Two kinds of hours, and only one of them carries materials
Refinish hours are the ones spent putting coating on a surface: the panels sprayed to full colour, the panels blended, the jambs and edges cut in. Everything else on a paint job is real work that takes real time and does not consume material at anything like the same rate. Masking, colour matching and cutting and buffing all belong in the hours total and none of them belong in the materials allowance, which is why the calculator keeps two subtotals rather than one.
That split is not a bookkeeping nicety. Materials are commonly billed as an amount per refinish hour, which means every hour that lands in the wrong subtotal moves money. Put the masking time into refinish and the materials figure inflates for work that used no paint. Leave the jambs out of refinish and you have sprayed material you are not being paid for.
The hours that go missing
The ones that disappear from estimates are small individually and there are a lot of them. A jamb on one door. The edge of a hood that has to be flipped out. The second blend that was obviously going to be needed and never made it onto the sheet. Half an hour spraying out a card and holding it against the panel in daylight because the colour is a silver and silvers do not forgive.
| Line | Why it gets left off |
|---|---|
| Jambs and edges | Not visible in the damage photograph, so nobody wrote it down |
| Second blend panel | Decided at the booth, after the estimate was signed |
| Colour match and spray-out | Feels like part of the setup rather than its own operation |
| Cut and buff | Only needed sometimes, so it is never in the standard build-up |
The point of listing them as separate fields is to make leaving one out a decision instead of an oversight.
Why one panel is never half of two
Setup, masking and colour match happen once regardless of how many panels are in the booth. On a single panel repair they land entirely on that one panel, and the all-in hours per panel figure on this page shows how heavy that is. Add a second panel and the fixed work is shared, which is why the marginal cost of the next panel is so much lower than the first and why quoting small jobs pro rata loses money every time.
Multi-stage colours change the arithmetic in a different way. A three-stage finish adds a stage to every panel and every blend, so the uplift is a percentage on the refinish hours rather than a flat addition. It also makes the blend harder, because the mid-coat is what carries the colour and its coverage depends on how many coats went on, which is exactly the variable a blend is changing.
The boundary this page will not cross
Everything here assumes panels that are already correctly shaped and correctly located, being coated. The moment the job involves structure, it is a different kind of work: frame and unibody measurement, sectioning and welding procedures written by the vehicle manufacturer, restraint system components, and calibration of the cameras and radar that driver assistance systems depend on. Those carry documented procedures and qualifications, and the consequence of getting them wrong is not a paint defect.
Nothing on this page evaluates whether a repair is sound, whether a vehicle is safe to drive, or whether a repair method is appropriate. It adds up hours you supplied. For the money side of a whole ticket, the shop labor estimate calculator takes an hours figure and builds the rest of the invoice around it.
Questions people ask
What counts as a blend rather than a refinished panel?
A refinished panel is sprayed to full colour across its whole surface. A blend is an adjacent panel where the colour is carried partway across and faded out so the eye cannot find the boundary, usually with clear over the whole panel afterwards. Blends take less colour and less time than a full panel and they take more skill, particularly on metallics where the boundary shows up as a difference in how the flake lies rather than a difference in colour.
Where does the materials allowance figure come from?
From your own records or from whatever agreement covers the job, and this page deliberately has no default for it. What it is worth doing once is checking it against reality: run the auto paint material calculator for the actual volumes on a job you have finished, price them, and divide by the refinish hours you billed. If the allowance is well under that figure, the difference is coming out of the labour.
Should cut and buff be in the refinish hours?
Not in the sense that matters here, because it consumes compounds and pads rather than paint, and materials allowances per refinish hour are set against coating consumption. Keep it in the job total, because it is genuine time, and out of the refinish subtotal. If your own arrangement treats it differently, move it by putting the hours into the setup field instead, which lands them in the same total by a different route.
Does the multi-stage uplift apply to the whole job?
Only to the refinish hours, which is where the extra stage actually happens. Masking does not get harder because the colour is a tri-coat, and neither does cleanup. The uplift percentage is left to you because how much extra a three-stage colour costs depends heavily on the specific colour and on whether the blend has to reproduce a mid-coat that was applied at an unknown number of coats in the factory.
Can I use this to check an estimate somebody gave me?
You can use it to see how an hours figure breaks down and to ask where the jambs and blends went, which is a useful conversation to be able to have. What it will not do is tell you whether a quoted number is fair, because labour rates, materials allowances and standard times are commercial figures that vary by shop and by region, and none of them are things this page has any view on.