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Painting Interior Doors and Trim: Cost Per Door and Per Foot of Baseboard, Brushed vs Sprayed, and the Prefinished Option That Skips It All
Drywall, Taping & Painting
Doors and Trim: Why 22 Doors Is $2,400, Why the Baseboard Costs More Than the Wall Above It, and the Factory Finish That Skips the Whole Thing
Trim is the slow part of painting. A foot of baseboard is a nail hole to fill, a joint to caulk, a top edge to cut against the wall, a bottom edge to keep off the floor, and two coats of an enamel that has to be brushed smooth. A door is two faces, four edges, and the only surface in the house people touch, so the finish has to be hard. This is why a painter’s quote has trim and doors as their own lines, and why a new house with 22 doors adds $2,400 to the painting before the baseboard starts. Here are the numbers, the two ways to do a door, and the option of not painting trim at all.
The numbers
| Item | Rate | What is in it |
|---|---|---|
| Baseboard | $2.25 per running ft | Nail holes filled, top and joints caulked, primer on bare MDF, two coats of enamel. A 12 x 12 room has about 45 ft: $100. |
| Door and window casing | $45 per opening | Both sides of a door frame or around a window, same treatment. |
| Interior door, brushed and rolled in place | $110 | Both faces and edges, hardware masked or removed, two coats. A good brush finish; you can see it is a brush finish. |
| Interior door, sprayed off the hinges | $140 | Taken down, sprayed flat on sawhorses or in a spray room, two coats, rehung. Looks like the factory. |
| Crown moulding | $3.00 to $4.00 per ft | Overhead, two edges to cut, caulked top and bottom. |
| Window sills and stools | $25 each | Often included with the casing. |
| Stair railing and spindles, painted | $30 to $45 per spindle | The job painters price highest and like least. Stained railings are a different trade. |
| Painting over old oil enamel | +$0.75 per ft, +$30 per door | Degloss, bonding primer, then the water-based enamel. Skip the primer and it peels in a year. |
Brushed or sprayed
Brushed trim in a good enamel, by a painter who can brush, is a fine finish and the normal one in an occupied house. Water-based alkyd enamels (Benjamin Moore Advance, Sherwin-Williams ProClassic and their kind) level out most brush marks and dry hard enough to wipe. Sprayed trim and doors are better: no brush marks at all, a uniform sheen, the factory look. Spraying needs an empty house or a lot of masking, and a painter with an airless or HVLP rig and the skill to run it. On a new house I have everything sprayed before the floors go in. On a repaint with the family at home, doors come off and get sprayed in the garage, and the baseboard gets brushed.
The enamel matters more than the method. Wall paint on trim stays soft, scuffs, and sticks to the door stop. Trim enamel costs $20 a gallon more and the difference lasts ten years.
The option of not painting trim
Prefinished doors and trim are what most of my houses get now. The door slab comes primed and painted from the manufacturer; the casing and baseboard come primed, or prefinished in white from the mill. The painter fills the nail holes and caulks the joints, or the trim carpenter does, and there is no painting. A prefinished door costs about $40 to $60 more than a primed slab; sprayed on site it would be $140. Prefinished MDF baseboard is about $0.50 a foot more than primed and saves $2.25. On a 22-door house the arithmetic is not close. The one thing to know is that a prefinished finish is only as good as the carpenter’s handling; a dinged prefinished door is a door that gets painted anyway. Allowances cover how this shows up in a builder’s contract.
Where homeowners go wrong
- Wall paint on the doors. It never fully hardens. Doors stick, trim scuffs grey. Enamel.
- Water-based paint straight over old oil trim. It peels in sheets. Degloss and a bonding primer, or ask the painter how he knows it is oil (a rag with rubbing alcohol: oil does not soften).
- No caulk. Trim painted without caulking the top edge has a black line along it forever. Caulk is in the price; make sure it is in the work.
- Counting doors wrong. Both sides, closets included, the furnace room included. 22 is normal in a 2,000 sq ft house.
- Painting prefinished trim. If you ordered prefinished and the painter quotes trim, somebody has not read the order.
Questions people ask
How much does it cost to paint an interior door?
$100 to $120 brushed in place, $130 to $150 sprayed off the hinges, both sides, two coats of trim enamel, in Ontario in 2026. More if it is oil-painted and needs a bonding primer.
How much does it cost to paint baseboards?
About $2.25 a running foot, filled, caulked, two coats of enamel. A 2,000 sq ft house has 500 to 600 ft of baseboard: $1,100 to $1,350.
Is it cheaper to buy prefinished doors or paint them?
Prefinished, by about $80 a door against spraying on site and $50 against brushing, as long as the carpenter does not ding them. Most new houses go prefinished now.
Should trim be semi-gloss or satin?
Either, in a proper trim enamel. Semi-gloss is harder and shows more; satin is softer-looking and hides more. Both wipe clean. Flat trim does not.
Price the trim with the walls
The interior painting calculator works out baseboard length from your rooms and counts the openings, with doors as a separate line you can set to zero if they are prefinished.
Sources and further reading
- Benjamin Moore Canada: product data sheets for the primers and paints named on these pages: coverage per gallon, recoat times and the right primer for new drywall.
- Sherwin-Williams Canada: the other paint line most Ontario painters use; the data sheets say the same things in different words.
