The cost to paint kitchen cabinets sits far below the cost of replacing them, which is why it is the single best-value job in most kitchens. What surprises people is how much the price varies between two kitchens that look roughly the same size.
Cabinet work is priced per door and drawer front, counted on site, plus the boxes and any exposed end panels. That is the only honest way to quote it, because a kitchen with 12 doors and a kitchen with 40 are different jobs with the same floor plan. Refinishing sound cabinetry consistently lands at a fraction of what replacing it with new cabinetry of the same standard costs, which is why it is the best-value job in most kitchens.
Five things move the number, and none of them is the square footage of the room.
What this usually costs
Published national figures for painting kitchen cabinets, and what the alternatives cost.
| Per door | $70 to $125 |
| Per drawer front | $30 to $110 |
| Per linear foot | $30 to $70 |
| Average kitchen, 100 to 200 sq ft | $2,000 to $6,500 |
| Small kitchen | $1,000 to $3,500 |
| Large kitchen | $5,000 to $10,000 |
For comparison, the same sources put refacing at $5,000 to $13,000 and full replacement at $4,500 to $15,000. That gap is the whole argument for painting cabinets that are structurally sound.
Source: HomeGuide cabinet painting cost data, February 2025.
These are national market figures, not our price. We do not quote from a chart. Your estimate is written after we look at the actual surfaces, because condition and prep move the number more than square footage does.
1. Door and drawer count
This is the main driver, and it is why cabinet work is not priced by kitchen size.
Almost all the labour is in the doors and drawer fronts. Each one comes off, gets labelled on the back, degreased, sanded, primed, sprayed on both faces, dried, and rehung. A kitchen with 30 doors is roughly twice the work of one with 15, regardless of the room’s footprint.
Count yours before you gather quotes. Include drawer fronts, false fronts and any glass doors, and count pantry doors separately because they are larger. That count tells you more about the likely price than the room dimensions do.
2. What the existing finish is
Painted wood is the straightforward case. Degrease, scuff sand to 220 grit, prime, spray.
Factory-finished, lacquered and laminate doors need a bonding primer, because those surfaces are built to shed everything. Stained oak brings a second problem: tannins in the timber bleed through white and light colours as a yellow-brown shadow, sometimes two or three weeks after the job looked finished, unless a shellac or solvent-based blocking primer goes down first. Bonding and blocking primers are specified against Painting Contractors Association guidance.
Thermofoil is the awkward one. It is a vinyl skin heat-wrapped onto MDF, and once it is lifting at the edges near the range or the dishwasher, coating it will not reattach it. Where we find that, we say so at the estimate and explain the alternatives.
3. Spray versus brush
Spraying costs more in setup, masking and time. It is also the only way to get a factory-smooth finish on a flat door face.
Brush texture on a cabinet door is permanent, and it sits in exactly the place your eye lands first, at hand height in the brightest room in the house. Every cabinet job we do is sprayed: doors laid flat in a controlled space, boxes and frames masked and sprayed in place, with the kitchen sealed off in plastic and negative air pulled out through a window.
The product matters as much as the method. Cabinets get a waterborne alkyd or a two-component urethane enamel, not wall paint, because a cabinet door has to survive fingernails, cleaning sprays and a wet dish towel for years. Ask any quote which enamel it specifies and whether the doors are sprayed off the hinges. Ours states both in writing.
4. Colour change or refresh
Refreshing the same colour on sound doors is the least expensive version of this job, because it usually needs no blocking primer and a single finish coat carries it.
Going from dark stained oak to white sits at the top of the range. It needs the blocking primer, usually three coats of finish, and every missed spot inside a profile shows. A mid-tone colour sits between the two. Very dark and very saturated colours add a coat of their own, because the pigments hide poorly.
5. Hardware and detail
Simple slab doors are quick. Raised panel, shaker with deep profiles, and applied mouldings all take longer, because every profile has to be coated evenly without pooling in the internal corners.
New hardware, or moving from knobs to pulls, means filling the old holes with a two-part filler and drilling to a template. It is not expensive, but it is time, and it should appear on the quote as its own line rather than arriving as a surprise. Hinges are worth deciding at the same time, because replacing a 20 year old hinge while the door is already off costs almost nothing.
How long the job takes
Most kitchens run three to five days. Day one is removal, labelling, degreasing and sanding. Day two is priming and the first pass on the boxes. Days three and four are finish coats with dry time between. Day five is rehanging, adjusting doors so the gaps line up, and refitting hardware.
The kitchen stays usable for most of that, though you will be without doors for a few days, so it is worth moving the things you use daily to an accessible shelf before we start. The sink and appliances stay live unless we are spraying that run.
Cure time is separate from dry time and it matters. The coating is touch-dry in a few hours but keeps hardening for one to two weeks. Loading heavy pans back into a cupboard on day six is the most common way an otherwise perfect finish picks up damage. We tell you the exact wait for the product we used, and felt pads on shelves are a cheap insurance policy.
Weighing the cost to paint kitchen cabinets against replacing them
Painting makes sense when the boxes are sound, the doors are solid wood or MDF, and the layout works for how you cook. Replacement makes more sense when the boxes are water damaged or delaminating, when the layout itself is the problem, or when the doors are failing thermofoil.
Most kitchens we look at are firmly in the first group, which puts refinishing at a fraction of replacement and finishes it inside a week. Your estimate is free, it lists the door count and the products by name, it carries the nine-year written workmanship guarantee, and there is no deposit at any stage.
See cabinet painting or the painting cost guide.
