Cost to Drywall 1,500 Square Feet:
$2,250 to $5,250 Installed

What 1,500 Sqft of Drywall Covers

1,500 square feet of drywall surface is the bottom end of "real remodel" scope. It corresponds to a small bump-out addition (300 to 400 sqft of floor including ceiling and exterior wall returns), the entire upper floor of a mid-size two-story home (800 to 1,000 sqft of floor, plus its sloped ceilings and dormers), a fully-finished basement (900 to 1,000 sqft of floor including partition walls, drop-ceiling box-outs, and the perimeter exterior walls), or a major kitchen-and-living-room open-concept gut where every interior surface comes down.

At this scope, the contractor field shifts. Handyman-tier outfits typically pass on bidding because they cannot crew up. The bids you will see come from specialty drywall contractors (3+ crews, dedicated finishers) and from remodeling general contractors who subcontract the drywall to one of those specialty outfits. The GC adds 15 to 25 percent margin on top of the drywall sub's price, which is why direct-to-drywaller pricing is usually cheaper if your project has no other trades to coordinate.

Material Logistics: Half-Pallet Delivery

For 1,500 sqft you need 52 sheets of 4x8 drywall (1,500 / 32 sqft per sheet, plus 10 to 12 percent waste). The right purchase is a half-pallet plus a few singles (40 + 12), or a full pallet (80 sheets) if you have storage space and a use for the leftovers. Pallet pricing from a contractor lumberyard runs roughly 10 to 15 percent below the per-sheet Home Depot rate, so a contractor with a trade account pays roughly $11 to $13 per sheet instead of $12 to $15.

Material is about $0.54 to $0.87 per sqft, roughly 25 to 35 percent of a total bid. Labour is the rest. For homeowners DIYing the hang and hiring out the finish, your material cost is the retail figure; for full contractor scope, you are paying the contractor-pricing tier built into their bid.

Three-Person Crew Logistics

At 1,500 sqft, the most efficient crew is three people: two hangers and one finisher. Two hangers can hang 35 to 50 sheets per day on residential framing, so the hang phase compresses to one or one-and-a-half days instead of two. The finisher then has 36 to 48 hours of work spread across three mud cycles plus sanding. This is the size where contractors most often deploy a three-person crew, because the labour productivity gain pays for the third headcount.

Realistic schedule with a three-person crew:

• Day 1: Material delivery. Two hangers stock and hang first 30 sheets.
• Day 2 morning: Hang remaining 22 sheets. Finisher arrives, embeds first coat of mud over first day's work.
• Day 3: Finisher continues first coat over remaining hang. Second coat on day 2 work.
• Day 4: Second coat finishes. Third coat begins on day 2 work.
• Day 5: Third coat completes. Begin sanding.
• Day 6 morning: Sanding completes. Touch-up patches. Primer.
• Day 7 or 8 (you): Paint.

Total labour: 80 to 120 hours across the three trades. At blended $50 to $75 per hour, that is $4,000 to $9,000 in raw labour. The reason your bid is $2,250 to $5,250 (not $4,000 to $9,000) is that contractor pricing assumes per-sqft productivity gains at this scale that reduce effective labour cost. The crew is not idling between mud cycles, they are on another job.

Multi-Room Texture Standardisation

One logistical wrinkle that appears at 1,500 sqft and above: texture standardisation across rooms. If your project covers multiple rooms, you need to decide whether each room gets the same texture or different ones. Specifying different textures per room (orange peel in the bedrooms, smooth in the bathrooms, knockdown in the basement) adds 5 to 10 percent to the finishing labour because the crew has to clean and reload the texture sprayer between rooms.

The cleanest budget strategy is to standardise on one texture across the entire scope. Most contractors will quote a base price assuming standardisation and add a "texture variance" line if you want different finishes in different rooms. If your scope includes any rooms with existing texture that you are matching (not replacing), expect a 10 to 15 percent texture-match premium because the finisher has to mix custom batches to match.

For full texture pricing including orange peel ($0.35/sqft), knockdown ($0.45/sqft), skip trowel ($0.75/sqft), and Venetian plaster ($4.50/sqft), see the drywall finishing cost page.

Parallel Trades: Drywall in a Remodel Sequence

On a 1,500 sqft scope, drywall is rarely the only trade on the job. It is typically the middle step in a sequence: framing first, then electrical and plumbing rough-in (with inspection), then insulation (with inspection), then drywall, then primer and paint, then trim and finish carpentry, then flooring, then final electrical (outlets, switches, fixtures). The drywall stage is the "close up the walls" milestone that ends the messy demolition-and-rough-in phase.

Scheduling matters at this scale. The drywall crew cannot start until all rough-in inspections are passed (the inspector needs to see the wires and pipes in the open walls). They also cannot finish until the insulation is installed (insulation goes in after rough-in inspection but before drywall hang). And the painter cannot start until the drywall finisher has signed off on Level 4 completion, which is typically a separate walk-through with the GC.

For projects with both drywall and flooring (basement finish, addition), the standard sequence is drywall before flooring. The drywall crew works off the subfloor without protecting it (mud splatters and screw drops are inevitable). The flooring crew comes in after Level 4 sign-off. The reverse sequence (flooring first, then drywall) requires extensive floor protection and adds 5 to 10 percent to the drywall labour. Sister-site laminatefloorinstallationcost.com has the parallel sequencing detail from the flooring side.

Frequently Asked Questions

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