How to Start a Painting Business in Australia
Painting has the lowest tool bill of any trade and the tightest margins to match. Here's how to set up a painting business that prices prep properly and doesn't compete on being cheapest.
Painting is cheap to start, which is exactly why it's hard to make money at. Anyone with a ute and a few brushes can undercut you, and plenty do. What separates a painting business that lasts from one that folds in eighteen months is not the gear — it's pricing that accounts for preparation, a licence where the state requires one, and a client base that isn't chosen purely on price. This guide covers setting up properly.
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Decide what you paint and who you paint it for
Painting splits into markets that look similar and behave completely differently. Your pricing, your gear and your marketing all follow from which one you're in.
- Residential repaints — owner-occupiers repainting their own home. Best margins, highest expectations, and the market where a good reputation compounds fastest.
- New residential — painting for builders on new homes. Steady volume, tight rates, fast turnaround, and you're on the builder's payment cycle.
- Real estate and rental turnover — quick repaints between tenancies. Repeat work, price-driven, and it fills gaps well.
- Commercial and strata — offices, common areas, apartment blocks. Bigger jobs, out-of-hours work, more paperwork and longer payment terms.
- Specialist finishes — spray work, heritage, protective coatings, roofs. Higher rates, more equipment, less competition.
New businesses often take builder work first because it's easy to find, then discover the rates don't support the business. It's a fine way to fill a diary while you're getting established — just don't build your rate around it.
Licensing, safety and lead paint
Plenty of people believe painting isn't a licensed trade. In several states it plainly is, and the threshold that triggers it is low enough that an ordinary three-bedroom repaint clears it without trying.
- Queensland requires a QBCC painting and decorating licence for work valued above $3,300. Below that it falls inside the handyman exemption.
- New South Wales licenses painting as a trade category, with a contractor licence required for building or trade work above $5,000 in labour and materials including GST.
- Victoria handles it through building practitioner registration, with domestic building work above $10,000 requiring registration in the relevant category.
- Those figures are current as at August 2026 and they change — confirm your own state's before you quote, and don't assume the other jurisdictions match.
The safety side is where painting carries risk out of proportion to its tool bill:
- Lead paint — homes painted before the 1970s can carry lead-based paint. Disturbing it by sanding or scraping creates a health hazard for you, the occupants and the neighbours, and there are specific controls for managing it. Test before you sand an old house.
- Working at heights — second-storey exteriors mean scaffold, an EWP or a harness system. It's a real cost and it belongs in the quote.
- Asbestos — eaves, sheeting and fibro on older homes. Unlicensed removal is capped at a small area of non-friable material and prohibited outright in the ACT, so if you're preparing a surface that might be asbestos, stop and get it identified before you touch it.
- Silica — sanding or grinding render, masonry and cement sheet is regulated processing of a crystalline silica substance, which means water suppression or on-tool extraction plus respiratory protection, not a dust mask.
- Solvents and ventilation — enclosed spaces, spray work and two-pack products all have handling and respiratory protection requirements.
Lead paint is the one most likely to catch a new painting business out, because the house looks like any other repaint from the driveway. Ask the age of the building at the quoting stage and price the extra controls in — retrofitting them halfway through the job costs you the margin on the whole thing.
What you'll be spending money on
Painting has the smallest tool bill of the major trades, which is a blessing and a trap — low barriers mean more competitors. Price your own setup across these categories.
| Category | What sits in it |
|---|---|
| Registration and licensing | ABN and business name, state painting licence where required |
| Vehicle | Van or ute, racks, shelving, signage |
| Brushes and rollers | Quality applicators, poles, trays, buckets, cutting-in gear |
| Prep gear | Sanders with dust extraction, scrapers, fillers, sugar soap, masking, drop sheets |
| Access equipment | Ladders, trestles, planks, and scaffold or EWP hire for two-storey work |
| Spray setup | Airless unit, tips, hoses, respirators — optional at first, transformative later |
| Insurance | Public liability, tools, income protection |
| Software and phone | Job management, accounting, mobile plan |
| Working capital | Paint float and living costs until invoices are paid |
Open a trade account with a paint supplier early. Trade pricing on paint is a substantial share of your material margin, and terms mean you're not funding every job on a credit card. Suppliers will also colour-match, deliver to site and take back mixed-in-error tins, all of which save you hours.
Price the preparation, not the paint
Every painting job that loses money loses it in preparation. The painting itself is predictable — you can measure the walls. Filling, sanding, patching, rust treatment, undercoating and masking are what vary between one house and the next, and they're what an inexperienced quote leaves out.
- Build your charge-out rate from your own overheads and genuinely billable hours, then price jobs against it. Square-metre rates copied from a competitor carry their prep assumptions, not yours.
- Walk every room and every elevation before you quote. Note the substrate, the condition, the number of colours and the cut-in complexity.
- Quote coats explicitly — undercoat plus two, or two over existing. Ambiguity here is the most common argument in the trade.
- Price access as its own line. Scaffold or an EWP for a two-storey exterior can rival the paint cost.
- Exclude what you're not doing in writing — timber repairs, render cracks, gutter replacement, moving furniture. Otherwise you'll be doing it.
- Add a real allowance for weather on exteriors. Days you can't paint still cost you.
Our guides to quoting exterior house painting and quoting interior painting go through what to itemise, and working out your charge-out rate covers the number underneath it all.
Winning work without being the cheapest
There will always be someone cheaper. Competing with them is a losing position, because the client who chooses on price alone will leave you for the next cheaper quote anyway. Win on the things a low quote can't offer.
- Quote in detail, and quickly. A quote that spells out preparation, coats, products and what's excluded reads as professional next to a one-line number — and it's your protection when the job runs.
- Photograph everything you finish. Painting is the most visual trade there is. Before and after shots are your entire marketing asset, and they cost nothing but the discipline.
- Set up your Google Business Profile. Fill it out, post job photos regularly, and ask every happy customer for a review the day you finish. Local search is where residential repaint work starts.
- Get to know a few builders and agents. Not to build your business on, but to fill the weeks between residential jobs while your reputation is still forming.
- Leave the site cleaner than you found it. Drop sheets, tidy edges, no paint on the tiles. It sounds trivial and it is the single most common thing referrals are made on.
ServiceYak keeps your rates and standard line items — prep, undercoat, coats, access — in a reusable kit, so a detailed painting quote is assembled on site rather than typed up at night. When the client accepts, the quote becomes the job and then the invoice, with the before-and-after photos on the same record.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a licence to start a painting business in Australia?
In several states, yes — painting is more often licensed than people assume. Queensland requires a QBCC painting and decorating licence above $3,300, NSW requires a contractor licence for trade work above $5,000 including GST, and Victoria requires building practitioner registration for domestic building work above $10,000. Those are current as at August 2026 and they change, so confirm your state's directly. An average house repaint clears all three thresholds.
How much does it cost to start a painting business?
Less than most trades, because the tool bill is small — brushes, rollers, prep gear, ladders and a vehicle will get you working. The costs people underestimate are access equipment for two-storey work, a spray setup if you want it, insurance, and enough working capital to buy paint before the client pays you.
What should I charge for painting?
Work the rate out from your own overheads and the hours you can genuinely bill, then price each job by walking it and costing the preparation. Square-metre rates borrowed from someone else carry their assumptions about prep, access and coats — which is exactly where painting quotes go wrong.
How do I compete when someone always quotes cheaper?
Don't compete on the number. Quote in detail so the client can see what your price includes and what the cheap one doesn't — preparation, number of coats, products, access, and what's excluded. Then win on responsiveness, tidiness and photographs of finished work, which a cheap quote can't match.