How Much Does Interior Painting Cost in Ontario? (2026)

Short answer: interior painting cost in Ontario runs $2.35–2.75 per square foot of floor area for walls in two coats, $3.30–3.70 once the ceilings are added, $4.60–5.10 with baseboards and window casings as well, and from $5.50 for enhanced preparation and premium-grade materials. All before HST, and the smallest project is $750. Per room, an 11 × 13 bedroom lands between $550 and $725 depending on how much of the room gets painted; a 2,000 sq ft house runs $4,700 to $10,200. One number matters more than any of those: square foot of floor area, not wall area. Painting rates get quoted against different areas — wall or floor — and the two are not comparable, so the first thing to ask about any rate is which one it uses. Measure your floor, multiply, and you have the figure. Below is the full breakdown — by room, by home size, by what pushes it up or down, and how to read a quote that does not show its denominator.

What interior painting costs in Ontario

Our pricing runs on four packages, built around the decision homeowners actually make — how far up the room to go. Walls only. Walls and ceilings. Walls, ceilings and the trim. Or all of that with heavier preparation and premium-grade materials. Each has one published rate covering labour and all paint, and each carries the same two-year workmanship warranty.

Lower end: vacant home, standard 8′ ceilings, light/similar colours, normal condition. Upper end: occupied home, 9’+ ceilings, stronger colour changes, additional cutting/preparation. Doors are not in any package — they are priced per door, at $150–225 each.

Minimum project: $750 within 50 km of Mississauga, rising with distance — $1,500 between 50 and 100 km, $2,500 between 100 and 175 km, $4,000 from 175 to 300 km. Before HST. Every package includes floor protection and masking, moving light furniture and putting it back, daily clean-up, a written specification before work starts, and leftover paint labelled with the colour code. The full package detail sits on our interior painting page.

Paint is specified by grade, not by brand: contractor-grade on Fresh Start, mid-grade on Full Refresh and Complete Home, premium-grade on Signature Finish. Any product within a grade performs within a few percent of the others, so the grade is the fact and the brand is an implementation detail. Ceilings get dedicated ceiling paint in every case, not wall paint rolled overhead. The exact product and colour codes go on the written specification before work starts.

Two things about this rate card are worth saying plainly, because they are the reason it looks the way it does.

It is the going rate, not a discount. These are the prices this work costs when it is done properly — enough prep, two real coats, the right paint on the ceiling. We did not cut them to win the job, and we do not raise them once we are inside your home. We are not the cheapest number you will find, and finding a cheaper one is easy. What is difficult to find is a number you can take apart.

It is quoted per square foot of floor area. This sounds like a technicality and is not. A 12 × 12 bedroom has 144 square feet of floor and roughly 380 square feet of wall. A rate of $3.00 means one thing against the first number and something entirely different against the second. A rate is only comparable once you know which of the two it is measured against. Ours says floor, means floor, and can be checked with a tape measure.

Interior painting cost by room

These are the room prices we quote, by package. Floor area is given so you can check the arithmetic against your own rooms.

Full Refresh — walls and ceilings — sits between those two columns and is quoted per job rather than from a table. The reason is the next paragraph: a single room carries fixed costs that the per-square-foot rate, which is built for whole homes, does not capture. Multiplying the rate by one bedroom would produce a number below the walls-only price, which is arithmetic, not a quote.

These room prices apply inside an order of two rooms or more. A single room booked on its own does not price from this table — it meets the $750 minimum instead. That is worth planning around: if you were going to do the bedroom this month and the hallway in the spring, doing both together costs far less than doing them separately, because the second room carries no second mobilisation.

Now the thing that confuses most people reading a table like this: small rooms cost more per square foot than big ones. A powder room at $350 for 24 square feet works out to roughly $14.50 a foot; a living room at $650 for 252 square feet is about $2.60. The rate did not change — the work did. Almost everything that takes time in a room is fixed regardless of its size. Masking the floor, protecting and moving furniture, cutting in every edge by brush where the wall meets ceiling, trim, corners and fixtures, setting up and cleaning up: a powder room has nearly as much cutting-in as a bedroom and a fraction of the open wall that a roller covers quickly. Rolling is the fast part, and small rooms are mostly not rolling.

The same logic explains why bathrooms sit high for their size. Every edge is a fixture, a mirror, a tile line or a vanity, and none of them can be rushed.

Interior painting cost by home size

Every figure above is the rate multiplied by the floor area — arithmetic you can repeat yourself, which is why each one is a range rather than a single number. Doors are counted on top, at $150–225 each; a 2,000 sq ft house usually has about sixteen.

A whole home costs less than its rooms added together, and that is deliberate. Add the room table up for a three-bedroom house and you will land well above the whole-home figure. A house is one mobilisation, one masking, one paint order and one continuous run of work, and that saving belongs to you rather than to us. It is also why doing the house in three separate visits over a year is the most expensive way to paint it.

Whole-home work usually runs four to seven days for a 2,000 sq ft interior. What actually sets the schedule — drying time between coats, repairs that must cure first, whether you are living in the house — is covered in our guide to how long it takes to paint a house interior.

What moves the price up or down

Everything below appears on the quote as its own line with its reason, so you can take it off if you would rather not pay for it. None of it appears afterwards on an invoice.

Dark to light, plus 35%. Coverage is essentially the whole cost of painting. Taking a deep charcoal wall to an off-white is two extra passes of material and the labour to put them on, and trying to do it in one is how a wall ends up looking patchy in afternoon light. The alternative is a tinted primer coat at $0.85 per square foot of wall, which is often cheaper on a large area — we will price both if it is close.

High ceilings: plus 25% at 10 feet, 50% at 12, 75% at 15. Not a surcharge for the ambience. Somewhere above nine feet a roller pole stops being enough and the work needs staging, which means more setup, more moving, and slower cutting-in at the top of every wall.

Homes built before 1960, plus 20%. Plaster rather than drywall, old oil-based trim that needs a bonding primer before anything will stick to it, and walls that are rarely flat. A start inside 72 hours, plus 15%, because it displaces work already booked. Downtown condos, plus 12% for the elevator booking, the loading dock and the building’s permitted hours.

Going the other way: 10% off between 15 December and 15 March, when the calendar is quiet and the work is indoors anyway; 5% from five rooms up; 5% on a referral. They stack to a maximum of 15%, and never below the minimum for your distance.

Two more that are not percentages. Wall condition is the single biggest variable in any quote: nail pops, cracks, anchor holes and old patches that were never feathered out all get fixed before paint, because paint highlights bad patching rather than hiding it. Basic filling and caulking is inside every package; real damage is drywall repair, quoted as its own line. What belongs in which category is set out in our guide to wall prep before painting. And textured ceilings drink paint and roll slowly; if you would rather be rid of the texture than repaint it, see popcorn ceiling removal.

One legal note for older houses. Paint made before 1980 can contain lead, and disturbing it by sanding is regulated work under O. Reg. 213/91 — testing and containment are priced separately, and no reputable painter will sand a pre-1980 surface without addressing it first.

What it costs to paint trim, doors and ceilings

There are two steps here, not one. Ceilings are the step from Fresh Start to Full Refresh — roughly $0.55 to $1.35 per square foot of floor area, depending where each package falls in its range. Baseboards and window casings are the step from Full Refresh to Complete Home, another $0.90 to $1.80. Doors are not a step at all: they sit outside every package and are priced per door, because a house with fifteen doors is a different job from a house with five.

Where an item sits outside the package you have chosen, it is priced per piece:

Wooden windows only. Vinyl and aluminium frames we do not paint at any price — paint does not hold on them, and the failure shows up in a season rather than a decade.

Doors are the item most often missing from a quote that looks cheap. A door is two faces, four edges and a frame, and a six-panel door has dozens of edges to brush where a flat slab has none. Fifteen doors at $150–225 is $2,250–3,375 of work, and a quote that does not mention doors either is not painting them or will discover them later. Trim is the same story by the foot: sanding, priming over old oil-based enamel, then two coats of something hard enough to survive a vacuum cleaner. In a house with painted trim throughout, trim and doors together can account for a third of the total.

Sheen belongs in this conversation too, because it changes both durability and how much prep a surface needs — our paint sheen guide goes room by room.

DIY versus hiring a painter

Painting a room yourself is one of the few renovation jobs where the honest answer is often yes, do it. Materials for a single bedroom run roughly $120–200: a gallon and a half of decent paint, a roller frame and sleeves, a brush worth using, tape, filler and a drop sheet. Against a $550 Fresh Start price for the same room, you are buying back about $400 with a weekend of your own labour.

Where that arithmetic stops working:

• Ceilings. Overhead rolling is slow, physically hard, and unforgiving of lap marks under pot lights — the one surface where the difference between amateur and professional shows from the doorway.
• Anything above nine feet. Staging and ladder work is where DIY painting injuries happen. A two-storey stairwell is not a beginner’s job at any budget.
• Going dark to light. Three coats over an existing dark wall is not a weekend, and stopping at two is worse than not starting.
• Whole houses. The per-room saving is real; multiplied across a house it becomes three weeks of evenings, and most people stop somewhere in week two.
• Pre-1980 trim. Sanding it is regulated work, and the testing costs more than it sounds like it should.

The pattern worth noticing: DIY saves labour, and labour is cheap on small simple surfaces and expensive on tall, detailed or damaged ones. Do your own bedroom walls. Get help with the stairwell.

How to read a painting quote

Most bad painting decisions in Ontario are made at the comparison stage rather than on the ladder, because two quotes for the same house are rarely quotes for the same work. Four questions make them comparable.

What is the denominator? If a rate is given per square foot, ask whether that is floor or wall, and do not accept “it works out the same”. It does not — the two differ by roughly a factor of two and a half in a standard room.

What surfaces are in, by name? Walls, ceilings, baseboards, window casings, doors, door frames, closet interiors. “The whole room” is not a scope, and every one of those items is somebody’s idea of an extra.

How many coats, and what prep? Two coats over prepared walls is the standard that lasts. One coat over unprepared walls is roughly half the labour and is the usual explanation for a quote that undercuts everyone by 40%.

What is written down? The scope, the paint line and colour codes, each add-on as its own line, HST shown separately, and the warranty stated in years. A verbal number is not a quote; it is an opening position.

Our own answer to all four: every enquiry gets a response within 48 hours, without conditions attached. Where photographs of every wall in daylight, room dimensions, ceiling height, the current colour and its sheen, and a count of doors and windows are enough to price from — and nothing in those photographs shows damage, staining, peeling or previous repairs — the written price arrives in the same 48 hours, firm, on the condition that what we were told matches what is there. Everything else needs a walkthrough; within 48 hours you get an answer and a date for it, not a promise about a price we have not yet been able to work out. Either way, if the walls are not what they were described to be, the revised price is agreed with you before work begins and never added to the invoice. Quotes hold for 30 days, the deposit is 25%, changes go through a written change order, and Ontario consumer protection law gives you 10 days to cancel.

Frequently asked questions about interior painting cost

How much does interior painting cost in Ontario?

$2.35–2.75 per square foot of floor area for walls in two coats, $3.30–3.70 with the ceilings, $4.60–5.10 with baseboards and window casings as well, and from $5.50 for enhanced preparation and premium-grade materials — before HST, with a $750 minimum project close to home. Doors are priced separately, at $150–225 each. Note the denominator: floor area, not wall area.

How much does it cost to paint a bedroom?

An 11 × 13 bedroom is $550 for walls and $725 with the ceiling and trim. Those figures apply within an order of two rooms or more; a single bedroom booked on its own meets the $750 minimum instead, which is why adding a second room costs much less than the first. Doors, if you want them painted, are $150–225 each on top.

Is there a minimum project?

Yes, and it goes up with the drive: $750 within 50 km of Mississauga, $1,500 between 50 and 100 km, $2,500 between 100 and 175 km, and $4,000 from 175 to 300 km. A painter’s day costs what it costs whether the job is one room or four — the drive, the masking, the protection and the prep do not shrink with the room. Rather than add a travel charge to a small job far away, we set the smallest job that makes the trip honest for both sides.

Do you charge for travel?

No travel fees within 50 km of Mississauga. Beyond that the minimum project rises with distance, and we tell you the figure before the quote. It is the minimum that moves rather than a separate charge appearing on your bill — there is no travel line on the invoice.

How much does it cost to paint a 2,000 sq ft house?

$4,700–5,500 for walls throughout, $6,600–7,400 with the ceilings, and $9,200–10,200 with baseboards and window casings as well, before HST. Doors are counted on top, at $150–225 each; a house that size usually has about sixteen.

What is the cost per square foot to paint a room?

$2.35 to $5.50 and up per square foot of floor area, depending on the package. Floor area is the honest denominator because it is what you can measure without a ladder — and because a rate quoted against wall area looks about half as large for exactly the same work.

Is it cheaper to paint room by room or all at once?

All at once, by a wide margin. A 2,000 sq ft house painted throughout costs less than the same rooms priced individually, because it is one setup, one masking and one paint order. Room by room over a year also means paying the minimum more than once.

Is there a warranty, and does the cheaper package get a shorter one?

There is, and it does not: two years on all four packages. Warranties that shorten with the price are common in this trade and we decided against one — a shorter term on the cheaper package is really a statement that the cheaper job gets less care, which is not how we want to work. What it covers is workmanship: peeling, blistering and chipping that come back to preparation, adhesion or coat count. What it does not cover is everything a paint film has no say in — moisture, movement and cracking in the wall behind it, normal wear, damage after the job is done, and old coatings that were already lifting when we arrived. Both lists are on the written specification before anyone starts.

Does the price include the paint?

Yes — labour and all paint, in the line named for your package, plus floor protection, moving light furniture, daily clean-up and leftover paint labelled with the colour code. The paint line and colour codes are on the written specification before work starts. Premium-grade materials are not a paid add-on bolted onto a cheaper package — they are what Signature Finish is.

Get a written price

Send the rooms, the floor area and photographs of the walls in daylight, and you get an answer within 48 hours — and the written price itself if the photographs show enough. We paint across the GTA and Southern Ontario, including Toronto, Mississauga, Oakville and Hamilton. Owner-run: the person who quotes your job is responsible for it, with no subcontractor hand-offs. Get an interior painting quote or call (647) 558-8723.

Owner-run and fully insured. The person who quotes your job is responsible for it.