Ask ten painting contractors what their production rate is and you will get ten confident answers. Ask them where the number came from and it gets quieter. It is usually a figure someone remembers from a job that went well, adjusted a bit each year by feel.
That matters because almost every quote leans on it. How many days, how many painters, what the labor costs. Get the rate wrong by 20 percent and the labor assumptions behind every quote can be wrong in the same direction, all year.
PaintClarity already holds both halves of the real answer. Your crew logs hours because that is how payroll and job costing work. What was missing was how big each job was, and that is now a field. Put the two together and your own rate stops being a guess.
Example: Your actual production rate
2,400 sq. ft. painted
60 labor hours logged
8-hour standard workday
= 320 sq. ft. per painter per day
PaintClarity calculates this automatically from your completed jobs.
How the number is worked out
Two steps, and you can check both by hand.
Painter-days first. Every hour logged against a job is added up and divided by your Standard work day, set under PaintClarity, Business, Pricing Rules. On an 8 hour day, 60 logged hours is 7.5 painter-days. It does not matter whether that was one painter for 7 and a half days or three painters for two and a half. The work is the same amount of work.
This is why the setting exists. A shop running ten hour days and a shop running eight hour days do not have comparable days, and comparing them as if they did is how two honest businesses end up with numbers that cannot be read side by side.
Then the rate. The job’s Paintable Area divided by its painter-days.
2,400 sq ft over 60 logged hours, on an 8 hour day 60 ÷ 8 = 7.5 painter-days 2,400 ÷ 7.5 = 320 sq ft per painter per day
That is one job. The headline at the top of the Rates page is the middle value across every job in the window, which is not the same as the average and is deliberately not the average.
Say your last seven scored jobs came out at 267, 289, 300, 320, 360, 400 and 450. The middle one is 320. The average is 341. The average is being pulled by the two fast jobs at the top, and if one of those had been an area typed with an extra digit it would have been pulled a great deal further. The middle value barely moves. A number you check against your gut once and find absurd is a number you never look at again, so the page is built to be worth a second look.
What is in the window, and what is not
By default the page looks at your last 10 completed jobs. You can switch that to 5, 20 or 50 at the top of the page, and the choice stays in the web address so you can bookmark the view you like.
Three kinds of job never enter the window at all:
- Jobs marked “exclude from reports.” If a job is not in your books it is not in your rates either. Same flag, same rule.
- Callbacks and punch-list visits. Their hours belong to the original job. Two hours of touch-up against a 3,000 sq ft area would read as the best day your crew ever had.
- Anything not finished. A job half done has all of its area and only some of its hours, which is exactly the shape of a fake record.
Everything else is listed, including jobs that cannot be scored yet. This is on purpose. If you have finished ten jobs and recorded an area on four of them, you see ten rows: four with a rate, six with an “Add area” link where the rate would be, and a headline that says “from 4 of the last 10.” The alternative would be to list only the four, which hides the problem and makes a thin page look like a slow quarter instead of a missing field.
A job with an area but no hours logged says “No hours” and offers a link to add them.
When a number looks impossible
A job that works out to less than 25 or more than 2,000 sq ft per painter per day is moved to its own section, Probably needs a correction, with the reason stated, and is left out of the headline.
Nearly always this is one of two things: an area typed with a digit too many or too few, or hours that have not been logged yet. Those are worth fixing rather than averaging in.
But sometimes the number is real. Four sprayers on open warehouse walls with lifts genuinely do move that fast, and fine trim or cabinet enamel genuinely is that slow. So every row has the last word available to you:
- Count it anyway puts a flagged job back into your rates.
- Leave out takes any job out, flagged or not, when you know something about it that the numbers do not show.
- Undo puts either decision back to automatic.
A job you decided by hand is labeled on the row, so a number you chose never looks like a number the plugin worked out. The decision lives on the job itself, so it travels with that job and disappears if the job is deleted.
The rate your quotes use is a setting, not this measurement
This is the part worth being clear about, because it is the opposite of what most software would do.
Nothing on the Rates page ever changes the rate your quotes are built from. The page measures. You decide.
The rate your quotes use is set in one of two places:
Per job category, which is the one that will actually help you. Go to PaintClarity, Business, Job Categories, open a category and expand Advanced. There is a Production rate field. Fill it in only when that kind of work runs at a different pace from the rest of your business, which for most shops is most of them. An interior repaint with furniture to move and cut lines everywhere is not a new construction exterior with nothing in the way. Setting them apart once is worth more than adjusting a single average on every quote forever.
The business figure, which is the fallback. Go to PaintClarity, Business, Pricing Rules. The Production rate field there sits directly under Standard work day, because the two of them together are what turn an area into days. It ships at 300 sq ft per painter per day, which is a general book figure rather than anything about your business.
Any category you leave blank uses the business figure. The field shows you what that figure currently is as its placeholder, so you are never typing into a blank box wondering what it would fall back to.
How that reaches the Labor Days calculator
When you open the Labor Days and Crew Cost Calculator on a quote, its Production Rate field is already filled in. It uses the rate you set for that job’s category. If that category has no rate of its own, it uses your business figure. Either way it says which one it used and where to change it, right under the field:
Your rate for Interior Repaint, set under Business, Job Categories. Type over it for this quote any time.
You can type over it for one quote without changing anything permanently. That is the right way to handle a job you already know is unusual.
What does not happen: the calculator never quietly swaps in the measured median from the Rates page. An earlier build of this did exactly that, and it was wrong. A measured rate carries last February’s rain, the third floor with no elevator, the callback that ran long and the warehouse with the lifts. None of that is in the number. You are the only one who can weigh it. So the measurement sits on its own page as evidence, the setting drives the quotes, and you are the one who decides when the evidence should change the setting.
Keeping the number honest
The page is only as good as what goes into it. Four habits do almost all the work.
1. Fill in Paintable Area. It is on the job form, next to Workers and Days. You can also let the Paint Calculator do it: run it on a quote and it offers to save its own computed area straight onto the job with one click. That is the least work for the most accurate number, because the calculator just measured it.
2. Measure the same way every time. The page does not care whether you count ceilings, or how you handle trim, as long as you are consistent. A rate built from areas measured three different ways is a rate about your measuring, not about your painting.
3. Log hours to the right job. A day logged against the wrong job makes two numbers wrong at once. This is already true for job costing, so it is not a new habit, just one more reason for it.
4. Keep your Standard work day current. If you moved from 8 hour days to 10, change it under Pricing Rules. Every painter-day figure on the page is built on it.
Two more worth knowing:
- Give it a little history before you lean on it. Three jobs is a number. Twenty jobs is a rate. The page tells you how many it used, every time, so you always know how much weight the figure deserves.
- Look at the category rates, not just the headline. Each category shows its own figure with how many jobs it came from, as a small “n=” on the pill. A category rate from nine jobs and one from a single job are different kinds of claim, and the page never hides which is which.
What this is good for
- Sanity checking the rate you quote from. The headline says how far your measured figure sits from your set figure, as a percentage. Anything inside 10 percent is close enough to leave alone. A persistent 25 percent gap in the same direction is telling you something.
- Setting per category rates from evidence instead of feel. This is the best use of the page. Let a few jobs in each category accumulate, then set each category’s rate with the measured figure in front of you.
- Catching bad data. Jobs with no area, jobs with no hours and impossible rates are all on one screen. Fixing them makes your job costing better too, because they are the same records.
- Noticing a change. If your rate drifts down over a season, that is a real signal about crews, scheduling or the kind of work you have been taking. It will not tell you which, but it tells you to go and look.
What this is not for
Being straight about the limits is part of making the number trustworthy.
- It is not a per painter rate and it never will be. When three people work one job, the job produces one number and the arithmetic genuinely cannot split it. One equation, three unknowns. Anything claiming to tell you that one painter is 12 percent faster than another, from crew job data, is guessing and dressing it up.
- It is not a crew scorecard. The page shows who logged hours on each job so you have the context, and it deliberately stops there. Crews change between jobs and within them, and a production rate is about the work, not about the people.
- It is not a performance measure. A slow month can be weather, access, the kind of work, or a job that was underscoped from the start. The number tells you the pace. It does not tell you the reason.
- It is not a bid. Nothing here prices anything. There is no revenue, no cost, no payroll and no margin on the page. It is square feet and hours.
- It is not a prediction. It is what already happened, on the jobs it says, in the window it names.
A few practical details
- The Rates page is in the free plan. Recording area is free, so seeing what that record buys you is free too.
- It is for office and admin users. Painters do not see it in their menu and cannot open it, since it covers the whole business rather than their own jobs.
- On a site set to metric units, everything shows in square meters. Behind the scenes the figures are stored one way and converted for display, so switching your units setting re-labels every number on the page rather than reinterpreting it.
- The window and the outlier range are both about jobs, not about time. Ten completed jobs might be three weeks or three months, depending on how you work.
Getting started in about five minutes
- Open PaintClarity, Business, Pricing Rules. Check Standard work day is right, and put a reasonable figure in Production rate if you have one in mind. 300 is fine to leave for now.
- Open a job you recently finished and fill in Paintable Area. Do a few.
- Open Rates under Tools. You will see the jobs you just filled in with a rate on each, and the rest asking for an area.
- Keep filling the field in as you finish jobs. Once each category has a handful behind it, come back and set the per category rates from what you see.
From then on your quotes start from your own numbers rather than somebody else’s book.