Auckland · What it costs
What painting a house in Auckland costs — and how much of that is actually knowable
Every painting site in Auckland will give you a price per square metre. None of them will tell you that New Zealand publishes no figure they could have got it from. This page separates what is published, what can be modelled, and what is judgement — and labels each one, every time.
$29.81 / hour
The median hourly pay of a New Zealand painter and decorator. It is the only genuinely published price input in an Auckland repaint. Everything else on your quote is built on top of it — and this page shows the building up.
Tertiary Education Commission — Tahatū Career Navigator · retrieved 2026-07-30
Start here
There is no official New Zealand dataset for the cost of a trade.
New Zealand publishes no free, official figure for what it costs to paint or renovate a house. Stats NZ publishes the declared value of building consents, which is the applicant’s own estimate, excludes land, and is inconsistent on GST. It publishes cost indexes, which track movement rather than level. And it publishes construction wages. None of them is a price for a job. The only commercial cost libraries — QV CostBuilder and the former Rawlinsons handbook — are paid, licensed products we are not permitted to republish. So where this site shows a range, it says exactly where the range came from, and where it can only show surrounding market context, it says that too.
The four kinds of number on this page
They are not interchangeable, and the whole method is refusing to blur them:
- Published data. Consent declared values, cost indexes, trade pay bands, climate records. Dated and linked to the release they came from.
- A model. Labour hours multiplied by a published pay rate. The rate is sourced; the hours are our judgement, and both are printed.
- Movement, not level. Index series can tell you a repaint costs more than it did in 2016. They cannot tell you what it costs today. We never use them as though they could.
- Judgement. Stated as judgement, with the reasoning visible, or not stated at all.
Where those four run out, this page stops. There are places below where the honest answer is that the number does not exist, and we say so rather than filling the gap.
Context, not price
The closest thing to an official figure, and exactly how far it falls short
Stats NZ publishes the declared value of every consent to alter an existing dwelling. For Auckland, over the twelve months to May 2026, that is the market a repaint sits inside. It is not a repaint price, and the caveats are not fine print — they are the reason it cannot be one.
Read it as a weather report on the Auckland alterations market rather than a price list. Declared value rose +12.9% while the number of consents rose only +4.9% — Aucklanders consented slightly more alteration work and declared substantially more money against it. Some of that is bigger projects. Some of it is the cost movement on the why painting costs more than it used to page.
Most repaints never appear in this dataset at all, because repainting is maintenance and needs no consent. The exception that catches people out is a Special Character Area or a scheduled heritage place, where changing the appearance of a street-facing elevation can require resource consent. Check whether your suburb carries an overlay.
Why we cannot turn this into $/m²
You would need the floor area of each consent. The alterations series does not record it, because an alteration does not necessarily change floor area. The new-dwellings series does record it, which is why a new-build $/m² is computable and a renovation one is not.
Anyone publishing a renovation or repaint $/m² sourced to Stats NZ has divided by a number that is not in the file.
The model
Build it up from the one price that is published: what a painter is paid
If no source gives you a job price, start from a source that gives you an input price. New Zealand publishes painter pay bands. Multiply them by hours and you get the labour component of a repaint — the part that dominates every other part.
| Job archetype | Crew × days (judgement) | Labour hours | At $24.04/hr | At median $29.81/hr | At $45.19/hr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single-storey weatherboard, full exterior Wash, scrape, sand, spot-prime bare timber, two top coats. Ladder access, no scaffold. | 2 × 10 d | 160 | $3,846 | $4,770 | $7,230 |
| Two-storey weatherboard, full exterior The same system, plus scaffold to reach it and the slower working that comes with height. | 3 × 12 d | 288 | $6,924 | $8,585 | $13,015 |
| Two-storey monolithic or plaster Moisture check, crack and joint repair, then a flexible membrane system. Scaffolded. | 3 × 16 d | 384 | $9,231 | $11,447 | $17,353 |
| Interior, three-bedroom house Walls, ceilings, doors, jambs, skirtings and scotia. Sound existing paint, light patching. | 2 × 6 d | 96 | $2,308 | $2,862 | $4,338 |
| Roof, single-storey long-run metal Wash, treat, prime the bare and corroded areas, two coats of roof membrane. | 2 × 3 d | 48 | $1,154 | $1,431 | $2,169 |
| Fence, 30 lineal metres, both sides Clean, sand the rough, two coats of stain or paint by brush and roller. | 1 × 2 d | 16 | $385 | $477 | $723 |
Hours = crew × days × 8. An eight-hour productive day is itself generous: travel, set-up, drop sheets, masking, clean-up and weather all come out of it. The crew sizes and durations are Paintwork Auckland’s judgement for a house in sound condition — a house that is not in sound condition can double the days without changing a square metre of area.
Paintwork Auckland labour model; hourly rates from 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.
The arithmetic, in full, for one job
Two painters, ten working days, on a single-storey weatherboard exterior:
That is the labour input, before paint, access, overheads, margin or GST. Which is the useful conclusion: on a job like that, materials are a minority of the cost. Paint has also become cheaper in real terms over the last decade while the finished job got dearer — the series that shows it.
What changes the number, in order
- Cladding type. Not a modifier — a different job. A monolithic wall needs moisture investigation, crack repair and a membrane system; weatherboard needs preparation, timber repair and a conventional three-coat system. What each system involves.
- Condition. Sound paint gets washed and recoated. Failed paint gets scraped, sanded, filled and primed first, and that is the single biggest swing in the hours above.
- Storeys and access. Height slows every task and usually forces scaffolding, which is hired by the week, so a slow job is a more expensive job twice over.
- Preparation specified. Two quotes for “exterior repaint” can describe genuinely different amounts of work. This is where they usually differ.
- Area. Last. It matters, but it is the weakest of the five.
The Auckland calendar is the sixth. Winter shuts down exterior work for weeks at a time, and a job that cannot proceed still accrues scaffold hire. How many days a month you can actually paint.
By job
The same method, applied to the job you actually have
Each of these pages carries the cost drivers specific to that work, the honest gaps, and the questions to put to whoever quotes it.
Exterior repainting
Why identical areas cost different amounts: cladding, condition, storeys, scaffolding and access.
Interior repainting
Room count is the wrong unit. Trim, doors, cutting-in and patching are where the hours go.
Roof painting
Metal, tile and Decramastic. Pitch and access. And when a roof needs replacing, not painting.
Fences and decks
Priced by the lineal or deck metre. Stain or paint. Timber condition decides the rest.
Why it costs more than it used to
Paint is −9.0% in real terms over a decade. The finished job is up +21.3%. The gap is not paint.
What painters are paid
Pay bands, Auckland job-ad counts and training — and the honest limits of reasoning from pay to price.
Questions people actually ask
Why won’t you just give me a price per square metre for painting?
Because there is no honest way to produce one. No free official New Zealand source publishes a cost per square metre for painting. The consent data that comes closest records declared value but not floor area for alterations, so the division cannot be done. The two commercial cost libraries that do publish trade rates are licensed products we may not republish.
Beyond the licensing, area is genuinely a weak predictor. Cladding type, condition, storeys, access and how much preparation the surface needs all move the hours more than area does — and on a repaint, hours are the cost.
Why is one quote double the other for the same house?
Usually because the two quotes describe different work. Ask each painter to write down four things: how the surface will be prepared, how many coats and which product, what access equipment is included, and what happens if bare or rotten timber is found once the scraping starts.
In our experience the cheap quote is not usually a cheaper painter — it is a shorter specification. Once both are written in the same terms the gap tends to collapse, and where it does not, you can see exactly what you are paying for.
Does a painting quote normally include scaffolding?
Sometimes, and it is the most common reason two quotes are not comparable. Scaffolding on a two-storey house is a real, separately hired cost, charged by the week. Ask directly: is scaffold included, who erects it, how many weeks are allowed for, and who pays if weather extends the hire. More on access as a cost driver.
How accurate is the labour model on this page?
The hourly rates are published figures. The crew sizes and durations are our judgement, printed so you can replace them. What the model is good for is proportion — showing that labour dominates a repaint. What it is not good for is predicting your invoice, because it deliberately excludes paint, access hire, vehicles, insurance, overheads, margin and GST.
Should I paint or reclad?
That is decided by moisture, not by how the paint looks. Paint is a coating, not a repair: if water is getting into the wall, painting over it hides the evidence and buys nothing. The honest sequence is investigate first, then decide. Where the investigation finds failed flashings, saturated framing or rotten timber, the repair may be restricted building work under the Building Act 2004 and must be done or supervised by a Licensed Building Practitioner — which is a different trade and a different conversation. Renovate Auckland covers recladding.
Is the average consent value on this page what my repaint will cost?
No, and the gap is large. $163,752 is the average declared value of an Auckland consent to alter a dwelling. Most of those consents are structural work — a deck, a bathroom, an extension — with painting somewhere near the end of it. Repainting on its own generally needs no consent, so it is largely absent from the dataset. Treat the figure as the size of the market around your job, not the price of it.
Do you need to see the house before quoting?
Yes, and treat a firm price given without a site visit as a guess. The two facts that decide your price — what the cladding is and what condition it is in — cannot be established from an address or a photograph. A number produced without them will change once someone starts scraping.
Next
Get a read on your job before anyone visits
Send the job, not your life story. You get an honest answer on whether the budget and the work match — in writing, before a site visit is booked.
Same house, bigger job
If the painting is the last step of a renovation — a kitchen, a bathroom, an extension or a reclad — the cost method for that work is on the sibling site.
Renovate Auckland