Market Data

Why Paint Prices Never Came Back Down After 2021

The coatings PPI surged with resin and titanium-dioxide costs, then stopped falling, the story of how the index ratcheted up and now reads 422.95.

Paint prices stayed elevated because the Producer Price Index for Paints and Allied Products rose sharply during the 2021–2022 feedstock spike and then plateaued rather than reversing, it reads 422.95 as of May 2026, little changed from a year ago, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For plant managers still benchmarking coating budgets against pre-pandemic price files, the uncomfortable answer is that those files describe a market that no longer exists.

The spike: when every input broke at once

The 2021–2022 run-up was a pile-on with few precedents in the category. Winter Storm Uri froze the Gulf Coast in February 2021 and knocked out a large share of U.S. petrochemical capacity, sending epoxy, acrylic, and other resin prices vertical just as pandemic-era demand for housing, renovation, and durable goods was peaking. Titanium dioxide, the white pigment that anchors nearly every formulation, tightened globally. Solvents followed crude higher, packaging metals and freight added their own surcharges, and the major producers responded the way the industry always has: with repeated list-price increases, announced quarter after quarter through 2021 and 2022. By the time the letters stopped, wholesale paint prices had reset dramatically above their 2019 basis, a step-change, not a cycle.

PPI: Paints & Allied Products, May 2026 (1982=100): 422.95. Across the archived window the index has held a band of about 0.8%, from 420.56 in Jun 2025 to 424.08 in Jan 2026, the signature of a level that reset and stayed.

The ratchet: why the level stuck

When some feedstock costs eased from their 2022 extremes, the paint index did not follow them down, and the reasons are structural rather than sinister. Coatings pricing is announced, not traded: list increases go out in letters, and no producer sends a letter taking them back while volumes hold. The industry is concentrated enough that no one needs to discount to keep share, and producers spent 2023 and 2024 openly prioritizing margin recovery over volume after two years of absorbing input inflation. Labor, packaging, and logistics, large shares of a can's delivered cost, never retraced at all. Economists call the pattern asymmetric pass-through: costs ride up the escalator and down the stairs. The chart above shows the result, and the current reading of 422.95, little changed from a year ago, is the residue of that ratchet, a plateau at altitude.

Costs ride up the escalator and down the stairs. Paint's post-2021 plateau is what asymmetric pass-through looks like on a chart.

Budgeting against a level that will not unwind

The arithmetic settles the practical question. Set against the 1982 base of 100, today's reading means $100 of wholesale paint at the base period invoices near $423 now, and the archived window's 0.8% band, from 420.56 to 424.08, shows how little of the post-2021 gain the market has given back. The planning conclusion: treat the current level as the new basis, not a temporary premium to be waited out. Rebase coating standards in routings and quotes to today's index, focus recovery efforts on usage, transfer efficiency, film-thickness control, reclaim, where 10% is winnable, and reserve price negotiations for the spread between your invoices and this published tape, which is the part suppliers can actually be held to.

Use the paint and coating cost calculator to rebuild per-part coating costs on the current price basis instead of a 2019 file. Rebase your coating costs

Published 2026-07-13.