Picking a painter by the star rating means choosing between businesses that are, to the nearest tenth of a star, the same. Across 5,726 Google ratings for the 201 painters we rank, 97% are five stars, and only one painter in ten is rated below 4.8. So we read what the reviews behind those ratings actually say. The stars cannot tell these painters apart. The text can.
"We went with him because of these five-star ratings. He started off well, saying all the right things, and a reasonable quote."
A painter's star rating has run out of room
Painters get five stars more often than any other trade that works on houses. Plumbers, builders and roofers are all at about 92%. Painters are at 97%. Across all 59 categories we rank the figure is 90%, and only five categories score higher than painters: wedding photographers, mortgage brokers, graphic designers, financial advisers and building inspectors. None of them does work on the house.
| Trade | Five-star share of ratings |
|---|---|
| House painters | 97% |
| Plasterers | 96% |
| Tree services | 96% |
| Tilers | 95% |
| Electricians | 94% |
| Roofers | 92% |
| Plumbers | 92% |
| Builders | 92% |
| Kitchen renovators | 88% |
| All 59 categories | 90% |
Share of Google ratings that are five stars, across every business in the latest Top5.nz snapshot of each category, September 2026.
The four-star review has almost gone as well. It is 1.6% of painter ratings, about the same as the 1.4% rated one to three stars. Across every category we rank, fours are 5% of the total. Painters' customers give five stars or, rarely, one. So a 4.9 is not a worse painter than a 5.0. It is one unhappy customer in fifty, or one honest four in ten. The unhappy ones at least explain themselves: low reviews run to 48 words at the median, against 35 for the praise.
What a five-star painter review says, and what it leaves out
The finish is the thing most often described: 57% of the 400 most recent positive reviews mention it. Four in ten name the job: an exterior repaint, a lounge and hallway, a roof, a villa. A third mention communication, and a third say the painter turned up when promised and finished on time. Preparation, the washing, sanding, filling and priming before any colour goes on, is described in 11%.
Share of the 400 most recent four and five-star reviews mentioning each theme. A review often mentions more than one, so the figures do not sum to 100%.
Reviews are written when the job is done, and on that day a finish looks the same whether or not the boards under it were washed, sanded and primed. The one review in nine that describes the preparation is describing the part of the job that decides whether it lasts five years or fifteen.
"Years of paint layers built up and flaking, to the point a straight repaint over the top wasn't really an option. They stripped it right back to bare weatherboard first, no shortcuts, then primed."
About one positive review in four says nothing a reader could check. 18% have no theme at all ("Did a good job", "Great people, great service"), and another 6% praise the finish and nothing else. At the other end, 60% say something about how the job was done: the prep, the communication, the timekeeping, the tidiness, or how a problem was handled. 27% both name the job and describe how it went. That last quarter is the useful one: a job like yours, described by the person who paid for it.
The most common painter complaint is a job that never happened
More than a third of painter complaints describe a job that never started or never finished. Of the 77 reviews rated one to three stars, 28 are about a no-show for the quote, a quote promised and never sent, or an agreed job postponed, dropped for bigger work, or left part-done. For 15 of them that was the whole complaint. Nothing was painted badly, because nothing was painted.
Share of 77 reviews rating three stars or below mentioning each theme. Themes overlap: an unhappy review often cites several. With a pool this small the order is solid and the percentages are approximate.
"When five dry days were forecast I contacted them, only to receive a flippant text to say they had secured a two year contract and recommended I find someone else."
Conduct is the most common single theme, in roughly a quarter of complaints, and in about half of those no painting had happened. Four of the 77 are about how a signwritten company vehicle was driven, written by people who had never hired the firm. One of them could "only imagine their painting jobs are just as rushed".
Painters are the third trade in a row where the work itself is not the main complaint. Conduct, not turning up, walking off and going quiet after payment appear in 58% of painter complaints. The finish or the prep is faulted in 29%. The same split showed up for plumbers and builders. Of the 22 complaints about the paintwork, only four were about the paintwork alone. The rest came with a conduct, communication or mess complaint attached.
What painter reviews never say
Three things are close to absent. Price comes up in 23% of the 3,951 positive reviews, but only 1.5% say the final bill matched the quote. Four in ten reviews name a tradesperson by first name, and an undisclosed subcontractor is the complaint in 6% of the low ones, so the name in the review and the name on the ladder are not always the same person. Lead paint is mentioned in nine of the 3,951 positive reviews and in two of the 77 complaints.
So ask the painter directly: is the quote fixed, who will be on the job, and, on an older house, do they test for lead before sanding. The reviews will not say.
What painters can take from this
The most common complaint needs no painting skill to fix. For 15 of the 77, the whole complaint was a painter who never quoted, never started or never came back. Going quiet after payment is another of the top five, and the reply under a bad review is the only public evidence either way.
On the reviews themselves, six in ten name no job and one in nine describes the prep. How to ask, and what Google allows, is in our guide to getting more Google reviews. Why the words matter is in Your reviews decide what you get recommended for.
Every business here passed the gate for a Top5.nz ranking (4.0 stars and three reviews), so this is the better-reviewed end of the trade, not every painter in New Zealand. The positive sample is the 400 most recent four and five-star reviews, and two-thirds of the whole corpus was written in 2024 or later. Four-star reviews are too rare to analyse on their own. The complaint side is close to complete but small: the order of the themes is solid, the percentages are not, and seven or eight of the 77 low reviews are not from painting customers at all (a paint shop, a misrated positive review), which is why 18 carry no theme. No per-city complaint rates: the market with the most one-star reviews has eight and the one with the fewest has one.
Methodology: Top5.nz analysed the Google reviews held for 201 painting businesses ranked across twelve New Zealand markets, collected through September 2026, including a one-off pull of each business's lowest-rated reviews so the complaint side is near complete: 77 texts rated one to three stars against 82 such ratings on Google. The star distribution uses Google's own counts for all 5,726 ratings. Every review rated one to three stars, and the 400 most recent rated four or five, were classified against a fixed list of ten praise and ten complaint themes using AI-assisted analysis. Tagging is multi-label, so a review may carry several themes or none. A manual check of a random 50-review sample agreed with the automated tags on 90% of reviews, and on 96% for the main theme. A second run on identical batches agreed on the exact theme set for 83% of reviews and moved no theme count by more than 11 reviews, so shares are quoted to about five points. A keyword pass over all 3,951 positive texts was used to check the sampled figures. Cross-trade five-star shares use every business in the latest ranking snapshot of each category. No business is named. Full ranking methodology: top5.nz/how-we-rank.