How Much Does It Cost to Paint a House in Melbourne? (2026)

“How much does it cost to paint a house in Melbourne?” is the question we get before any other, and most answers online dodge it. So here is a straight one: the honest ranges, where they come from, and the four things that actually move the number on your job.

One note before the figures. The ranges below are collected from published Melbourne cost guides, not from our price list. They are useful for sanity-checking a quote, not for budgeting a specific house. Ours are quoted per job after we have looked at the surfaces, and we tell you the GST position in writing.

Whole-house interior: roughly $4,500 to $12,000 for a three-bedroom

This is the only figure in the whole market with real agreement behind it. Three separate Melbourne painting businesses publish ranges for a standard three-bedroom interior and they land in almost the same place — $6,000–$11,000, $6,000–$12,000 and $4,500–$12,000+. Taken together, $4,500 to $12,000 is a fair envelope for walls, ceilings and trims through a typical three-bedroom home.

• One or two-bedroom unit: around $2,500–$7,000
• Three-bedroom house: around $4,500–$12,000
• Four-bedroom house: $10,000–$20,000+

The spread inside each band is mostly ceilings and trims. Walls alone sit at the bottom; walls plus ceilings plus doors, architraves and skirting sits at the top, because trim work is slow and almost entirely hand-cut.

Room by room

• Standard bedroom: $650–$950
• Master bedroom: $800–$1,200
• Living room: $1,000–$1,500
• Open-plan living and dining: $1,500–$2,500
• Ceiling only: $150–$400

Single rooms are proportionally more expensive than a whole house. Set-up, masking, cutting in and clean-up barely change whether you are doing one room or six, so the fixed cost is spread over much less work.

Exterior: the substrate decides it

Exterior pricing depends far more on what your house is made of than on its footprint. Published Melbourne ranges for a single-storey home:

• Weatherboard: $10,000–$18,000 — the most labour-intensive, because every board has two edges and prep is where the time goes
• Rendered or cement sheet: $8,000–$15,000
• Modern townhouse: $6,000–$12,000
• Brick veneer, trim and fascia only: $4,000–$8,000
• Heritage Victorian or Edwardian: $14,000–$28,000 — detailed timberwork, and often old paint that has to be dealt with carefully
• Two storeys: add roughly 40–60% for access and height

Treat the exterior figures as more provisional than the interior ones — only one Melbourne source publishes a proper substrate-by-substrate split, so there is less corroboration behind them.

Fences and roofs

Fencing is usually priced by the lineal metre rather than by area: roughly $12–$18 per lineal metre for a single coat, $18–$28 for two, and $28–$45 where repairs and full preparation are involved. Colorbond runs about $20–$40 per lineal metre. A 30-metre paling fence therefore lands somewhere around $360–$1,050 depending on condition and coats.

Roof painting is the least reliable category we researched: published Melbourne rates disagree by a factor of about four, from $12–$20 per square metre for metal up to a flat $35–$50 per square metre. Whole-roof figures for a single-storey three-bedroom cluster around $2,500–$5,000, and $4,500–$9,000 double-storey. If you are getting roof quotes, ignore per-square-metre advertising and compare written scopes — whether pressure washing, ridge re-bedding and scaffolding are in or out will change the price more than the paint will.

The four things that actually move your number

1. Surface condition. This is the big one. Sound walls need washing and cutting in. Walls with cracking, patched-over damage, flaking paint or moisture staining need repair work first, and that is real hours before a finish coat goes anywhere.
2. Access. Second storeys, steep sites, tight side setbacks and anything needing scaffold add cost that has nothing to do with paint.
3. How many surfaces. Walls only, or walls plus ceilings plus trims plus doors? Each layer adds slow, hand-cut work.
4. Colour change. Going dramatically lighter over a dark colour, or covering strong stains, can mean an extra coat across the whole job.

What a painter’s labour actually costs

For context on where quotes come from: under the Victorian award rates published by the Master Painters Association of Victoria, effective from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2025, a qualified residential painter (CW3) on daily hire is paid $30.65 per hour, with a casual Level 3 qualified painter at $37.14 per hour plus a daily travel allowance.

Those are wages, not charge-out rates — a business rate has to carry insurance, superannuation, vehicles, equipment, materials, waste, quoting time and warranty on top. But it is a useful floor. If a quote works out well under those numbers per hour of work on site, something has been left out of the scope, or someone is not being paid properly.

How to compare two quotes properly

Price per square metre is close to meaningless between quotes, because almost nobody defines whether they mean wall area or floor area, and few state whether GST is in or out. Compare these instead:

• What preparation is named — not “prep as required”, but the actual repairs, sanding, filling and sealing included
• How many coats, and of what product
• Which surfaces are included, and which are explicitly excluded
• Whether the price includes GST
• What happens if the job takes longer than expected

A cheap quote is usually cheap because prep has been left out. Prep is the part you cannot see once the job is done, and the part that decides whether the finish is still sound in eight years.