European Painting Cost Index 2026

The headline number: professionally painting the interior of a 3-bedroom house (120 m² wall area, 2 coats) costs €2,422 in Copenhagen vs €803 in Bucharest at mid-range — a 3.02× spread. That is the widest gap of any trade in our EU cost index series. The reason is simple: painting is almost pure labour. The paint itself costs the same everywhere — it's the hand holding the roller that changes price.

Why this matters

Painting has the highest labour share of any renovation trade we track: roughly 79% of the mid-range total is labour. Compare that to flooring (43%), tiling (53%), or even roofing (65%). When you hire a painter, you are overwhelmingly paying for someone's time, not for materials.

That makes painting the most "location-sensitive" renovation. A painter in Denmark costs an employer €47.10/hour; in Romania, €10.30/hour. For 120 m² of wall area requiring prep, primer, and two coats of emulsion, that translates to roughly 3–4 days of work — and the labour bill ranges from under €300 to over €1,800 depending on where in Europe you live.

The materials — premium emulsion paint, primer, masking tape, dust sheets — cost roughly €200–350 regardless of country. A 10-litre tin of Dulux or Alpina ships across the EU single market at near-identical pricing.

This 3× spread creates the strongest DIY incentive of any trade. If you can hold a roller and tolerate sore shoulders, painting is the renovation where doing it yourself saves the most money relative to the total project cost.

The full ranking

Standard 3-bedroom house interior (120 m² wall area), 2 coats, professionally painted. Sorted from most expensive to cheapest. The full dataset is free to download as CSV.

* 2024 labour cost values for Austria and Finland are flagged provisional by Eurostat.

What's actually driving the difference

Labour dominates at ~79% of the mid-range total. No other trade comes close. A professional painter's main inputs are time, skill, and a steady hand — not expensive materials. A 10-litre tin of quality emulsion covers 100–120 m² per coat and costs €40–80 across the EU. For our 120 m² reference project, the total paint cost is roughly €100–200. The rest is labour.

The 3.02× spread is the widest in our series. For comparison: tiling has a 2.01× spread, insulation 2.65×, and flooring 1.73×. The reason painting tops the list is precisely because materials are so cheap relative to labour. When materials are a bigger share (as in tiling, where the tiles themselves are expensive), the spread narrows because material costs are similar across the EU.

Surface preparation is the hidden time sink. Our baseline assumes walls in reasonable condition. If walls need filling, sanding, or mould treatment, add 20–40% to the labour time. In older buildings across Southern and Eastern Europe, wall preparation can account for more hours than the actual painting.

The luxury tier tells a different story. Premium paints (Farrow & Ball, Little Greene, Caparol premium) cost €60–120 per litre — 5–10× more than standard emulsion. At the luxury tier, materials become a larger share, which narrows the relative country gap slightly. But the absolute numbers are striking: €3,376 in Denmark vs €1,168 in Romania for the same project.

Painting is the most DIY-able trade. Unlike electrical, plumbing, or even tiling, interior painting requires no specialist tools and no certification. The main barrier is time and willingness. A competent DIYer can paint a 3-bedroom house in a long weekend.

How we calculated this

Costs are derived from RenoQuant's national-average baseline for a 3-bedroom interior painting project (sourced from our paint cost calculator) combined with Eurostat's published hourly labour cost in construction.

The country multiplier is applied only to the labour share. Materials (emulsion paint, primer, masking tape, dust sheets, rollers) are held constant. Budget tier uses contractor-grade emulsion (1 coat primer + 2 coats), mid-range uses quality branded emulsion with full prep, luxury uses premium designer paints with specialist finishes.

VAT excluded. Full methodology at EU renovation cost methodology.

Source: Eurostat, Labour cost levels by NACE Rev. 2 activity, dataset code lc_lci_lev, NACE Rev. 2 section F, total labour cost (D1_D4_MD5) in EUR, 2024 estimates. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

See also

• Paint Cost Calculator — interactive calculator with the underlying RenoQuant baseline used in this study.
• Paint Calculator — material quantity calculator for any room size.
• Bedroom Paint Calculator — bedroom-specific paint estimation.
• Ceiling Paint Calculator — ceiling-specific paint estimation.
• European Bathroom Renovation Cost Index 2026 — same methodology applied to full bathroom renovations.

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RenoQuant Research is the data and analysis arm of RenoQuant, a free renovation calculator suite covering 18 trades across Europe. If you're a journalist or researcher, the CSV is free under CC BY 4.0 — please credit "Eurostat + RenoQuant" if you use it.