Tools
Kitchen Cupboard Paint Calculator: How Many Tins to Buy
By the Hill & May team
Updated 2026
Guessing cupboard paint from the size of the kitchen is how you end up either a tin short halfway through the second coat or with two unopened tins in the shed. The number that matters is the painted area of the doors and drawer fronts themselves, multiplied by the number of coats, plus the edges, which on an 18mm door add more than you would think. Enter your fronts below and this calculator gives you the litres, the tins to buy and how much you will have left over.
Your doors and drawer fronts
Group fronts of the same size into one line. The sizes in the list are common nominal sizes for British flat-pack and trade kitchens, but ranges differ, so measure one of each and change the width and height if yours are not the same. Count a tall larder door as a single front at its full height.
18mm is typical for MDF and chipboard doors; solid wood shaker doors are often thicker.
Drawer fronts are never counted twice; only doors have an inside you can see.
Anything else in the same colour
End panels, plinths, cornice, pelmet, open shelves, an island back, visible carcass edges. Width × height in metres, added up.
The paint
Coverage on a tin is an "up to" figure for a smooth, non-absorbent surface. The allowance knocks that down for paint left in the roller, the tray and the brush, and for a slightly heavier coat than the lab applied. Raise it for textured or grained doors, a big colour change, or bare timber.
Check the sizes your chosen paint actually comes in. Some cupboard paints are sold only in 750ml tins; set the large size to 0 for those.
Read this off the primer tin. The figure here is only a placeholder.
How the calculator works it out
For each line it multiplies width by height by the number of fronts to get the face area. If you tick edges, it adds the perimeter of each front times its thickness: a 715 × 497mm door that is 18mm thick has about 0.044 m² of edge, roughly an eighth of its face. Across twenty fronts that is close to a square metre, which is why leaving edges out of the sum is an easy way to run short.
That total is multiplied by the number of coats and divided by the coverage on the tin, after the allowance has been taken off. The litres are then matched to the tin sizes you entered, using the combination that leaves the least paint over, and the fewest tins where two combinations tie. A large tin usually costs less per litre than the same volume in small tins, so if the plan shows three or four small tins, price a single large one against them before you buy.
What pushes the number up
- A big colour change. Going from dark wood or navy to a pale cream can take a third coat, and a white over a strong colour almost always does. Set coats to 3 and see what it costs you.
- Shaker and panelled doors. The recessed centre panel and the moulding add surface that a flat width × height measurement does not see. Add 10 to 15 points to the allowance for a lot of framed doors.
- Bare wood or fresh filler. Porous surfaces soak up the first coat. This is what the primer is for, and it is why the tin figures assume a sealed surface.
- Touching up later. Keep a little of the same batch. A small amount left in a sealed tin is worth more than an exact order when a pan catches a door edge in two years' time.
Which paint to use depends on what your doors are made of, and our kitchen cupboard paint guide goes through melamine, vinyl wrap, MDF and solid timber, and which products need a primer on each. If you are changing handles at the same time, fill the old holes while the doors are off; the kitchen door handles guide covers matching new hardware to existing holes.
