What it costs · Trade pay
What painters are paid in Auckland — and what that tells you about your quote
This is the one genuinely published price in a repaint, so it is worth understanding properly: what a painter earns, how Auckland compares with the rest of New Zealand, and precisely how far you can reason from a wage to a price. The answer to that last part is less far than you would like.
122
Live Auckland job listings for painters and decorators, out of 1386 nationally, on the regional breakdown of the same occupation record. A live count, not a vacancy rate — and not the same figure as the occupation-level listing count, which is discussed below.
Tertiary Education Commission — Tahatū Career Navigator · retrieved 2026-07-30
The published bands
Three trades, side by side
Painter, plasterer and roofer, because a repaint regularly touches all three: plaster repair before coating, and roof work at height. All figures are before tax.
| Occupation | Lower | Median | Upper | Auckland listings | National listings | Training |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Painter and decorator T00754 · Painter decorator, house painter, paperhanger, painter decorator operator | $24.04 | $29.81 | $45.19 | 122 | 1386 | 0-3 years |
| Plasterer T00760 · Exterior plasterer, interior plasterer, solid plasterer | $24.04 | $30.77 | $48.56 | 135 | 1532 | 0-3 years |
| Roofer T00762 · Maintenance roofer, metal roofer, membrane roofer, roofing labourer | $24.04 | $31.73 | $51.92 | 153 | 1375 | 0-3 years |
The listing columns are the regional breakdown figures: the national total and the Auckland share come from the same regional query, so they are consistent with each other. They are live counts of job advertisements, not vacancy rates, and they are not the same as the occupation-level availableJobListings figure discussed in the next section. Alternate job titles are listed under each occupation because they are the terms you will see on a quote or an invoice.
Tertiary Education Commission — Tahatū Career Navigator · retrieved 2026-07-30
The pay you see here is your pay before tax. When an employer pays you, Inland Revenue (IR) collects a percentage of that income. Learn more about income tax on the IR website — Inland Revenue. Pay data: Tertiary Education Commission — Tahatū Career Navigator, licensed CC BY 4.0.
| Occupation | Weekly range | Weekly median | Yearly range | Yearly median |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Painter and decorator | $961 – $1,807 | $1,192 | $50,000 – $94,000 | $62,000 |
| Plasterer | $961 – $1,942 | $1,230 | $50,000 – $101,000 | $64,000 |
| Roofer | $961 – $2,076 | $1,269 | $50,000 – $108,000 | $66,000 |
For context, the source states: “The average pay in Aotearoa New Zealand is $34 an hour or $70,000 a year.” Painting, plastering and roofing medians all sit below that national average hourly figure.
Tertiary Education Commission — Tahatū Career Navigator · retrieved 2026-07-30
The pay you see here is your pay before tax. When an employer pays you, Inland Revenue (IR) collects a percentage of that income. Learn more about income tax on the IR website — Inland Revenue. Pay data: Tertiary Education Commission — Tahatū Career Navigator, licensed CC BY 4.0.
A careful note
There are two job-ad numbers, and they are not the same number
This is the kind of detail most sites would quietly average away. We would rather show you the discrepancy, because a reader who spots us smoothing one figure has no reason to trust the others.
The source exposes live job-advertisement counts in two places for the same occupation, and they do not agree:
Both come from Tahatū, both are live, and they are computed separately. We do not know the exact scope difference between them, so we do not reconcile them, do not average them, and never present one as the other. On this site the Auckland and national figures always come from the regional breakdown, where they are internally consistent, and the occupation-level count is quoted only as itself.
The same pattern holds for the other trades: painter and decorator 164 against 1386 regional-total; plasterer 215 against 1532 regional-total; roofer 317 against 1375 regional-total.
None of these is a vacancy rate. A live advertisement count moves with hiring activity, seasonality and how many roles one advertisement covers. It is an indicator of demand and nothing more.
Tertiary Education Commission — Tahatū Career Navigator · retrieved 2026-07-30
Stats NZ — Labour market statistics, Quarterly Employment Survey — March 2026 quarter · March 2026 quarter
The honest limit
From a wage to a quote, and where we stop
This is the reasoning chain that most cost content skips, because the end of it is a refusal rather than a number.
Start with what is published and add only what can be named:
- Pay rate. $29.81 an hour, median, before tax. Published. This is solid ground.
- Employer cost of that hour. Add holiday pay, statutory holidays, sick leave, ACC levies and KiwiSaver. Every one of those is a real, legally required cost of employing the hour. None of them is published as a painting-industry figure.
- Cost of being able to do the work. Vehicles, fuel, ladders, staging, spray equipment, drop sheets, consumables, public liability insurance, and the quoting time that never becomes a job.
- Unproductive time. Travel between sites, weather days, and set-up and pack-down that no client wants to pay for but every job requires.
- Overheads and margin. Administration, compliance, and the profit that lets a business still exist to honour a guarantee.
- GST. On the whole lot.
Every step is real. Not one of them has a published New Zealand figure for painting. So the chain gets you a clear structure and no number, and this is where we stop: we will not multiply a wage by a ratio we cannot cite and present the result as what your job should cost.
What the pay data legitimately supports is the floor. On the cost hub the labour model uses exactly that, and nothing more.
Entry and training, as published
Painter and decorator. You usually need to do an apprenticeship to become a painter and decorator and experience may be useful. You usually need NCEA Level 2 to do the study or training for this job. Usual routes include to do an apprenticeship in painting, decorating and signwriting; a New Zealand Certificate in Painting and Decorating (Level 4); experience in similar work. Training duration 0-3 years.
Plasterer. You usually need to do an apprenticeship to become a plasterer. Training duration 0-3 years.
Roofer. You usually need to do an apprenticeship to become a roofer. Training duration 0-3 years.
Questions people actually ask
If a painter is paid $29.81 an hour, why am I charged much more than that?
Because a pay rate and a charge-out rate are different quantities. The pay rate is what lands in an employee’s account before tax. The charge-out rate has to cover that plus holiday pay, sick leave, ACC levies, KiwiSaver, vehicles and fuel, ladders and scaffolding, spray gear, consumables, insurance, quoting time that never becomes a job, weather downtime, administration, and a margin — then GST on top.
We are not going to publish a multiplier, and that is a deliberate refusal. Trades commonly reason about one, but there is no New Zealand source that publishes a painting charge-out rate or the ratio between the two, and inventing a number here would be exactly the behaviour this site criticises. What the pay data legitimately gives you is a floor: whatever else is true, the labour in your job cannot cost less than the hours times these rates.
Why are two different Auckland job-ad numbers on this page?
Because the source publishes two separately computed live counts and they do not reconcile. The occupation record for painter and decorator carries an availableJobListings value of 164. The regional breakdown for the same occupation reports 1386 listings nationally, of which 122 are in Auckland. Both are live figures from Tahatū, computed at different points and, as far as we can tell, over different scopes.
We report them separately and we do not add, subtract or reconcile them, because we cannot see the definitions behind them. Treat both as an indicator of demand rather than a census of vacancies.
Does a shortage of painters in Auckland push my quote up?
Directionally, yes, but be careful with the evidence. Auckland shows 122 live painter listings against 1386 nationally — a large share for one region, though Auckland is also New Zealand’s largest labour market, so a large share is expected. Live job ads measure hiring activity, not unfilled demand, and no free source publishes an Auckland painting vacancy rate. What the wider data does support is that construction labour has become more expensive in real terms: the series that shows it.
How long does it take to become a painter, and does that matter to me?
You usually need to do an apprenticeship to become a painter and decorator and experience may be useful. You usually need NCEA Level 2 to do the study or training for this job. Training duration is listed as 0-3 years. It matters to you for one practical reason: on a crew, some hours are an apprentice’s and some are a qualified painter’s, and the difficult work — cutting in, spraying, diagnosing a substrate — is not apprentice work. When you ask who will actually be on your house, you are asking about the mix of hours you are buying.
Are plasterers and roofers paid more than painters?
On the published medians, yes, modestly. Plasterers sit at $30.77 an hour and roofers at $31.73, against $29.81 for painters and decorators. All three bands start at the same $24.04 floor. The relevance to a repaint is that jobs which cross trades — plaster crack repair before coating, roof work at height — draw on the dearer bands as well as the painting one.
Should I just hire the cheapest hourly rate I can find?
Hourly rate is the wrong thing to optimise, because you are buying a finished surface rather than time. A slower painter at a lower rate can cost more and deliver less. What is worth comparing is the specification — preparation, product, number of coats, access — because that is what determines both the hours and how long the result lasts. How to make two quotes comparable.
Next
Ask about the hours, not the hourly rate
Send the job. What comes back is a view on the work involved and whether your budget covers it — which is the conversation the pay data on this page says actually matters.