Painter Hourly Rate NZ: What to Charge Per Hour (2026)

Executive Summary

What a painter should charge per hour, and how to work it out

Most New Zealand painting businesses charge roughly $45 to $80 an hour, and where you land depends on your region, experience and overheads
Your charge-out rate is not your wage: it has to cover ACC levies, KiwiSaver, vehicle, tools, insurance and a profit margin, not just your take-home
How to build your own rate from realistic billable hours, not a hopeful 40-hour week
When GST applies, and why painting is not a licensed trade in New Zealand even though credibility still has to come from somewhere
Why getting found by the right customers matters more than shaving a few dollars off your quote

A painter's hourly rate is what a painter or painting business charges a customer per hour of work, typically $45 to $80 across New Zealand depending on experience, region and the type of job, and it sits well above what an employed painter earns as a wage because it also has to cover the business's overheads, ACC levies, vehicle and tools, and a profit margin on top.

None of that works if the right customers never find you, so a free Google listing audit is the quickest way to see where you show up for painting searches in your area. Get the rate itself wrong, though, and you either quietly work for free on every job or lose good customers to a painter who can explain their price. First, the numbers.

A few numbers worth knowing before you set your price:

Painting businesses in New Zealand commonly charge around $45 to $75 an hour, with apprentice-level work nearer $30 to $45 and specialist or master painters running $70 to $100 1.

Auckland tops the regional charge-out table, with qualified and experienced painters running $50 to $80 an hour 1. Auckland consumer cost guides quote a lower band of $40 to $60 an hour for standard work 2, which is a useful reminder that what homeowners are told to expect and what an established business needs to charge are not the same number.

By contrast, an employed painter and decorator in New Zealand most commonly earns $24 to $36 an hour, starting near $24 and topping out around $45 3. The adult minimum wage is $23.95 an hour from 1 April 2026 4. That gap between what a worker earns and what a business charges is the whole point of this guide.

Why Isn't a Painter's Rate the Same as the Wage?

This is the mistake that sinks new painting businesses. A painter leaves the boss who has been paying them about $30 an hour, adds "a bit on top", quotes $38, and cannot work out why there is nothing left at the end of the year. That number sits below the bottom of the national charge-out band before a single cost is counted.

The wage and the charge-out rate are two different numbers doing two different jobs.

The wage is what an employer pays an employed painter. Most painters and decorators in New Zealand earn somewhere between $24 and $36 an hour, and the legal floor under all of it is the adult minimum wage of $23.95 an hour 3 4. That is a payment for a worker, not a price for a business.

The charge-out rate is what a business bills a customer. Out of that one number you have to pay yourself a wage and then cover everything the boss used to cover: public liability insurance, the ute and fuel, tools, brushes, drop sheets and consumables, KiwiSaver, ACC levies, sick days and holidays, quoting time you never get paid for, phone, software, and the tax bill. Whatever is left after all of that is your margin. Strip the margin and there is no business, just a job with extra paperwork.

Action: Never quote off your old hourly wage. Start from everything the business has to cover in a year, then work back to an hourly number.

What Does Your Rate Actually Have to Cover?

Before you can build a rate, it helps to see the full stack of costs sitting behind every hour you bill.

ACC levies. Every business pays them, and they are charged as cents in every hundred dollars you earn. The Earners' levy is $1.52 per $100 of income and the Working Safer levy is $0.08 per $100, so on a $75,000 income those two alone come to roughly $1,200 a year. On top of that sits the Work levy, which is set by how risky ACC rates your industry, your own claims history and how much you pay out in wages 5. Painting means ladders, scaffolding and solvents, so this is not a rounding error.
KiwiSaver. If you employ anyone, the minimum compulsory employer contribution is 3.5% of gross salary or wages 6. That sits on top of the wage itself.
Unpaid days. Public holidays, annual leave and sick days are days nobody is billing. The days you do work have to carry them.
Vehicle, tools and consumables. The ute and fuel, ladders and scaffold hire, sprayers, sanders, brushes, rollers, masking, drop sheets and the replacements when they wear out.
The invisible hours. Quoting, site visits, buying paint, chasing colour approvals, invoicing and callbacks. None of it appears on a bill, all of it eats the week.

Action: Add these up for last year before you touch your rate. Most painters find the real overhead number is a third higher than the one in their head.

How Do I Work Out My Own Charge-Out Rate?

There is a simple method the New Zealand trade software people use, and it beats guessing. Add up your annual costs, being the salary you want plus every business overhead, divide by your real billable hours for the year, then add your target profit margin 7.

The part most people get wrong is the billable hours. A 40-hour week across the year looks like about 2,000 hours on paper. You will never bill all of them. Most tradies realistically bill 25 to 32 hours a week, with the rest going to quoting, travel, admin and callbacks, and calculating your rate off a full 40-hour week means undercharging from day one 7.

Fergus works a plain example: $80,000 in costs divided by 1,380 billable hours is $57.97 an hour just to break even, and adding a 25% margin lands the charge-out rate at $77.29 an hour excluding GST 7.

Here is the same method with painter-shaped numbers:

Decide your salary. Say you want to pay yourself $75,000 a year.
Add your annual overheads. Say $22,000 for insurance, vehicle, tools, phone, software, accounting and consumables.
Add them together: $97,000 is what the business must earn just to stand still.
Divide by realistic billable hours. At about 30 billable hours a week across 47 working weeks, that is roughly 1,400 hours: $97,000 divided by 1,400 is about $69.29 an hour. That is break-even, not profit.
Add 20% on top for profit: about $83.15 an hour. That is a rate that actually builds a business. Note that adding 20% on top is not the same operation as Fergus taking a 25% margin out of the final price, so pick one method and stay with it.

Your numbers will differ. A solo painter with a paid-off ute and a home office has lower overheads than a three-van crew with a yard and a storeman. And if the number you land on sits above your local band, the answer is not to pretend it is lower. It is to bill more of the week, cut a real cost, or win work that pays for finish rather than the cheapest hour.

Action: Add up last year's real overheads and the salary you want, divide by your honest billable hours, then add your margin. Compare the result to what you have been quoting.

What Do Painters Charge in Different Regions?

Rates move with the region, mostly because overheads and the cost of living do. Charge-out data across the main centres lands around here, from qualified through to experienced painters 1:

Region	Typical painter rate (per hour)
Auckland	$50 to $80
Wellington	$48 to $78
Tauranga	$45 to $72
Christchurch	$45 to $70
Hamilton	$43 to $68
Dunedin	$42 to $65

Smaller centres and rural areas generally sit below those figures. That is not a rule you can put an exact percentage on, but the logic is straightforward: lower rent, lower cost of living and cheaper premises mean lower overheads, so the rate that keeps a Southland painter profitable is usually below what an Auckland painter needs to charge for the same work.

Do not read a regional table as permission to race everyone to the bottom of it. A painter with a full book of five-star reviews and a portfolio of clean work charges at the top of their local range and still stays busy, because the customer is buying the finish, not the cheapest hour.

Action: Find your region's range, then decide whether your reviews, finish and reliability justify sitting at the top of it. Usually they do.

Does GST Change the Rate?

You must register for GST once your turnover was at least $60,000 in the last 12 months, or you expect it will be at least $60,000 in the next 12 months 8. GST in New Zealand is charged at 15% 9, so once you are registered that goes on top of what you charge.

Two things trip painters up here.

GST turnover is gross income, not profit. It is your total sales, not what is left after paint and wages. A painter billing $68,000 a year has to register even if only a third of that is profit.

Say which number you are quoting. Trade and commercial customers usually expect a rate excluding GST. Homeowners usually want the number they will actually pay. A $70 hourly rate becomes $80.50 once GST is on it, and a customer who was told "seventy" and invoiced "eighty fifty" will feel stung even though you did nothing wrong. Label it every time.

Action: If you are near $60,000 turnover, sort registration with your accountant before you cross it, and make every quote say clearly whether the number includes GST.

Do You Need a Licence to Charge for Painting in New Zealand?

No. Painting is not a licensed trade in New Zealand, and you do not need a licence to charge for painting work.

Compare it to the trades that are regulated. Prescribed electrical work can only be carried out or supervised by someone registered and holding a current practising licence from the Electrical Workers Registration Board 12, and the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board runs the equivalent registration and licensing system for restricted plumbing, gasfitting and drainlaying work 13. Restricted building work sits under the Licensed Building Practitioner scheme, which has seven licence classes: design, carpentry, roofing, brick and block laying, external plastering, foundations and site 14. Painting is not one of them, and there is no painters' board.

That cuts both ways. It means you can start tomorrow, and so can the bloke who has never held a spray gun. With no licence to point at, your credibility has to come from somewhere else.

Master Painters New Zealand is the national industry body for painting, made up of 13 member regions, with over a century of history behind it. Members are held to a code of conduct and offer a 5-Year Workmanship Guarantee on qualifying jobs 10. Membership is voluntary, which is exactly why it signals something.
Site Safe issues the Site Safety Card, which Site Safe describes as proof that you understand the essential health and safety practices required on New Zealand worksites. Many principal contractors and employers require it before allowing site access 11. If you want commercial and new-build work, get one.
Reviews and photos do the rest. In an unlicensed trade, a wall of recent five-star reviews and a gallery of real before-and-after work is the closest thing to a licence a customer can check in thirty seconds.

Action: If you are chasing commercial or new-build work, get a Site Safety Card sorted. If you are chasing quality residential work, get your reviews and job photos in front of people, because nobody can look up your registration.

What Else Changes What You Can Charge?

A single hourly figure never tells the whole story. A few things push a painter's rate up or down within their local range:

Interior versus exterior. Exterior work usually earns more per hour because of height, weather, access and heavier prep. Auckland cost guides put exterior work around $60 to $90 per square metre of wall area against $50 to $80 for interior 2. A second-storey weatherboard repaint is not the same job as rolling a bedroom.
Prep and condition. Flaking paint, rot, water damage and gap-filling all add hours. Good painters price the prep, not just the top coat.
Substrate. Weatherboard, brick, plaster and stucco all take different amounts of work, and the per-metre costs reflect it 2.
Season and weather. Exterior work is weather-bound in a way most trades are not. An Auckland summer will let you turn exteriors around; a Dunedin or Southland winter will not, because cold and damp kill the drying windows between coats. Either build a weather buffer into an exterior quote booked in the wrong months, or push the job to a month that will let you finish it, and fill the winter with interiors.
Experience and finish. A painter known for crisp cut-in lines and no callbacks charges more than a first-year sole operator, and customers pay it.
Job size and type. A regular commercial or property-management client that feeds you steady work may get a sharper rate than a one-off job, because the volume is worth it.

None of these are excuses to discount your way to a full diary. They are reasons to quote the specific job in front of you rather than a flat rate off the top of your head.

Charging Properly Starts With Being Found

Here is the part that decides whether your rate holds. If the only customers who find you are the ones filtering three quotes off Builderscrack on price, you will always feel pressure to drop your hour. If customers find you because you show up on the map with a wall of five-star reviews and a gallery of real before-and-after work, price stops being the whole conversation.

That is the difference between renting leads on a job board and owning the pipeline: a complete Google Business Profile, steady reviews, and a website with a page for each job you do. Painting is a trade people judge with their eyes, so the painter whose work is visible wins the better-paid jobs. The full plan is in SEO for painters.

Want a Painter Website That Wins Better-Paid Work?

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What a painter website costs

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Frequently Asked Questions

What should a painter charge per hour in New Zealand?

Most New Zealand painting businesses charge somewhere between $45 and $75 an hour, with apprentice-level work nearer $30 to $45 and specialist or master painters running $70 to $100. Auckland sits at the top of the national picture, with qualified and experienced painters charging $50 to $80. Where you land depends on your region, experience, overheads and the type of work, not on a single national number.

Why is a painter's hourly rate higher than a painter's wage?

Because the wage and the charge-out rate are different things. An employed painter and decorator in New Zealand most commonly earns $24 to $36 an hour, which is what a worker takes home. A business's charge-out rate has to pay that wage and then cover ACC levies, KiwiSaver, insurance, the ute and fuel, tools and consumables, unpaid quoting time, tax and a profit margin. Quoting off your old wage is the fastest way to work for free.

How much do painters charge in Auckland?

Charge-out data for qualified and experienced Auckland painters runs $50 to $80 an hour, the highest band of any New Zealand region. Auckland consumer cost guides quote a lower figure of $40 to $60 an hour for standard work, so expect homeowners to have that number in their head. Wellington sits a touch below Auckland, and Christchurch, Hamilton, Tauranga and Dunedin lower again. Smaller centres and rural areas generally run below the main-centre figures because overheads are lower.

Do painters have to charge GST in New Zealand?

Only once the business turns over $60,000 or more in a 12-month period, or expects to in the next 12 months. GST is charged at 15%, and turnover means gross sales, not profit, so a painter billing $68,000 a year has to register even if only a third of that is profit. Always say whether a quoted rate includes GST, because $70 an hour becomes $80.50 once it is added.

Do you need a licence to work as a painter in New Zealand?

No. Painting is not a licensed trade in New Zealand and there is no registration board for painters, unlike electrical work through the EWRB or plumbing through the PGDB. Credibility comes from voluntary signals instead: Master Painters New Zealand membership with its 5-Year Workmanship Guarantee, a Site Safety Card for site access on commercial and new-build jobs, and a solid record of reviews and job photos.

How do I work out my own charge-out rate as a painter?

Add the salary you want to pay yourself to your annual overheads, then divide by the hours you can realistically bill and add a margin. Most tradies bill 25 to 32 hours a week rather than 40, so use the honest number. For example, a $75,000 salary plus $22,000 of overheads across about 1,400 billable hours is roughly $69 an hour before margin, and about $83 with 20% on top.

References:

This is the painter-specific pricing guide. To get found by the customers who pay a proper rate, see SEO for painters. Want it built for you? See websites and marketing for painters.

Published by Made 4 Tradies. Kiwi-owned, run by a Hawke's Bay local. Serving Hawke's Bay, Hastings, Napier, and nationwide.

What Should a Painter Charge Per Hour in New Zealand? (2026)