Cabinet Painting Cost Calculator
Cabinets are priced by the piece, not the room. Count your doors and drawer fronts, enter your painter’s per-unit price, add labor and a contingency buffer, and get one planning cabinet painting cost from your own numbers.
30 doors and drawer fronts at $75.00 each plus labor is about $3,025.00 (labeled band ~$50.00–$100.00/door-or-drawer). Cabinet pricing tracks the number of doors and drawer fronts — each is sanded, primed and sprayed on all faces — not the room’s square footage; count the doors and drawers.
Calculator inputs
The single most common cabinet-budgeting mistake is pricing by the kitchen’s square footage. Cabinet painters don’t work that way — each door and drawer front is removed, degreased, sanded, primed and sprayed on every face, so the piece count is what drives the price. Two kitchens the same size can differ by thousands simply because one has twice the doors.
So the order of operations is: count first, price second. Walk the room and tally every hinged door (uppers, lowers, pantry, a lazy-Susan blind corner) and every drawer front, then apply the per-unit number from your quote. Enter any extra labor for the boxes and frames separately so you can see the two parts. Because the price is yours, the estimate stays correct no matter what materials cost.
Formula
Cabinet cost is a per-unit sum with a buffer:
total = ((doors + drawers) × $/unit + labor) × (1 + contingency%)
- doors + drawers — the number of pieces sprayed, not the room’s area.
- $/unit — your painter’s price per door or drawer front (they cost about the same).
- labor — boxes/frames, degreasing or hardware work not already in the per-unit price.
- contingency — a labeled 5–10% planning buffer, not a fee.
Worked example
20 doors + 10 drawer fronts = 30 pieces at $75 each, with $500 of box/frame labor and a 10% contingency:
((30 × $75) + $500) × 1.10 = ($2,250 + $500) × 1.10 = $2,750 × 1.10 = $3,025
So you plan for about $3,025. Notice the pieces do the heavy lifting: adding six more doors at $75 is another $450 before contingency — the count matters more than the kitchen’s footprint.
Measure first, avoid re-orders
Count before you price. Open every cabinet and tally doors and drawer fronts on paper — it is astonishingly easy to miss a bank of drawers or the pantry. Label them if you are removing them; a numbered map saves an afternoon at reassembly.
- Doors and drawers cost about the same. Each is handled, sanded, primed and sprayed on all faces, so one per-unit price for both is the norm.
- Don’t double-count labor. If your per-unit number already covers the boxes, leave the labor field at 0; if boxes are separate, put them there.
- Degreasing is not optional. Kitchen grease is the number-one cause of peeling cabinet paint — budget the prep, or it becomes a re-do.
- Keep the buffer. A hidden soft spot or a door that needs a third coat is what the 5–10% is for.
Reference table
Labeled cabinet planning bands — a sanity check only. You enter your real per-unit price; cost swings with door style, spray vs brush, the number of coats, degreasing and how much boxes/frames work is included.
| Basis | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Paint, per door or drawer front | $50.00–$100.00 |
| Paint, per sq ft of cabinet face | $30.00–$60.00 |
| Reface, per linear foot of run | $150.00–$350.00 |