How Much to Charge to Refinish a Deck
The short answer
A full deck refinish drew three bids between $3,700 and $4,700 in one New England region. The operator who posted the job had quoted $2,500.
He was $1,200 under the lowest of the three, and he thought the problem was his hourly rate.
Run it. At roughly thirty hours, a $15 an hour gap is $450. That is a quarter of the distance to the nearest bid, and it is the part he was worried about.
The rest is not explained by his rate, and it is not explained by his hours either. We will show you exactly how far his own numbers get him, and then we will stop, because that is where the evidence stops.
Start with production rate, because nobody publishes it
Every "deck staining cost" article gives you dollars per square foot. Dollars per square foot is an output. You cannot check it, you cannot argue with it, and it hides the only number that decides whether you make money.
Here is the input.
Strip and two coats runs about 19 square feet per hour. That is a measured job: 420 square feet in roughly 22 hours, using a commercial orbital sander plus a hand orbital for the tight work. One operator, one deck.
Read that again if you have been quoting decks off square footage alone. A 500 square foot deck is about 26 hours of refinishing labor before you touch a single repair. If your quote assumed a day and a half, you were wrong before you picked a rate.
That number will move with condition, and the direction is always the same. Previously stained and sound goes faster. Weathered gray needing a full strip is the baseline the 19 describes. Solid stain or paint coming off is slower and belongs on its own line.
The three buckets that sink deck quotes
A deck refinish is not one job. It is three, and most quotes price one of them.
Bucket one: the refinishing. Clean, strip, sand, coat. This is the 19 square feet per hour number. On the job above, about 22 hours.
Bucket two: the carpentry. Deck boards do not survive being sanded when they were already soft. That job needed 10 board replacements, most at 10 feet, plus 16 sistered joist areas. About 8 hours on its own, plus lumber.
Bucket three: everything around the work. Furniture off and back. Planters. The grill. Covering the siding. Two trips because of dry time. A dump run for the old boards.
His hours do not close, and that is the finding
He reported about thirty hours on that deck.
Refinishing ran about 22. The board and joist work ran about 8. That is thirty already, which leaves nothing for the furniture, nothing for the setup, and nothing for the second trip.
So thirty is light. Put four honest hours against the site work and his realized rate is not $60 an hour. It is about $53.
He did not forget to bill the carpentry. Nobody forgets eight hours of work. He billed those eight hours at whatever his refinishing number implied and never decided whether carpentry should carry a different rate. The site work he did not count at all.
He priced one bucket of hours and called it a deck.
What his own numbers actually produce
Built from his figures, not the market's. His hours, his own $75 target, and the benchmark materials number.
| Line | Hours | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Surface prep and refinishing, 420 sq ft | 22 | $1,650 |
| Board replacement and joist repair | 8 | $600 |
| Site preparation and second visit | never counted | never priced |
| Materials: stain, disposables, sander rental, lumber | $700 | |
| Total on the hours he counted | 30 | $2,950 |
Put four honest hours against the site work and he is at $3,250. Put eight and he is at $3,550.
His own targets, applied to his own job, never reach $4,300. The remaining gap is not his rate and it is not his hours. It is something the thread does not tell us, and we are not going to invent a line item so the arithmetic closes neatly.
He may also have won the job because of it
Worth saying plainly. At $4,300 he might have lost this one. At $2,500 he bought himself thirty-plus hours of work at about $53 an hour and a second trip he never priced.
Winning a job you priced wrong is not winning. But "left $1,800 on the table" assumes he wins at $4,300, and nobody knows that.
Cure and dry windows force a second trip
Plan on the wash and the sand being separate visits. Wet wood does not sand, it fuzzes, and coating over damp wood fails and comes back as a callback.
One caveat on the number you will see quoted for this. The 48-hour figure that circulates comes out of a painting thread, and its own source points at stucco rather than at decking. We have not collected a deck-specific dry time from an operator. The scheduling consequence is the same wherever the number came from: a second drive, a second setup, and a day you cannot fully book. The duration is the part we cannot yet stand behind.
If your pricing model treats a job as one uninterrupted run of hours, it is understating every deck you will ever quote.
Materials
About $700 all in for a full deck, including the sander rental, disposables, replacement lumber and stain. One operator, one job, and tight enough that it is worth checking against your own supplier before you lean on it.
Two things worth saying plainly.
Materials and consumables tend to run 15 to 20 percent of labor on coating work. If your materials number is landing at 5 percent of your labor number, you have either forgotten the consumables or badly understated your hours.
And if you are renting the sander, that rental is a cost of doing business on that job, not overhead you eat. Rented and subcontracted equipment is one of the most common missing lines in a solo operator's pricing, right alongside a reserve for replacing the equipment you do own.
What the market actually pays, and it disagrees with itself
Two field bands, from two different rooms. We are showing you both, because showing you one would make a cleaner story than the evidence supports.
| Source | Scope | Band |
|---|---|---|
| Three operators, one New England region | Full refinish, this job | $3,700 to $4,700 |
| Highest-voted answer, a painters' room | Full deck, scrape, sand, prime, stain | $2,500 to $3,500 |
| Same painters' room | Add for 100% paint removal on customer insistence | +$1,000 |
Those two bands barely overlap, and that is the honest picture. Against the first, a $2,500 quote is $1,200 under the floor. Against the second, it sits at the bottom of normal. The scope descriptions are not identical and the rooms are not the same, so treat the difference as real rather than as one of them being wrong.
On the three New England bids specifically: the range is $1,000, which is 27 percent above the low. They disagreed with each other by about a quarter, so be suspicious of anyone who tells you there is one right number for a deck. What they agreed on is a floor. Not one went under $3,700.
Note also what the top bid did and did not include: the $4,700 was quoted before moving items. Furniture handling sits on top of that number, not inside it.
And on the $1,000 removal adder: it is conditional on a customer insisting on complete paint removal. It did not apply to this job, which was a strip and recoat.
The rate check
Do this on every deck quote before you send it, and do it in this order.
- Add your hours.
- Take your quoted price, subtract materials.
- Divide by hours.
That is your actual rate on this job.
The operator ran that check after the fact and got about $60 an hour against a $75 target, on a thirty-hour count that does not include his site work. His conclusion was that he needed to raise his rate. His arithmetic said he needed to count more hours.
If your effective hourly comes back low, work out which of the two it is before you touch your rate card. Did you charge too little an hour, or did you not count enough hours? On deck work it is the second one more often, and it is the one nobody checks.
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Run your own number
These come from your business, not from us. Time one job and work them out.
Enter an all-in production rate here — refinishing plus carpentry and site work — not the 19 sq ft/hour refinishing-only figure quoted above. On the guide's own job that was about 30 total hours for 420 sq ft, only 22 of them refinishing.
What goes on the quote
Write the deck as separate lines, not one number. It protects your price and it makes the change order conversation normal instead of awkward.
- Surface prep and refinishing, square footage, condition tier, hours at your rate
- Board and structural repair, allowance with a stated per-board and per-joist price
- Site preparation, furniture, plantings, masking, protection
- Materials, stain, disposables, rental
- Disposal, old boards, and it is by weight if the facility charges that way
Two lines of terms that will save you an argument.
Board replacement $____ each. Joist sistering $____ per bay. Repair scope discovered during prep is quoted at these rates, approved in writing, and added as a change order before the work is done. Fill in your own two numbers. A clause promising to bill at the stated rate, with no stated rate anywhere on the page, points at a blank and protects nobody.
A second visit is required after washing to allow the surface to dry. Set it as a feature of doing the job right, because it is one, rather than letting it show up as a delay.
Related guide
Pricing interior walls instead of an exterior deck? See the interior painting guide for the wall-area math and the market rates that go with it.
Frequently asked
Is deck refinishing priced by square foot or by hour?
Quote it as a square foot number if the customer wants one, but build it from hours. About 19 square feet per hour for a strip and two coats, then add repair hours and site prep hours separately. A per square foot figure that was never built from a production rate is a guess wearing a unit.
Why do deck quotes vary so much between contractors?
Partly scope and partly genuine disagreement. Three operators pricing the same deck in one region still landed $1,000 apart, which is 27 percent. But the wide misses come from quotes that left out board replacement, structural repair, furniture handling, or the second trip.
How long does a full deck refinish take?
For a 400 to 500 square foot deck: roughly 22 to 26 hours of refinishing, about 8 hours if there is meaningful board and joist repair, plus site prep and a second visit. Count the site prep separately. The operator in this case did not, and it cost him about $7 an hour on his realized rate.
Should I charge extra to remove old solid stain or paint?
One painters' room put it at about $1,000 on top, conditional on the customer insisting on 100 percent removal. Stripping labor is not proportional to refinishing labor. It is a separate job that happens to be on the same deck.
Where these numbers come from. Production rates, materials costs, repair hours and accepted prices in this guide were collected from operators publicly posting real jobs, including the hours they worked and the prices customers actually paid. They are field figures, not survey averages and not our estimates.
One job is a case study, not a data set. We use it to look at how a quote was built, not to tell you what your market pays. Where a figure came from a different trade, we say so on the page. Tune all of it to your own costs and your own market.