Drywall Repair Cost Calculator
Drywall repair costs about $346 for one medium hole with the wall repainted, and $338 for four small ones done in the same visit. It is priced per patch and per visit rather than per square foot, because the hole is the cheap part. Two things move this figure more than size does: whether the paint is taken to the corners, and whether the house predates 1978 — above 6 square feet disturbed in a room a federal rule turns a repair into a certified renovation.
Estimate the cost for your home
Estimated cost of the repair
$366
typical · range $248 to $484 · 3 patches · 1.2 sq ft disturbed · 120 sq ft repainted
Labour priced at national wages. Enter a ZIP code to price it for your area. 69% of this figure comes from modelled material prices — each line shows its own uncertainty.
Priced from bls.gov Aug 2026how every line is sourced
The one input that changes the answer for you.
Standing up, working at chest height. The baseline for every rate on this page.
Nothing to match, and therefore the easiest to make invisible — provided the finishing is good, because a smooth wall hides nothing.
1 / 5
The figure above is already calculated. Each step just makes it more yours, and you can stop at any of them.
The federal line at 6 square feet
In a house built before 1978, this is what decides whether your patch is a minor repair or a regulated renovation.
This threshold only bites in housing built before 1978. Tick the box below if yours was, because above 6 square feet disturbed in one room the job stops being a repair in the eyes of the federal rule and starts being a renovation, with the cost that carries.
What an hour of this trade costs, and why
Half the people asking this question are contractors working out what to charge. Here is the whole chain, so both sides can see the same arithmetic.
- Drywall and Ceiling Tile Installers, national median wage
- $28.33/h
- Adjusted to the national average
- ×1.000
- Benefits, taxes and insurance
- ×1.4582
- Overhead and profit
- ×1.33–1.43
- Billed rate
- $55–$59/h
The wage is official BLS data; the load and the markup are our modelled figures, and the method page shows how they are built.
| Line item | Qty | Cost | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minimum call-out1 per visit | 1visit | $95–$240 | estimated±43% |
| Board offcuts, backing, tape and compound0.2 small + 1 medium + 2.5 large + 6 per section | 1.4patch equivalent | $6–$20 | estimated±56% |
| Drywall finisher: cut, patch, tape and sandsum of per-patch hours × surface factor | 1hour | $55–$59 | sourced |
| Primer and paintpainted area: 3× the disturbed area for a spot, the wall, or the room ×3.2 | 120sq ft | $19–$50 | estimated±45% |
| Painter: mask, cut in and roll0.5 h + 1 h per 180 sq ft painted (modelled) | 1.2hour | $55–$59 | sourced |
| Dust protection and clean-up1 per visit | 1visit | $18–$55 | estimated±51% |
| Total | $248–$484 | ±32% |
Where these numbers come from
- Where the 6 square feet comes from
- It is a definition in the regulation itself. 40 CFR 745 subpart E, Residential Property Renovation defines minor repair and maintenance activities as those that disrupt 6 square feet or less of painted surface per room for interior activities or 20 square feet or less for exterior ones. Below that, the lead renovation requirements do not apply; above it, paid work in pre-1978 housing must be done by a certified firm. Note the rule’s own definition of the area: it is the entire surface removed, not the size of the original damage. Retrieved 2026-08-23. Plain-language versions: EPA, Lead Renovation, Repair and Painting Program and EPA, Renovate Right. This crossing is what takes the section repair above from $535 to $865.
- Wage rates by area, for both sides of the quote
- BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, for drywall installers and for painters, adjusted to your metropolitan area. Retrieved 2026-08-20. Benefit load from BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation. The calculator prints the whole chain from median wage to billed rate, because a good share of the people asking this question are contractors deciding what to charge rather than homeowners deciding what to pay, and the honest answer to both is the same arithmetic.
- Why the repair is three visits and not one
- Joint compound shrinks as it dries, so an invisible repair is three thin coats with drying between them, and each coat is wider than the last. A patch done in a single afternoon will show a ridge within weeks, and that is the commonest complaint about cheap drywall work. The sanding between coats is also the dustiest part of the job — CDC NIOSH, Construction safety and health covers the respiratory side — which is why containment and a proper clean are a line here rather than an afterthought. Retrieved 2026-08-22.
- The paint is the part that decides whether it looks repaired
- A perfect patch under spot-painted paint still shows, because new paint over old differs in sheen and raking light finds the rectangle. That is why the honest minimum is repainting corner to corner, and why colour matching from a chip is unreliable after a few years of sunlight on the original. Neither of those is a charge somebody invented; they are the reason a forty-dollar bag of compound turns into a several-hundred-dollar bill, and they are set out as their own lines in the breakdown so you can decide which of them you actually want.
- Material prices
- Modelled estimates, not sourced prices. No public, machine-readable source of US residential material prices exists, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Each line carries its own uncertainty band. How we estimate them.
Contractor overhead and profit applied at 33–43% over direct cost. Data last reviewed 2026-08-23.
What this figure does not include
- Whatever caused the damage
- A stain that keeps coming back is a leak, a crack that reopens every year is movement, and a hole in a ceiling below a bathroom is a plumbing job with a drywall repair attached. Patching without fixing the cause buys a patch that fails again, and the cause is not priced here.
- Popcorn ceilings in older houses
- Acoustic ceiling texture sprayed before the early eighties may contain asbestos. It should be tested before anything is scraped or sanded, and if it is positive that is licensed specialty work rather than a drywall repair. No figure on this page covers it.
- Lead abatement
- The lead-safe line above is routine regulated renovation by a certified firm, and it applies above the six-square-foot threshold. Abatement is a different thing: permanently removing a lead hazard, priced after an inspection by a licensed abatement contractor.
- Matching a discontinued texture or a plaster wall
- Some textures from particular decades cannot be reproduced with current products, and a genuine plaster wall over lath is not drywall at all — it is repaired with plaster by someone who does that, and it is slower and dearer than anything here.
- Structural or framing repair
- A wall that has moved, a ceiling that sags between joists, or damage from an impact that went through to the framing all need the structure fixed first. Board goes on afterwards.
Questions people actually ask
How much does it cost to repair drywall?
A single medium hole repaired and the wall repainted is about $346 in Atlanta, in a range of $231 to $461. The same hole patched and left bare is $253, and four small nail holes on one visit come to $338. The shape of those numbers is the useful part: they barely move with the size of the hole, because almost all of the cost is turning up, protecting the room, waiting for compound to dry between coats and then making the paint match. Repairs are priced per patch and per visit, not per square foot, and the way to save money on them is to batch them.
Is it cheaper to repair or replace drywall?
Repair, for far longer than most people expect. Replacing the board in a 12 by 12 room, including stripping out the old, is about $2,784 in Atlanta. Patching stays cheaper until roughly 21 separate large holes in that one room, at which point repair reaches $2,855 and the two meet. Before that crossover the answer is repair; after it you are paying repeatedly for the same set-up, drying time and paint match. Two things move the line earlier: damage spread over several rooms, and any reason to open the wall anyway — rewiring, plumbing, insulation — because then the board is coming off for free.
What do drywall contractors charge per hour?
In Atlanta the arithmetic comes to $56 to $60 an hour, and it is worth seeing where that comes from rather than taking the number. The BLS median wage for drywall and ceiling tile installers is 28.33 an hour nationally, ×1.013 for this metropolitan area. Employer costs for benefits, payroll taxes and insurance multiply that by about 1.46, and overhead and profit by roughly 1.33 to 1.43. So a wage a little over 28 dollars becomes a billed rate near 56, and none of the gap is greed: it is the cost of employing somebody. The calculator prints this chain for your own ZIP code.
How do I charge for a drywall repair?
Not by the square foot, which is the mistake that loses money on small jobs. Charge a call-out that genuinely covers the round trip and the unsold slot, then per patch by size class, then the finishing and the paint separately — because the paint is where the hours quietly go. Two things to price in that estimators routinely leave out: the drying time between coats, which turns a one-hour repair into two or three visits, and matching an existing texture, which is the actual skill and usually means practising on a scrap first. And in a house built before 1978, check the disturbed area against the 6 square foot federal threshold before quoting, because above it the work has to be done by a certified firm and the job is a different price.
Taken from Google’s “people also ask” results for this search on 23 August 2026, not invented.
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- The full drywall repair cost dataset
Every unit price, every quantity rule and the reasoning behind each estimate, as a plain table.
- How we calculate
The formula, the sources, and an honest account of which parts of the model are weak.