Painting Contractor Travel Time Cost: The Unbilled Hours Draining Your Margin
Most painting contractors know roughly what their paint costs and roughly what they pay their crew. What they don't know — and what quietly kills their margin — is how many hours they're paying for that never appear on any quote. Drive time is the biggest culprit. Not the long haul to a remote site (that's a quote line you can see and price). The invisible kind: the morning run from the depot, the hardware store trip mid-job, the 20-minute drive between two jobs on the same day. Nobody bills it. Everyone pays for it.
The Math Nobody Runs
Take a two-van crew. Each painter loses 45 minutes a day to unbilled drive time — depot to first site, hardware run, cross-town between jobs. That's not an estimate; it's what shows up when you actually log it. Across a 250-day working year, that's 187 hours per painter. Call it 190.
At a fully loaded labour cost of $35/hr USD (the typical US baseline, including wages, insurance, vehicle allowance, and leave), that's $6,650 per painter per year — paid out of your pocket, recovered from nobody. Two painters in those two vans: $13,300 gone before you've spilled a drop of paint.
In Australian dollars at the $50/hr AUD typical loaded rate, 190 hours per painter comes to $9,500 — nearly $19,000 for the pair. In NZ at $40/hr NZD, it's $7,600 per painter. The currency changes; the problem doesn't.
The reason this never gets fixed is simple: it doesn't appear on any quote, so it doesn't feel like a real cost. It's real. It's just hidden.
Two Honest Ways to Recover It
There are exactly two legitimate ways to handle unbilled travel time. Most contractors use neither, which is why their margin lands at 8–12% when the markup looked like 40%.
1. Fold It Into the Loaded Rate
This is the right approach for day-to-day urban and suburban work. You calculate your true loaded hourly cost — wages, on-costs, vehicle, insurance, AND a realistic allowance for non-billable time — and that becomes the rate your quotes are built on. Every job carries its proportional share of travel overhead automatically, whether it's a one-room repaint or a full exterior.
The mistake contractors make here is building a rate from wages plus super (or pension or benefits), stopping there, and treating every hour on the clock as a billable production hour. That's not how the day actually runs. A painter who costs you $35/hr for 8 hours costs you $280 for the day. If 45 of those minutes produced nothing billable, your effective production cost per hour is closer to $38. Across a full crew across a full year, that gap is the difference between a profitable business and one that feels busy but never builds cash.
Set your loaded rate to reflect real available production time, not clock-on to clock-off. If you're not sure where to start, reviewing your overhead allocation and rate structure is the job — and actually logging your crew's work days so you can see billed hours versus paid hours is how you find the gap. That comparison is uncomfortable the first time you run it. It's also the most useful number in the business.
2. Price It as a Job Line on Genuine Remote Work
When a site is genuinely remote — 45 minutes (72 km / 45 mi) each way, an early start requiring an overnight, or a location that pulls your crew off their normal run — fold-it-in stops working. The travel overhead on that one job is too large to absorb across your general rate card without distorting everything else.
That's when travel becomes a quoted line item: hours × loaded rate, shown clearly on the estimate. That billing approach — travel as a visible quote line on remote work — is covered in detail in this post on painting job cost breakdown. The point here is different: most of your travel cost isn't remote-job travel. It's the daily friction that never gets priced at all.
The Small Job Problem
Ignoring travel time is most dangerous on small jobs, and that's exactly where contractors are most likely to ignore it.
Think about a half-day repaint: a single room, two coats on walls and ceiling at 160 ft²/hr (15 m²/hr), done in 3.5 production hours. Add 45 minutes of drive time and a hardware store run, and you've just turned a 3.5-hour job into a 5-hour day. Travel is now 30% of the time your painter spent on that job — and if it's not in the quote, you just handed the client a discount they didn't know they were getting and you can't afford to give.
The instinct on small jobs is to keep the quote lean so you win the work. That instinct is costing you. A quote that covers your real costs and still prices competitively is a rate card problem, not a quoting problem. Fix the rate; don't discount the overhead.
What "Loaded Rate" Actually Means
A properly loaded hourly cost rate accounts for:
- Base wages — what the painter takes home
- On-costs — super/pension/benefits, payroll tax, workers' comp, paid leave
- Vehicle costs — fuel, maintenance, registration, insurance, depreciation
- Non-billable time — travel between sites, depot runs, material pickups, short waits
- Business overhead — a proportional share of tools, software, insurance, admin
Most contractors build their rate from the first two items. The last three are where the bleed happens. Non-billable time alone — that 190 hours per painter per year — can shift your true cost per production hour by $3–5 in either direction, depending on your crew structure and how tight your run is.
If you want to see exactly how your rate stacks up, Surfacely's profit-check calculator walks through loaded cost construction properly — overhead allocation included — so the number you quote from reflects what you actually spend, not what you hope you spend.
Log the Days, Find the Gap
None of this is fixable if you're flying blind. The only way to know whether your loaded rate is absorbing your real travel cost is to log actual work days — what time the painter left the depot, what time they clocked off, how many hours went to non-billable movement — and compare that against the hours the job was quoted on.
When quoted hours and actual paid hours diverge consistently by 10–15%, that's not estimating error. That's systematic unbilled time, and it has a cost. Logging it closes the loop. It tells you whether your rate card is carrying its weight or whether you're subsidising every job you win with hours nobody ever charged for.
Run the math on your own crew. Forty-five minutes a day feels small. Multiply it out and it won't feel small anymore.