Most decorators who lose money on a kitchen don't lose it on the day. They lose it three weeks earlier, on the phone, in the four minutes it took to pull a number out of the air. The job was always going to take what it took. The quote was the only part you controlled, and you rushed it.
Cabinet painting punishes a loose quote harder than almost any other trade work. The labour is front-loaded into prep nobody can see, the finish has to be furniture-grade because the client stands six inches from it every morning, and the failure modes — a run in the topcoat, a nib you missed, a door that chips at the handle in week three — all land on you, not the paint. Price it like a wall and you will work for nothing. Price it properly and a kitchen is some of the best-margin work you can take.
This is a framework, not a price list. The numbers in here are illustrative — placeholders, clearly flagged, so the method is visible. Your rates are yours. The value is in knowing every cost that has to go into the quote and the order you build them in, so that when you write the figure down it is a calculation and not a guess.
Price the job, not the doors
The instinct is to count doors and multiply. It feels precise. It is the single fastest way to underbid a kitchen.
A per-door figure assumes every door is the same, and they never are. A flat slab MDF door takes a fraction of the prep of a moulded oak Shaker with a deep profile that has to be brushed by hand into the corners while the faces are sprayed. A door that has been waxed, oiled, or coated in a previous silicone-laden polish needs degreasing and a barrier primer before anything else will key to it. Two kitchens with the same door count can differ by a day and a half of labour. Count doors to sanity-check your number at the end — never to generate it.
Build the quote from time and cost instead. Everything below is either an hour of your labour, a pound of material, a mile of van, or a slice of overhead and margin. Estimate each one, total them, then divide by the door count only as a final cross-check. If your all-in figure comes out at wildly more or less per door than jobs that actually went well, something in the estimate is wrong and you've caught it before you sent it.
The survey is the most valuable hour you'll spend
Quote a kitchen off photos and you are gambling. The two things that destroy cabinet jobs — substrate contamination and hidden damage — are exactly the two things a photo hides.
Go and look. On site, you are answering specific questions, and each answer moves the price. What is the existing finish: bare timber, factory foil-wrap, melamine, a previous coat of someone else's eggshell, or a hand-waxed antique? Foil and melamine need a specialist adhesion primer and a frank conversation about peeling foil, which is a substrate failure you cannot paint over. Is there grease? A kitchen that has been cooked in for ten years has a film on the doors above and beside the hob that ordinary sanding drives in rather than removes, and that film is the most common cause of a respray lifting six months later.
Check the door count, yes, but also the drawer fronts, the open shelf ends, the plinths, the cornice, the pelmet, the bulkhead, and the interior reveals the client will absolutely expect done even though they didn't mention them. Open a door and decide now whether you are painting the inside faces and the carcass edges or only the show face — that single decision can swing the labour by a third, and it has to be agreed in writing, not discovered on the day.
Treat the survey as billable thinking time even if you don't itemise it. The hour on site plus the hour estimating afterwards is where the money is either protected or lost. Build it into your overhead rather than pretending it's free.
Degrease, sand, fill: the prep that decides everything
Adhesion is not a marketing claim, it is physics, and on cabinets it is the whole job. The design data is blunt about this: a premium topcoat on an unprepared surface fails in a couple of years, and a cheaper coating on a properly prepared surface lasts the better part of a decade. Prep work typically adds 30 to 40 per cent to the labour cost of a paint job and 10 to 15 per cent to the materials — and on kitchen cabinets that proportion runs higher still, because the surface is handled daily and seen close up. Price the prep as the largest single labour line, because it is.
Sequence it and cost each step. Degreasing comes first — sugar soap or a dedicated degreaser on every surface, with extra attention to the hob surround, rinsed and dried before anything touches it. Skip it and the rest is wasted. Then de-gloss: any existing glossy or factory finish has to be keyed back with an orbital sander on a dust extractor, or chemically de-glossed, because new paint will not bond to a slick surface. Then fill — grain, dents, chipped edges, the screw holes where the old handles came off if the client is changing hardware. Hard-setting filler for gouges, fine filler for grain, sanded flush when dry. Then a final denib and a tack-off so the first coat goes onto a clean, keyed, sound surface.
Every one of those is time. A flat modern kitchen in sound condition might be a half-day of prep across all the doors; a greasy, glossy, dinged-up traditional kitchen with bare patches and silicone contamination can be two full days before a drop of primer goes on. You cannot know which until you survey, which is why you survey.
Primer choice is a cost decision, not a default
The primer is where people either spend ten minutes thinking or reach for whatever is in the van. On cabinets it is load-bearing, and the right product depends entirely on what the survey told you.
Bare or newly filled timber and MDF want a proper wood or MDF primer. A surface with stains, tannin bleed, or a previous wax or oil contamination wants a shellac-based barrier primer — Zinsser BIN is the standard reach here — because it seals what water-based primers let bleed straight through, and it keys to slick surfaces that ordinary primers slide off. Foil-wrap, melamine, and laminate want a dedicated adhesion primer rated for non-porous surfaces, and you charge for it accordingly because it is dearer and the whole finish depends on it.
This matters to the quote in two ways. The product cost varies — a specialist shellac or adhesion primer is meaningfully more per litre than a basic acrylic wood primer, and on a full kitchen that difference is real money you must carry into the price. And the labour varies with it: shellac primers flash off fast and let you recoat in an hour, which can save you a half-day on a tight schedule, while some water-based systems want longer between coats and stretch the job across another day you have to fund. Pick the primer the substrate needs, cost the actual product, and cost the drying time it imposes.
Coats, cure, and the days you can't compress
A furniture-grade cabinet finish is rarely one coat of anything. A realistic specification is one primer coat — two on bare or awkward substrates — followed by two topcoats, with a light denib between each. That is three to four coats per surface, both faces if you're doing insides, and every coat is a separate pass with its own masking, its own laying-off, and its own drying window before the next.
The drying and curing is the part clients never see and decorators routinely forget to price. Between coats you are waiting on recoat times. At the end you are waiting on cure — the period before the finish is hard enough to take daily handling, and on cabinets that is not the same as touch-dry. The design spec for hard-use painted joinery routinely calls for a number of days of cure before a surface goes back into service, and a kitchen door opened and grabbed before the coating has cured will mark and you will be back to fix it for free.
Those days are real even when no labour happens on them. If the kitchen is out of action for a week, that is a week the client is washing up in the bathroom and the job is tying up your schedule. Price the elapsed time, not just the hands-on hours, and tell the client the timeline up front so the cure isn't mistaken for you being slow.
Doors and drawers: count them, then weight them
The count still matters — it drives masking, handling, and the sheer number of edges — but treat it as weighted, not flat. A drawer front is quick. A glazed door with bars you have to cut in around is slow. An end panel is a big flat area that sprays fast but shows every defect. A plinth is low, awkward, and gets kicked, so it wants the same care as the doors but in a worse working position.
The carcasses are the hidden multiplier. Spraying the doors off and brushing the fixed frames in situ is two different operations with two different rates, and a kitchen is usually both. The fixed end of the run, the frames around the appliances, the bulkhead and cornice — these are brushed and rolled in place, around the client's kitchen, with masking everywhere, and they are slower per square metre than a door on a rack. Count the doors and drawers as units, then add a separate, honest allowance for the fixed carcassery, because that is where per-door estimates quietly fall apart.
Spray versus brush: a finish decision with a cost tail
The client wants the sprayed look — the flawless, factory-smooth, no-brush-marks finish that sells a kitchen respray. Spray delivers it. It also changes your entire cost base, and not always downward.
Spraying lays a better film faster once you are running, and on a large kitchen the speed on the doors themselves is real. But the saving on application is partly eaten by setup. Spray means masking everything you are not coating to a much higher standard, building or hiring a clean space to spray the doors, managing overspray and extraction, cleaning the gun and lines between colours and at the end of each session, and carrying the cost of the equipment itself. Brushing and rolling is slower on the faces but needs almost none of that infrastructure, and for a small kitchen or a few doors the brush can genuinely come out cheaper once you account for setup.
There is also a skill premium. A decorator who can lay off a brushed eggshell or satin flat enough that it reads smooth from normal viewing distance can charge for a hand-finished kitchen and deliver it with minimal kit. A sprayer is buying a finish quality and a speed that a brush can't quite match on big flat panels — and paying for the masking, the booth, and the cleandown to get it. Neither is automatically right. Price the method the job and your kit actually call for, and quote the masking and cleandown as real lines, because they are hours whether or not the client sees them.
On-site spray versus workshop spray
If you're spraying, the next fork is where. Both have a cost structure and the wrong choice eats your margin.
Spraying the doors in the client's home or garage means masking a containment zone, protecting every adjacent surface from overspray, managing dust and fumes around an occupied house, and accepting that you are working in conditions you don't fully control — temperature, humidity, and dust all affect the finish. It saves the transport, and the doors never leave site, which clients like.
Taking the doors back to a workshop or unit to spray gives you a controlled, dust-managed, properly lit space where the finish quality is repeatable and the cure happens off the client's clock. The cost is handling and transport: numbering and removing every door and drawer, loading and moving them twice, the space itself, and the two trips. For a large kitchen the workshop usually wins on finish and on stress; for a few doors the handling overhead can outweigh the benefit. Either way, cost the masking-and-containment or the transport-and-handling explicitly. It is one of the biggest swing factors between two quotes for the same kitchen.
Coordinating with the joiner, the fitter, and the kitchen company
Cabinet jobs rarely happen in isolation. New kitchens come with a fitter; replacement doors come from a supplier; handle changes and hinge swaps sit somewhere between you and a joiner. Every handover is a cost and a risk, and unmanaged it lands on your time.
If you are painting before final fit, you need the doors at the right stage and you need to know who hangs them after you've finished them — a door chipped during hanging is a dispute about whose fault it is. If you are painting an installed kitchen, you are working around the fitter's silicone, the new worktop you mustn't mark, and appliances you have to mask or remove. Coordinate the sequence in advance: who is on site when, what state the units are in when you arrive, and who is responsible for the finish once you hand it back.
Build the coordination time into the price. The phone calls, the site visit to check the units are ready, the wasted trip when the kitchen isn't where the fitter promised it would be — these are real hours that vanish from a quote built on door count alone. Price them, and write the responsibilities into your quote so a chip at handover isn't automatically your problem.
Masking, dust protection, and the cost of a clean job
A kitchen respray in an occupied home lives or dies on protection, and protection is consumable time and consumable material in equal measure. The client is cooking, the kids are passing through, and your overspray or your dust on a granite worktop is a bill you'll be paying.
Masking a kitchen properly is hours: floors, worktops, walls, splashbacks, appliances, glass, sockets, and a dust-managed boundary if you're spraying on site. The materials — tape, film, paper, sheeting, and the dust-extraction consumables — add up faster than people expect across a full kitchen. None of it is optional, and all of it is invisible in a per-door price.
Cost masking as its own labour line and its own materials line. It protects you twice: it stops you absorbing the time, and it stops a claim for a marked surface eating the whole job's profit. A clean job is also how you get the next kitchen, so the protection is marketing as well as cost.
Mileage, consumables, and the small costs that add up
The small lines are where a quote quietly leaks. They are easy to omit and they compound across a multi-day job.
Mileage is real cost — fuel and wear, every day, both ways, plus any trips to fetch doors or materials. Track the round-trip distance, multiply by the days, and apply a per-mile figure that covers running the van rather than just the diesel. A kitchen an hour each way for a week is a meaningful number you must recover.
Consumables beyond the paint are constant: abrasives at several grits, tack cloths, filler, caulk, degreaser, masking tape and film, gun cleaner and thinners if you spray, rags, gloves, and the brushes and rollers that wear out. Decorators routinely underestimate these because no single item is dear, but across a fully prepped, multi-coat kitchen they add up. Either itemise them or carry a consumables percentage on top of the paint cost — a defensible markup on materials that covers the bits and pieces — but do not pretend they're free.
Overheads and margin: the part that turns a wage into a business
Everything so far is the cost of doing the job. None of it pays for the cost of being in business, and a quote that stops at job cost is a quote that keeps you self-employed and broke.
Your overheads exist whether or not you're on a kitchen this week: insurance, vehicle, phone, tools and their replacement, accountant, training, quoting time, the days you can't bill, and your own holiday and sick pay that no employer is providing. Total those for a year, work out how many billable days you realistically have once you remove weekends, admin, and gaps, and you have an hourly or daily overhead figure that has to sit on top of every job. This is not optional and it is not greedy — it is the number that lets you still be trading in five years.
Margin is separate again. Overhead recovery keeps the lights on; margin is the profit that funds growth, absorbs the job that goes wrong, and pays for the cure days when a kitchen is tying up your schedule. Decide your margin as a percentage and add it after costs and overhead, openly, in your own figures. The trade myth that you bury margin so the client can't see it is exactly how decorators end up running a busy business that makes no money. Cost the job honestly, recover your overhead, add your margin, and you have a price you can defend and survive on.
Building the quote, in order
Put the method together and a defensible kitchen quote assembles itself in one direction.
Start with the survey: substrate, contamination, condition, what's in scope, door and drawer count, carcass extent. From the survey, estimate prep labour — degrease, de-gloss, fill, denib — as your largest labour line. Add the coating labour: primer plus two topcoats, both faces if applicable, doors and fixed carcassery costed separately, by your chosen method. Add the masking and protection labour. Spread it across the elapsed days the recoat and cure times force on you, not just the hands-on hours.
Then layer the materials: the specific primer the substrate needs, the topcoat, and a consumables allowance on top. Add mileage for the round trips across the job's duration. Now apply your overhead recovery and your margin to the whole. Finally — and only finally — divide the total by the door count and ask whether the per-door figure looks sane against kitchens that actually went well. If it's wildly off, your estimate has an error in it and you've caught it before it cost you. That cross-check is the last gate, never the starting point.
A worked example (illustrative figures only)
These numbers are invented to show the shape of the calculation, not to tell you what to charge. Substitute your own rates throughout — the framework is the point, not the pounds.
Picture a medium traditional kitchen: 20 doors, 6 drawer fronts, two end panels, plinths, and a fixed run with frames and a bulkhead to brush in. The survey finds a moderately greasy, previously eggshelled surface in sound condition — real prep, but no foil and no silicone disaster. Say you estimate three days of prep, two days of coating across the doors and the fixed work, and half a day of masking and setup, with the doors sprayed in a unit so the cure happens off-site over a further few days you don't attend. That is five and a half attended days. Apply your own day rate to those days and you have your labour line. Apply your own overhead daily figure to the same days and add it. Cost the actual primer and topcoat the substrate needs, add a materials markup for consumables, add the round-trip mileage for the days you're on site plus the two door-transport runs, then add your margin percentage to the lot.
Whatever total that produces is your price, built from your rates. Divide it by 26 fronts as a cross-check and see whether the per-door figure sits where your good jobs have sat. If a reader takes a single pound figure from this paragraph as a market rate, they have misread it: every number here is a placeholder for one of your own.
Frequently asked questions
Should I quote per door or per day? Neither as your starting point — quote from total estimated cost. Build the figure from prep labour, coating labour, masking, materials, mileage, overhead, and margin, then use the per-door figure only as a final sanity check against jobs that went well. Per-door pricing alone ignores prep, contamination, and carcass work, which is exactly where kitchens lose money.
Why is cabinet painting so much more than painting a wall of the same size? Because the labour is in the prep and the finish standard, not the area. A wall is one or two coats of emulsion onto a forgiving surface viewed from across the room. Cabinets are degreased, de-glossed, filled, primed with the right specialist primer, and given multiple topcoats to a furniture-grade standard the client inspects from inches away, with cure days where the kitchen is out of action. The square metres are small; the hours are not.
Is spraying always cheaper than brushing? No. Spraying is faster on the door faces and gives a finish a brush can't quite match on big flat panels, but it adds masking, containment or a spray space, overspray management, and gun cleandown. On a small kitchen or a few doors, a hand-finished brush-and-roller job can come out cheaper once setup is counted. Price the method the job and your kit actually call for, not a default.
Should I spray the doors on site or take them back to a workshop? For a large kitchen, a workshop usually wins: a controlled, dust-managed space gives a repeatable finish and the cure happens off the client's clock — you carry transport and handling instead. For a few doors, on-site spraying can be cheaper because the handling overhead outweighs the benefit, provided you can contain the overspray and dust in an occupied home. Cost the containment or the transport explicitly either way.
How do I stop underpricing prep? Survey before you quote, and price prep as your largest single labour line rather than an afterthought. Inspect for grease, gloss, foil, and hidden damage on site, because those are what blow the estimate. Carry the principle that prep adds 30 to 40 per cent to labour, more on heavily used cabinets, and never let a photo-based guess set the figure.
What do most decorators forget to include? Cure days when the kitchen is out of action, coordination time with the fitter or joiner, mileage across the whole job, consumables beyond the paint, and — most damaging — overhead recovery and margin. A quote that covers only the cost of doing the job leaves nothing to run the business, absorb a job that goes wrong, or pay for the days a kitchen ties up your schedule.