What exterior painting costs in Los Angeles

Two bids for the same house can be far apart, and the cheaper one usually is not cheaper. The paint is the same paint. The walls are the same walls. What differs is the three or four days before anyone opens a can.

A repaint that still looks right in two years and one that still looks right in ten are separated almost entirely by prep. Prep is most of the labour hours on an exterior job, it is invisible the day the job is finished, and it is the easiest thing to quietly delete from a scope. That is where a low number comes from.

What a repaint costs

Exterior painting is priced by paintable surface area — the wall you actually put a coat on. It is not your floor area and it is not your lot size. A two-storey house on a small footprint has far more surface than a sprawling single-storey one with the same number of bedrooms.

You can get close in ten minutes with a tape measure. Walk the perimeter and add up the wall lengths. Multiply by wall height — call it nine feet a storey, so eighteen for a two-storey. Subtract about a fifth for windows and doors. Add a little back for gable ends, and for eaves and soffits if they are in the scope. That number is what a painter is pricing.

Three houses, roughly. A small two-bed bungalow — 120 feet of perimeter, one storey — lands near 900 square feet of paintable surface. A typical three-bed single-storey comes in around 1,500. A two-storey is usually 2,600 or more.

Treat those as the floor. The engine asks four more things before it quotes a real job — whether the paint is peeling or just faded, how many storeys, standard or premium product, inside or outside — and each of them adds. It is an instant estimate, not a final contract. Someone walking the house is what turns it into one, because rot and stucco damage are things you find, not things you guess.

Prep is the job

This is the sequence on a house in decent shape. A crew doing it properly is on your property for days before the first finish coat goes on.

1. Wash. The whole envelope, to strip chalk, dust, mildew and road film. Paint does not stick to chalk — it sticks to the layer of dust sitting on the wall, and then that layer lets go.
2. Dry. Stucco holds water. Washing in the morning and painting that afternoon traps moisture behind the film, which comes back as blisters in the first hot week.
3. Scrape and sand. Every lifting edge comes off, and the hard edge left behind gets feathered so it does not telegraph through the new coat as a visible ridge.
4. Repair. Stucco cracks opened, filled and textured to match. Rotten fascia, trim and sill sections cut out and replaced. Neither is optional and neither is fast.
5. Caulk. Every joint that moves — window and door perimeters, trim junctions, pipe and vent penetrations — with a urethane or elastomeric sealant, not the cheapest acrylic tube on the shelf.
6. Prime. Bare wood, bare stucco, every patch and every scraped-back area. Spot priming is fine. Skipping it is not: an unprimed patch flashes through the finish as a dull shape you will see from the street.
7. Mask. Glass, hardware, roof edges, hardscape, plants.

One coat, two coats, and which way the colour goes

One coat over a sound, clean wall in a similar colour is a legitimate scope, and on a house properly painted the same shade eight years ago it can be the right call. Everything else is two.

Colour changes are not symmetrical. Dark to light is the expensive direction: light pigment over a dark wall needs a tinted primer and then two finish coats, sometimes three, because you are hiding rather than refreshing. Light to dark is easier — a grey-shaded primer under a deep base gets there in two.

A quick sanity check on materials: a gallon covers roughly 350 to 400 square feet per coat on a smooth surface, and as little as 200 to 250 on heavy stucco texture, because texture has more surface than the wall it sits on. If a bid's gallon count is well under what your surface area and coat count imply, something is being thinned or something is being skipped.

What your walls are made of changes the product

Stucco is porous and alkaline. It drinks the first coat, so coverage per gallon drops and hairline cracking is normal rather than alarming. New stucco wants about a month to cure before it takes conventional paint, or a masonry primer built for high pH.

Wood siding is the highest-prep substrate on this list. It moves with the weather, it fails at the edges first, and it is where rot turns up — usually at fascia ends, the bottom course, and anywhere a downspout has been leaking for a year. Redwood and cedar bleed tannin, so they need a stain-blocking primer or the stain comes through the finish as brown streaks a month later.

Fibre cement — the board on most LA rebuilds and additions — takes 100% acrylic and nothing else. Cut edges from any repair have to be primed before they go up, or they wick water from the bottom.

Los Angeles is hard on paint, and not evenly

Two things here shorten a paint job. UV: the sun angle and the sheer number of clear days mean a south or west wall takes far more radiation than the north side of the same house. And salt: within a few miles of the water it deposits on the film and accelerates everything, metal first.

So houses fail by elevation, not all at once. The north side can look fine at year ten while the west wall has gone chalky and the deep-tinted trim on the south side has dropped a shade. A painter who quotes a number without mentioning which walls are worse did not walk your house.

That is also where product grade and sheen stop being upsells. Deep-base colours built on organic pigments fade fastest under this sun; the same colour built on inorganic oxide pigments holds. A flat sheen hides stucco imperfections but holds dirt and is hard to wash; a low-sheen or satin keeps its colour and rinses clean, which matters near the coast. Every manufacturer sells three or four exterior lines under one brand name, the top line runs about double per gallon, and that difference shows up as years on the wall.

What is in the price, and what is not

Assume nothing here, and get the answer in the written scope.

Usually included in an exterior repaint:

• Body — the walls, all elevations
• Trim around windows and doors
• Fascia boards
• Eaves and soffits
• Garage door
• Exterior doors, outside face

Usually its own line, or excluded outright:

• The front door, if you want it in a different colour or sheen from the rest of the trim
• Gutters and downspouts — different substrate, different primer
• Security bars and window grilles — every rust spot has to be wire-brushed back to bare metal and hit with a rust-inhibitive primer before any finish, which is hours, not minutes
• Wrought iron railings and gates, for the same reason
• Shutters, if they come off and go back on
• Decks, patio covers and pergolas
• The inside of the garage

The weather window

Most exterior acrylics want the air, the surface and the paint itself between about 50 and 90 degrees, and they want the surface at least five degrees above the dew point. Both matter here more than the mild climate suggests.

In May and June the marine layer keeps surfaces damp and cool well into the morning, and it can roll back in before the recoat window closes. A crew starting on a shaded wall at eight under June gloom is painting onto a damp surface.

The other end is worse, because air temperature is not surface temperature. On an August afternoon a west-facing stucco wall in direct sun runs thirty or forty degrees above the air. Paint hitting a surface that hot flashes off before it can level or wet out, so you get lap marks and poor adhesion on the exact wall that already takes the most sun and is already the first to fail. A crew that knows this city chases shade around the house — east elevations in the morning, west late in the day or the next morning. That is slower, and slower is part of what the higher bid is buying.

How to compare two bids that are far apart

Three questions. Ask both bidders the same three and the gap usually explains itself.

1. What prep is included, step by step? You want washing, scraping, sanding, stucco crack repair, wood replacement, caulking and priming named individually — plus what happens to the price if more rot turns up once the trim is open.
2. How many coats, and over what primer? “Two coats” with no answer on primer, on a house with bare patches, is one and a half coats.
3. Which product, by name? Not the brand — the line. Then pull the data sheet yourself and read the spread rate, the recoat time and the warranty the manufacturer is willing to put on it.

A fourth, if the numbers are still far apart: ask what happens if it fails in three years, and get that answer in writing. And know the deposit rule before anyone asks — in California a home-improvement deposit is capped at $1,000 or 10% of the contract, whichever is less. A painter asking for half up front is telling you something about their cash position, not about your job.

How DPOC prices this

The bands above came out of the same engine that prices a real job, run at the moment this page was built. Give it your surface area, your storeys, your substrate condition and the product tier you want and it returns a number in about two minutes — an instant estimate, not a final contract, and it is the same number the wizard shows you rather than a marketing figure written next to it.

DPOC holds CSLB #999194. Every job runs under this licence — ours, not a subcontractor's — so your contract is with one licensed, insured company that is still responsible for that wall in year three, rather than with whichever crew happened to be free that week.