Charge $4 to $6 a linear foot in labor for paint-grade baseboard on bare walls, $4 to $7 when you are tearing out the old base first, and $6 to $8 or more for stain-grade or a room full of corners. Those are D and G Flooring's 2026 labor ranges. Casing is a separate line, $100 to $200 a door by HomeGuide's figures. And never let a single room go out at the footage price. A 12x12 bedroom is about 44 feet. At $4 a foot that is $176, which sits inside the $150 to $300 minimum D and G says most trim carpenters carry. Quote the feet on a one-room job and you have driven out, set up a saw and coped four corners for your minimum or less.
What is the labor rate per linear foot for baseboard?
Between $3 and $8 depending on what is on the wall when you arrive. Three published ranges, labor only:
| Situation | Labor per linear foot | Source |
|---|---|---|
| New install, bare walls | $3-$5 | D and G Flooring |
| Replacement, old base removed and wall prepped | $4-$7 | D and G Flooring |
| Many corners, stairs, stain-grade | $6-$8+ | D and G Flooring |
| General range | $5-$7.75 | HomeAdvisor |
| General range, all trim | $3-$5 | HomeGuide |
Installed prices with material run higher. Homewyse put the national figure at $9.26 to $14.17 a foot in September 2026, and tells the reader to add 13% to 22% on top if a general contractor is running the job. That last part is worth remembering if you sub the trim out. The published number has no room in it for you.
I would not quote from the bottom of any of these. The $3 foot is a new-construction foot: empty house, primed walls, no furniture, a saw set up in the garage for a week. A remodel is not that.
Should you price trim by the foot or by the half day?
By the foot once the job is big enough to fill a day. By the half day when it is not. HomeGuide puts production at about 20 linear feet an hour, so a 44-foot bedroom is a little over two hours of running base. Add the drive, the setup, pulling the old base, filling nail holes and caulking the top edge, and it is a half day. Homewyse builds a 2-hour minimum labor charge into its own calculator for the same reason.
So do the arithmetic both ways. Feet times your rate, and hours times what an hour of your carpenter has to bring in. Send the higher one. On a single room that will be the hours every time, and the fuller argument for holding that line is in setting a minimum charge for small jobs.
Why is a 12x12 room longer than its perimeter?
Because the closet is not on the floor plan in your head. The perimeter of a 12x12 room is 48 feet. Take out the door and you get the 44 or so that D and G uses. Now put a 6-foot reach-in closet on one wall, 2 feet deep, with a 5-foot opening.
| Bare room | Room with closet | |
|---|---|---|
| Room walls, less openings | 45.5 ft | 40.5 ft |
| Closet walls and returns | 0 | 11 ft |
| Total footage | 45.5 ft | 51.5 ft |
| Pieces to cut | 5 | 11 |
| Inside corners | 4 | 8 |
Footage went up about 13%. Pieces and corners doubled.
The corners are where the per-foot price breaks. Homewyse's labor description allows one miter and one coped end per section. A 14-foot piece along the bedroom wall and a 6-inch return inside the closet each carry that same cope. The long one earns you fourteen feet of pay. The short one earns half a foot, and you cut it on your knees under a shelf with the saw forty feet away in the driveway.
Count pieces on the walkthrough. If the count is high for the footage, move the job up a tier in the table above. That is what D and G's "many corners" tier is for.
What do you charge for casing, quarter round and tear-out?
Put each on its own line. A baseboard rate with casing and shoe folded into it is a rate nobody can check, including you.
| Line | Published price | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Door casing | $100-$200 per door, or $5-$10 per LF installed | HomeGuide |
| Window casing | $50-$150 per window | HomeGuide |
| Quarter round | $3-$7 per LF installed | HomeGuide |
| Shoe molding | $4-$6 per LF installed | HomeGuide |
| Remove old baseboard | $1-$2 per LF | D and G Flooring |
| Remove old baseboard | about $1.50 per LF | HomeAdvisor |
Say on the estimate whether a door means one side or two. One side of a 2'6" door is two legs at 6'8" and a head, about 17 feet of casing. Both sides is 34. At HomeGuide's $5 to $10 a foot, that is $170 to $340 for the opening, and the top of it is well past the same page's $200 per-door figure. A closet with bifolds is cased on one side. A bedroom door is cased on two. "Per opening" with no further detail is how you end up doing the hall side for free.
Tear-out is cheap per foot until the base was glued. Construction adhesive takes the drywall paper with it, and then someone is skim coating before any trim goes back. Write the removal line as "nailed base, removed and hauled," and exclude wall repair behind glued trim.
After a floating floor, the customer will often ask you to put the old base back. Price that as a new install plus the removal. Old base comes off in pieces, the paint line on the wall no longer matches the new floor height, and every joint has to be fit again. It is the same day of work with worse material. The flooring side of that job is in pricing flooring installation per square foot.
How much more is stain-grade than paint-grade?
Start at the top tier, $6 to $8 a foot, and price the finishing separately. D and G puts staining and clear coat at $2 to $4 a linear foot, and painting at $1 to $2.50.
The reason is caulk. On paint-grade work a bead along the top edge and a dab in the corner hide a sixteenth of an inch. On stained oak there is nothing to hide behind. Every cope has to close on its own, every scarf joint has to match grain, and a wall with a belly in it shows as a shadow line above the base that you cannot fill. You scribe it or you live with it.
Height matters too. D and G notes that 5-1/4 inch base costs 40% to 60% more in material than 3-1/4 inch. The labor goes up for a different reason. Tall base will not bend to a wavy wall the way a short one does, so the gaps get bigger just as the profile gets more expensive.
One line of scope saves an argument on paint-grade jobs: who fills the holes and caulks. If the painter is doing it, say so. If you are, it is in your rate and your day. The painter's side of that handoff is covered in writing a painting estimate.
What slows a trim job down that the tape does not show?
The floor and the first corner. Fine Homebuilding has finish carpenter Tucker Windover on preparing a room for baseboard, and his point is that the first piece has to stand square to the floor or every piece after it gets cut out of square to match. "If that baby's not square," he says, the next one in has to be cut crooked too.
In an old house that takes time. So on the walkthrough, check three things besides length:
- Set a level on the floor at two corners. A floor that drops half an inch across a wall means scribing the base or adding shoe to cover the gap. Either one is a line on the estimate.
- Look at where the base meets the door casing. If the new base is thicker than the old casing, it stands proud and looks wrong. The fix is new casing or a plinth block, and the customer needs to hear that before you start.
- Find out what the walls are. Plaster over lath does not take a brad the way drywall does. You are hunting studs or gluing, and it is slower.
What this misses
The ranges are national. None of these sources break labor out by metro, and a trim carpenter in Boston is not billing the day a carpenter in Tulsa is.
Some of the figures are older than their titles. HomeGuide's page carries 2026 in its title and a June 2024 byline. Treat its numbers as the floor.
Crown, wainscoting and stair skirts are different work. Crown has compound angles and a ladder under every cut. Nothing here prices it.
Material is not in the labor rates. If you supply the trim, mark it up as you would on any job, and buy an extra stick or two. The 16-footer you need for the long wall is always the one with the ding in it.
Whole-house jobs get shopped down. D and G tells its readers to expect 10% to 20% off the per-foot rate for a full house. Know your day rate before that conversation, so you know how much of that you can give.
BidWalk takes the footage, the corner count and the casing openings as you call them out room by room, and writes each as its own line before you leave the house.
