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Trade Playbook
Painting is the lowest-barrier trade to start — and the easiest to under-charge yourself into the ground with. The real questions: residential or commercial or industrial coatings, brush-and-roll or learn to spray, how to price so you're not making minimum wage after materials, and whether to stay a solo cash-job painter or build a real crew business.
Where it starts
$17–22/hr
Helper / brush hand
Where it tops out
Much higher
Industrial coatings (404D)
Union route
IUPAT DC 46
Ontario figures for painting & finishing, from the first day on site to the top of the trade. Approximate, and worth checking against current collective agreement rates and job postings in your region.
| Stage | Pay | What is going on at this stage |
|---|---|---|
| Helper / brush hand | $17–22/hr | Prepping, cutting, rolling — earning while you learn. |
| Experienced painter | $22–30/hr | |
| Solo residential painter (own business) | $50k–80k | Entirely dependent on prep speed and — above all — pricing. |
| Commercial / crew owner | Higher on volume | You stop painting and start selling and managing. |
| Industrial coatings (404D) | Much higher | Blasting, epoxies, linings — certified, specialized, a different career. |
Two painters with the same ticket can be twenty dollars an hour apart because they picked different work.
Homeowner clients, referral-driven, and prep is 80% of the job. The lowest-barrier business in all of construction.
Best for: People who want to start this week and are good with homeowners.
Spray work, crews, and volume for GCs and builders. Faster production, less customer hand-holding, tighter schedules.
Best for: People who want production work and to build a crew.
Abrasive blasting, two-part epoxies and urethanes, tank linings, fireproofing — gated by AMPP/NACE certification.
Best for: People who want a high-skill, high-pay specialty rather than a price war.
Every figure above is what painters get paid. It is not what you charge once you run a painting business. Your rate has to carry the hours you are not on the tools, the truck, the tools themselves, WSIB, insurance, the quote you wrote and lost, and the holdback sitting in someone else's account for 60 days. Contractors who set their rate off their old hourly wage are the ones who work every weekend and still cannot say whether the year was profitable.
The step from paid by the hour to paid by the jobThe trap is staying a solo cash-job painter forever, capped by your own two hands. The exits up: systemize into a crew business (you sell and manage, others paint), move into commercial/new-construction volume, or go industrial coatings — the certified, high-paid specialty that is a different league entirely. Estimating and sales roles are the off-the-ladder option.
Wage data, union rate sheets, and the places painters talk about money openly.
The rates above are the market. The live feed is the market this week: which builders and contractors just pulled a permit or won a contract in Ontario, what they are about to need, and who to call.
Painter Jobs in Ontario: Who Is Hiring Right NowAEC Stack handles incorporation, WSIB, insurance certificates, quoting, invoicing, and chasing the money, so a painting business runs like one with an office behind it.
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