7 Easy Ways to Get Free Paint Near You!

• Paint samples
• Paint for your home
• Paint you can use for DIY projects from painting secondhand chairs to refreshing spaces in your home.
• And much more!

How to Get Free Paint for DIY & House Painting

If you’ve ever wanted to know, “where can I get free paint near me?”, read on to find out.

1. Look out for giveaways, promos, and other offers

Stores often have promos where they give away paint samples for free. Or they even offer deals where you can get full-sized paint cans for free. Recently, I got a deal where I got three cans of paint for the price of two. I was painting a pretty large area of our home, so this worked out to be a great deal.

I would highly recommend looking out for deals at stores where they sell paint like:

• Lowes
• Home Depot (Learn more about how to save money at Home Depot here.)
• Ace Hardware

Also, you can check with the paint brands themselves, such as

• PPG
• Behr
• Glidden

I would recommend not only looking on the deals section of these sites if they have one, but also:

• Follow these stores and brands on social media. Lots of them post free paint giveaways on their social media accounts.
• Sign up for any loyalty programs or rewards programs. These often give you points on purchases that you can redeem for free stuff, or you get access to exclusive deals like coupons.
• Sign up for newsletters/email lists. Most stores and brands have an email list that you can sign up for. Usually, you’re sent things like exclusive offers, details on upcoming sales and promos, coupons, and other money-saving deals.

2. Browse Craigslist

Craigslist is a treasure-trove for random freebies. Seriously, you can get pretty much anything you can think of on there for free. I’ve seen video games, furniture, clothing, and tons of other stuff on there that people are just giving away for free.

If it’s free paint that you’re after, it’s so worth having a look on there. Sure, there won’t always be people offering paint on there, but you never know you may be lucky and find someone who’s offering free paint near you.

So, just how do you go about finding freebies on Craigslist?

Well, it’s simple really:

• Visit this page and find your city’s Craigslist.
• Then, look for the “Free” section, which can be found under the “For Sale” section of your city’s Craigslist.
• Click on this, and you’ll be taken to a page where you can find people who’re giving away free stuff in your area.
• Now, you’ll find freebies in multiple categories here. So you’ll need to filter the results to find what you are looking for. You can do this by using the search bar. Just enter the term “paint” or something more specific, like “house paint” into the search bar and hit enter. Then, you’ll get results for free paint near you.

Like I said above, there may not be anyone offering free paint locally, but it’s still worth having a quick search on there.

Now, if you are meeting up with someone from Craigslist, make sure that you take safety precautions. So, meet in a public place, and take somebody with you if you can, and tell someone else where you’re going and who you are meeting with.

3. Look on Facebook Marketplace

You can also sometimes find people giving away paint on Facebook Marketplace. Now, you may know Facebook Marketplace as a platform where you can buy and sell stuff.

However, it also has a section that’s dedicated to free stuff. There, you’ll find people giving away all sorts of freebies!

This could include paint. Now, you won’t always find people on there giving away paint, but it’s definitely worth a look.

If you’re looking for paint for an accent wall, to paint a bench in your garden, or whatever project it is that you have in mind, then I would definitely have a quick check on Facebook Marketplace.

You can free the free stuff section, which I linked to below, and then use the search bar on the site to find free paint.

• Search for free paint on Facebook Marketplace here.

4. Get free paint from Freecycle

Next on the list we have Freecycle. If you haven’t heard about Freecycle before it’s basically a website where people can give away free stuff and get things for free locally. The website encourages the recycling of items rather than throwing out the things that we don’t need.

So, people who are looking to declutter a little use Freecycle to give their stuff away rather than throwing it out.

As they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure!

People give away all sorts of items on there. You can even request free things on there as well. You may be able to find someone who’s giving away free paint near you.

• Get free plants from Freecycle here.

5. Ask at your local recycling center

Sometimes you can get free paint from your local recycling center, dump, or hazardous waste facility. These facilities collect unwanted pain from homeowners and business owners, and then they set it aside so that people can come and take it for free.

Some centers will offer this paint on a First-come, First-served basis, and others may have certain days throughout the year where they have free paint giveaways. Just call your local recycling or hazardous waste center to see if they offer free paint.

6. Ask around

If you don’t have any old paint cans lying around, then ask around. Most people do have paint leftover from other projects that they just haven’t used. In most cases, this paint ends up drying out and going to waste. So why not ask around your family and friends to see if they have any old paint cans that they don’t need?

Most of the time they will – all you have to do is ask! They’ll be happy to give it to you. Of course, you’re not going to be able to decide on the color or quantity, but for DIY projects, it’s such a good idea!

7. Check around your home

I think that in most homes across the country, you’ll find at least one can of paint. I know that in our shed, there’s at least two! When I last painted a room in our house, we bought this cream paint for the ceiling, and it was only available in a huge tub. Lo and behold, we didn’t end up using all of that paint for the ceiling.

So, we just put it in the shed and forgot about it. A little later, we decided that we wanted to spruce up one of the built-in closets in our home. It wasn’t a huge space, but it looked tired and like it could do with a new coat of paint.

When looking for something else in the shed, my husband found the leftover cream paint that we’d used for the ceiling. Since the lid was firmly on it, the paint was still fine, and we used it for the closet.

This meant that we didn’t have to spend money on new paint, and the leftover paint we already had didn’t go to waste.

Take a look in your garage, shed, or wherever you keep your DIY supplies to check that you don’t have an old can of paint that you forgot about. It’s likely that you do!

This is a good idea if you’re tackling a project like sanding and repainting a piece of secondhand furniture that you purchased. I gave my mother-in-law the coffee tables we had when we moved out of our apartment. They were in good condition, but they didn’t fit the space that we were moving to.

When we visited, we’d seen that she’d painted them yellow using paint from another DIY project she had been working on. Repurposing paint is such a good idea.

Oops Paint!

Here’s a pro tip for when you can’t get paint in the color that you want for free.

Both JINATS

The two biggest home improvement stores (Lowe’s and Home Depot) have something that most people don’t know about but all the pro painters know about. They have a thing called Oops Paint.

What is Oops Paint?

These are custom mixed paint colors that either the store got it wrong or the customer who ordered it never came to pick up. So instead of throwing them away, they sell these for huge discounts, sometimes up to 90%!

Generally, you can pick them up for half prices or at the very least 20-30% off.

You can find Oops Paint usually behind the Paint aisle at both stores. Now, you may not always find the color you need but it takes a minute to heck.

Also, if you do a lot of DIY stuff, it would be smart to just pick up a few for practically free and have them around. You never know when you are going to need those colors!

Enjoy Your Free Paint!

Getting paint for free can save you a lot of money. It’s ideal if you’re looking to paint a room in your home or want some paint samples for a DIY project.

Give these tips a try if you’ve wanted to know where and how to get free paint.

And if you have any tips of your own on sourcing free paint, make sure you share them with us in the comments section below.