Interior vs Exterior House Painting: Which Costs More?

If you're budgeting for a whole house, the interior is nearly always the bigger number. A three-bedroom semi might cost £4,000–£7,500 to redecorate throughout – walls, ceilings, woodwork, hallway and stairs – while the outside of the same house typically comes in at £1,800–£3,500 before any scaffolding.

That surprises a lot of people, because the outside of a house looks like a bigger job. But inside there's far more surface area once you add up every wall, ceiling, door, frame and skirting board, and almost all of it needs careful cutting in by hand.

Interior work is detail work. Every room has corners, ceiling lines, sockets, light switches, radiators, door frames and skirting to paint around. A decorator might spend as long cutting in a bedroom as they do rolling the walls, and woodwork – especially if it's in gloss or satin – is slow, careful brushwork.

Interior jobs also involve more moving, masking and protecting. Furniture has to be shifted and covered, floors protected, and in an occupied home the decorator often has to work around the family. All of that is time, and time is what you're paying for.

Exterior work is generally faster per square metre, because walls are big and uninterrupted. A roller or spray on smooth render covers ground quickly. What makes exterior painting expensive is everything around the painting: access, weather and repairs.

You can't paint render in the rain, on frosty mornings or in the full midday sun, so a five-day job can easily stretch over two weeks. Height means ladders, towers or scaffolding. And the outside of a house hides problems – blown render, rotten sills, failed putty – that only show up once the old paint comes off.

Exterior paints cost more per litre than standard interior emulsion, and you need more of them on rough surfaces. A 10-litre tub of good masonry paint is typically £45–£80, compared with £30–£60 for the same amount of decent trade emulsion. Exterior wood paints and primers are also more expensive than their interior equivalents.

That said, materials are still a minority of the cost on both kinds of job. Labour accounts for roughly 70–85% of most painting quotes, inside or out.

If the outside is failing – peeling paint on windows, cracked render, water getting in – do the exterior first. Paint on the outside of a house is protection, not just decoration, and letting it deteriorate can lead to rot and damp that end up costing far more than the paint job.

If the exterior is sound, there's no harm in prioritising the inside, which you look at every day. Just remember that exterior work is seasonal: the best painters book up from March onwards, so if you want the outside done this year, get quotes early. Our guide on the best time of year to paint a house exterior explains the windows to aim for.

Some homeowners ask one firm to quote for inside and out together. It can work well: the painter can plan the interior for wet days and the exterior for dry ones, which keeps the team busy and can mean a slightly better overall price. It also means one point of contact and one set of dust sheets.

Just make sure the quote is broken down so you can see exactly what each half costs. Compare it with separate quotes for interior decorating and exterior painting before you commit.