Builders want square metre rates. The trouble is most square metre rates are copied from someone else's price list, and someone else's crew doesn't paint at your crew's speed. The rate that pays is the one built from your own hours. Start with your hourly rate: if you haven't worked it out properly, see how to work out your charge-out rate.
What goes into a square metre rate
- Labour: your charge-out rate divided by how many square metres the crew finishes in an hour.
- Paint: what a litre costs you, divided by how far it spreads, times the number of coats.
- Sundries and prep: tape, plastic, filler, sandpaper, and the prep time that doesn't show in the finished area.
A worked example: walls, two coats
Say your charge-out rate is $92 an hour, your crew finishes 10 square metres of wall an hour for two coats including cutting in, and you pay $250 for 15 litres of wall paint that spreads 14 square metres a litre a coat. These are example figures: use your own.
The number that matters most is production: square metres an hour. Get that wrong by 20% and the whole rate is wrong by about 20% of the labour, which is most of the price.
Where production rates come from
Not from a forum and not from memory. They come from your own finished jobs: the area you painted divided by the hours it took. If the crew logged their hours against each line of the quote, you have it for every surface: walls, ceilings, doors, trims.
Seven hours over on one job is a bad week. The same miss on every job all year is the difference between a business that grows and one that's always flat out and broke.
Keep the rate honest
- Price each surface on its own line, so you can see which one ran over.
- Have the crew sign off hours against those lines every day, not one guess at the end of the week.
- When the job's done, compare quoted against real production and move the rates that were wrong.
- Recheck your charge-out rate whenever wages or overheads change.
TradieXai does the comparison for you: crew hours go against each quote line, and every finished job tells you which square metre rates to move.