Paint

Apartment paint brands, ranked

Seven brands on the same primed wall, judged on coverage, smell and what a magic eraser does to them.

By Frances Delacroix · August 17, 2026

If you rent in this valley, your lease probably says the walls come back the way you found them. So the question is never which paint is best. It is which paint covers old plaster in two coats, stops smelling before you have to sleep in the room, and survives the scrubbing you will do the week you move out.

I put seven of them on one wall.

The test wall

The wall is in a spare bedroom of an 1898 mill building off Race Street in Holyoke. Plaster over wood lath, one skim patch from a previous tenant, a radiator under the window that runs hot from October to April. The wall is 11 feet by 9 feet, taped into seven vertical panels of about 18 inches each.

Everything I used is sold within twenty minutes of Northampton. Four cans came from the Home Depot in Hadley, one from Lowe's, one from the Sherwin-Williams store, and one from a Benjamin Moore dealer that also sells birdseed. All seven got the same treatment. One coat of Zinsser Bulls Eye 1-2-3 on a Sunday, sanded with 220 grit on Monday. The paint went on Tuesday, August 4, with a fresh 3/8 inch nap sleeve for each panel. Two coats, four hours apart. The room faces north, and I shot the wall at 2 p.m. each day for a week from a tripod.

The odor rating is mine, taken from the doorway 30 minutes after the second coat with the window open four inches, the only ventilation that bedroom has. The scrub test came 30 days later: 20 passes with a wet melamine sponge over a pencil scribble.

Coverage is what I got out of the can on this plaster, so the numbers run below the label. The labels all claim 350 to 400.

1. Benjamin Moore Regal Select, eggshell

$72 a gallon, 374 square feet. Dry to touch in 45 minutes, recoat at three hours, and the second coat went on without dragging.

This is the only paint on the wall that hid the skim patch in two coats. The others all left a faint shadow where the new plaster met the old. Odor was mild and gone by bedtime. The scrub test took the pencil off and left a duller circle you can find if you know where it is. Seventy-two dollars is a lot for a gallon. If your lease has a repaint clause and your deposit is $1,800, buy it anyway.

2. Sherwin-Williams Duration Home, satin

$96 a gallon at the shelf price, which nobody should ever pay. The store runs 30 and 40 percent off often enough that you can plan around it. I got 358 square feet, dry to touch in an hour, recoat at four.

The scrub test was the best of the seven and it is not close. Twenty passes, pencil gone, no change in sheen at all. What kept it out of first is the working. The paint is thick, and on a hot August afternoon it started setting at the edge of the panel before I could roll back into it. It also lost to the Regal Select on the patch by a hair. Good paint, priced like an insult.

3. Behr Marquee, eggshell

$57 a gallon at the Hadley store, 366 square feet, the best coverage number in the test. Dry to touch in 50 minutes.

Marquee is sold on the idea that one coat does it. On a repainted wall in a similar color, sure. On bare joint compound over old plaster, no, and two coats still left a shadow at the patch. What it does well is sit down flat with no roller stipple and take a sponge without complaint. The color dried a half step darker than the chip, which matters if you are matching something.

4. Valspar Signature, matte

$47 a gallon at Lowe's, 349 square feet, dry in 40 minutes. Fastest recoat in the group at two and a half hours, which matters when you have one free Saturday.

A true flat that swallows light and every lump in the plaster with it. On a 128-year-old wall that is worth a lot. The problem is the scrub test. Twenty passes took the pencil off and took paint with it, leaving a shiny patch the size of a coaster. Matte does that, and no label promise changes it. Buy it for a ceiling or a wall nobody touches, and keep the leftover.

5. Behr Premium Plus, eggshell

$36 a gallon, 318 square feet, dry in 35 minutes. Cheap, and stacked ten feet high in Hadley every day of the year.

Two coats did not cover. I could still read the patch and a ghost of the old wall color at the corner. Three coats fixed it, and three coats of a $36 gallon costs more than two of the Marquee sitting on the next shelf. This also had the strongest smell of the seven in that room, still faintly there the next morning with the window open.

6. PPG Diamond, eggshell

$43 a gallon, 329 square feet. Dry in an hour, recoat at six, which is a long time to have a room out of commission.

PPG sells this line on low odor and the claim held up. I smelled almost nothing, which is worth something in a studio you live in. Everything else disappointed. The paint went on thin, the roller left tracking on the second coat, and after 30 days the film still felt soft to a fingernail. The sponge went through to the primer in eleven passes.

7. Glidden Essentials, flat

$22 a gallon. This is the paint your landlord used, and now you know why the walls look like that.

I got 294 square feet out of it and needed three coats. The dry time is 25 minutes, which sounds good until you understand the paint sets before you can roll back into it, so every lap mark stays. The scrub test was a disaster. Six passes and I was at primer, and around the damage the flat burnished to a gloss, so the repair reads from across the room.

Buy it for a basement nobody enters. Never for a wall you have to hand back.

What I would do with $75

One gallon of Regal Select covers a valley bedroom in two coats with a cup left over, and the leftover is the point, because you will be patching a doorframe in eighteen months. Write the color name, the base and the sheen inside a closet door in pencil before you move out.

And do the work in September or May. Painting next to a live radiator in January dries the top of the wall faster than the bottom, and you will see that line for as long as you live there.