How Much Does It Cost to Paint a House in Melbourne?
The cost to paint a house in Melbourne in 2026 starts with a broad budget of roughly $20–$60 per square metre for interior painting and $30–$80 per square metre for exterior work, which puts a full interior repaint of a three-bedroom home around $6,000–$15,000. Surface condition and access drive the spread, so only an on-site inspection produces a fixed price.
When estimating the cost to paint a house in Melbourne, everything below is general market guidance drawn from published Australian price guides, not a Superb Painting price list. We quote every job after looking at it, because the same floor plan can carry very different costs once wall height, trim detail and the condition of the existing paint are counted.
Melbourne painting price ranges by home size
These bands are consolidated from several 2026 Australian cost guides, including What's The Damage's Melbourne painter cost data, Perfection Coating's Melbourne price guide and The Quote Yard's Victorian benchmarks. They are wide on purpose — a sound rendered wall and a flaking weatherboard of identical size are not the same job.
| Home size | Interior only | Exterior only | Interior + exterior |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1-bedroom unit or apartment | $2,200 – $5,000 | $2,400 – $7,000 | $5,000 – $10,500 |
| 2-bedroom unit or townhouse | $3,500 – $8,200 | $3,200 – $11,000 | $8,500 – $16,500 |
| 3-bedroom house | $5,000 – $15,000 | $8,000 – $20,000 | $12,500 – $26,000 |
| 4-bedroom or two-storey house | $7,500 – $16,500 | $10,000 – $24,000 | $17,500 – $37,000 |
| 5-bedroom or complex repaint | $10,000 – $24,000+ | $12,500 – $35,000+ | $25,000 – $56,000+ |
Smaller scopes are useful for sanity-checking a quote. Published Melbourne figures put a single room including walls and ceiling at roughly $315–$840, a ceiling on its own at $210–$525 per room, a feature wall at $160–$525, and a door painted both sides at $84–$210.
One pattern worth noting: doing the interior and exterior together almost always beats buying the two halves separately. You pay once for setup, access equipment, protection and site mobilisation instead of twice.
What changes the cost to paint a house in Melbourne?
Floor area sets a rough baseline. These factors decide where in the band you land.
| Factor | Effect on price | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Surface condition | The single biggest driver | Preparation — scraping, sanding, filling, priming — can consume the majority of a painter's hours on an older home |
| Weatherboards | Substantially higher than render | Scraping and sanding a profiled timber surface is slow, and there is more surface area than the wall's footprint suggests |
| Two storeys or difficult access | Commonly +20–40% | Scaffolding, ladders and height-safety requirements on every elevation |
| Colour change | Moderate increase | Going dark-to-light, or over a strong colour, often needs an extra coat |
| Ceiling height and trim detail | Moderate increase | Ornate cornices, picture rails, sash windows and multi-panel doors are cut-in work, which is hand labour |
| Paint system | Moderate increase | Premium interior washables and exterior-grade systems cost more per litre but extend the repaint cycle |
| Pre-1970 home | Condition-led, can be significant | Lead paint changes the preparation method entirely (see below) |
| Trims, doors and windows package | Often $2,500–$7,000 as a scope | The detail work that dates a home fastest, and frequently excluded from cheap quotes |
The cost to paint a house in Melbourne cannot be reduced to one square-metre rate. That rate can mislead is that it needs an accurate paintable area to mean anything. Ceilings add roughly a quarter again to an interior job, and doors, skirtings and architraves add more. A phone estimate skips all of that.
Interior versus exterior
The cost to paint a house in Melbourne differs inside and out. Interior rates sit lower — published Melbourne guidance runs about $18–$35 per square metre for sound plasterboard and $30–$55 where patching, sanding and priming are needed, with ceilings around $12–$22 per square metre. Surfaces are accessible, protected from weather, and easy to work in sequence.
Exterior work costs more for three reasons: access, preparation and coating. Published rates land near $25–$50 per square metre for single-storey render, $40–$75 for two-storey render requiring scaffold, and $35–$70 for weatherboard where scraping and sanding dominate the labour. Exterior programs are also weather-led in Melbourne, so a realistic quote builds in contingency days rather than promising a fixed finish date in July.
If you're scoping either side of that, our interior and exterior house painting page sets out what a full-prep job includes.
Apartments and strata: the extras people miss
Apartment access can change the cost to paint a house in Melbourne or a unit. Apartment and unit painting carries costs that don't exist in a freestanding house, and they are usually access and compliance rather than paint:
- Owners corporation approval and by-laws — some buildings require notice, approved hours, or sign-off before work starts on anything visible from common property.
- Lift bookings and protection — booked service-lift windows, plus protective covering of lobbies, corridors and carpets.
- Parking and loading — no driveway means paid or permitted loading, and longer carry distances for equipment.
- Occupied-site working — most apartments are lived in during the job, which favours low-VOC systems and tighter daily pack-down.
- Balcony and exterior elements — often partly common property, which can shift the work outside your scope entirely.
Those constraints affect the program more than the price per square metre. Our apartment painting page covers how we plan strata access, and it's a common scope in denser inner-east pockets like Richmond, South Yarra and Prahran.
Older Melbourne homes and lead paint
If your home was built before 1970, assume the existing paint contains lead unless testing proves otherwise. The Australian Government's Lead Alert guide notes paints containing as much as 50 per cent lead were used inside and out on homes built before 1950, and that the 1 per cent limit only arrived around 1970. Colour-change test kits sold in hardware stores are less reliable than laboratory analysis.
This matters for cost because it rules out the fastest preparation methods. Dry sanding, blasting and burning generate hazardous dust; wet methods, chemical stripping, containment and HEPA vacuum clean-up are slower. The relevant standard is AS/NZS 4361.2 for lead paint management in residential buildings, and WorkSafe Queensland's lead-based paint page is a clear plain-English summary of testing and safe removal methods.
Where paint is sound and not on a friction or chewable surface, the safest and cheapest answer is often to leave it in place and coat over it — a scope decision to make on site, not over the phone. Heritage-heavy streets in Hawthorn, Kew and Camberwell raise this question regularly.
Fixed quote versus hourly
Hourly labour is one way to discuss the cost to paint a house in Melbourne, but published data puts Melbourne painter hourly rates at roughly $52–$105, but the same guides note most residential work is quoted as a fixed project price rather than by the hour — and that's how we quote. For the cost to paint a house in Melbourne, a fixed price transfers the estimating risk to the painter. If the prep takes longer than expected, that's our problem, not a variation on your invoice.
The trade-off is that a fixed price requires a proper look first. We inspect on site, measure the actual paintable area, assess surface condition, confirm access, then issue a written fixed quote. Anyone giving you a firm number for a whole-house repaint sight-unseen is either padding heavily or planning to revise it later.
You can start that process on our contact page or by calling 0400 164 985.
How to compare painters without just picking the cheapest
Consumer Affairs Victoria's guidance on getting quotes is a good baseline: get the tradesperson's full business details, understand exactly what the quote covers, get a realistic timeframe, and ask to see a certificate of currency for public liability insurance.
Beyond that, the useful questions are the ones that expose scope gaps:
- How many coats, and over what primer? Two topcoats over an appropriate primer is the normal specification. "Two coats" alone doesn't say what's underneath.
- What preparation is included, and what's excluded? Ask specifically about filling, sanding, priming bare timber, and rust or mould treatment. This is where cheap quotes are cheap.
- Are ceilings, doors, skirtings and architraves in or out? Trim is a large share of interior labour and the most common exclusion.
- Which paint system, by name? A quote naming specific products can be compared. "Premium paint" can't.
- Does it reference AS/NZS 2311? That's the Australian/New Zealand guide to the painting of buildings, and a quote that specifies to it is telling you something about the standard of work.
- Who is actually on site? Ask whether the crew is employed or subcontracted, and who supervises.
- Is it a written fixed price, with variations in writing? Verbal scope changes are how budgets drift.
Three itemised quotes compared line by line tell you far more than three bottom-line totals. If one is dramatically lower, it is nearly always buying less preparation.
Your rights in Victoria — what the rules actually say for painting
This is widely misreported, so it's worth being precise. Several cost guides claim painting work over $10,000 requires a major domestic building contract and that jobs over $16,000 need domestic building insurance. For painting-only contracts in Victoria, that isn't correct.
Consumer Affairs Victoria explicitly lists painting among the single-trade jobs for which a major domestic building contract is not required, and the Victorian Building Authority's consumer material confirms a practitioner does not need registration if carrying out only one such task, regardless of cost.
Where it changes: if your contract combines trades — plastering and painting, say — or the painting is carried out in conjunction with a renovation or extension, then the standard thresholds apply. CAV's practitioner guidance sets out registration and a major domestic building contract above $10,000, and notes that from 1 July 2026 Home Warranty insurance applies to work worth more than $20,000 (replacing the previous $16,000 domestic building insurance requirement).
Two things hold either way. Australian Consumer Law guarantees still apply to the services you buy, and CAV recommends a written contract even for work under $10,000. Get the scope in writing regardless of what the threshold rules require.
Common questions
Why do quotes for the same house vary so much?
Almost always scope, not margin. Different quotes assume different amounts of preparation, different numbers of coats, and different inclusions for ceilings and trim.
How long does a repaint take?
Published Victorian guidance suggests roughly one to two weeks for a full three-bedroom interior and one to three weeks for a full exterior, with exterior programs weather-dependent.
Does a deposit have limits?
For contracts that fall under the Domestic Building Contracts Act, deposits are capped at 10% below $20,000 and 5% at $20,000 or more. For single-trade painting contracts outside that Act, agree the payment schedule in writing up front.
Getting a real number for your home
The cost to paint a house in Melbourne is specific to the property. Market ranges are useful for setting expectations and for spotting a quote that's too good to be true, but they can't price your house — wall height, trim detail, surface condition, access and the paint system specified all move the total.
Superb Painting is a Master Painters Association member working with Dulux accredited systems across Greater Melbourne. To get a written fixed price, request an on-site quote, browse our full range of painting services, or call 0400 164 985.
Sources
- What's The Damage — Painter Cost Melbourne 2026 — hourly rates, per-room and per-item ranges
- Perfection Coating — Painting Prices Melbourne 2026 — per-square-metre rates by surface type
- The Quote Yard — House Painting VIC 2026 — job-component costs, timeframes, two-storey loading
- Modernize Solutions — Painting Cost Per Square Metre Melbourne 2026 — interior and exterior rate bands
- Consumer Affairs Victoria — What work requires a building contract?
- Consumer Affairs Victoria — Getting quotes for building and renovating
- Consumer Affairs Victoria — About builders, tradespeople and other building practitioners
- Victorian Building Authority / building.vic.gov.au — My practitioner is unregistered
- Australian Government — Lead Alert: The six step guide to painting your home
- WorkSafe Queensland — Working with lead-based paint
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