Real numbers from real jobs — not national averages pulled from a calculator. This is what drywall repair actually costs in Fairfax, Arlington, Alexandria and the rest of Northern Virginia, and why the same hole can quote at $180 in one house and $650 in the one next door.
$150–$300
Typical small hole repair
$99
Service call, applied to the job
2.5 hrs
Most single-hole jobs finish inside a half-day package
These are the ranges we actually quote across Northern Virginia. The low end assumes a single, accessible repair with standard texture matching. The high end assumes larger damage, a difficult location, or a plaster wall that needs a different approach entirely.
| Repair Type | Typical Range |
|---|---|
|
Doorknob ding Under 4 inches |
$150 – $300 |
|
Hairline crack Settlement or seam |
$150 – $350 |
|
Large hole 4–12 inches |
$300 – $650 |
|
Water damage Sagging or stained |
$350 – $900+ |
|
Plaster wall repair Pre-1950 homes |
$400 – $900 |
|
Ceiling repair Overhead work |
$400 – $1,000 |
|
Popcorn ceiling removal Per room |
$600 – $1,800 |
|
High ceiling Spaces over 12 ft |
+40–80% |
What's never included in these numbers
Painting, matching a custom wall colour, fixing the underlying cause of water damage, and any structural repair behind the drywall. We flag those separately before work starts so there are no surprises on the invoice.
It's rarely the size of the hole. If you've had two quotes come back far apart, it's almost always one of these five.
The single biggest variable in Northern Virginia. Drywall is a patch-and-blend job. Plaster over wood lath is a different trade — the lath has to be re-keyed before anything goes over it, or the patch cracks out within a season. In Alexandria and older Arlington neighbourhoods, a large share of walls are plaster.
Smooth, orange peel, knockdown or hand-troweled plaster. Each needs a different technique and a different amount of time. Getting this wrong is the most visible mistake in drywall work — the patch is structurally perfect and still obvious from across the room.
A wall at chest height is quick work. A ceiling needs overhead mud work, and seams read differently in raking light. A stairwell needs staging. Behind a radiator or under a window means protecting something before you can start.
Stained or sagging drywall means water, and water means a source. Patching over an active leak is money thrown away. Most of the water damage we see above first-floor ceilings traces to ageing cast-iron or galvanised plumbing, not the roof.
This is where you save real money. Setup, masking, mixing and cleanup are a fixed cost on every visit. Five small repairs done in one trip cost meaningfully less than the same five booked as five separate service calls — often less than half once you count the $99 trip charge each time.
See half-day and full-day package pricingNational cost calculators treat "Northern Virginia" as one market. It isn't. The housing stock changes street to street, and so does the work.
Old Town, Del Ray, Rosemont
A large share of Alexandria's housing — especially Old Town and Del Ray — isn't drywall at all. It's plaster over wood lath. That changes the job entirely: a simple hole often means re-keying loose lath first, or the patch cracks out within a season. Expect to sit at the higher end of every range on this page.
Rowhouses also crack along party walls and original chimneys — those are movement lines, not paint failures, and caulk won't hold them.
Fairfax City, Fair Lakes, Greenbriar
Fairfax is genuinely two markets in one. Older City homes and 1950s ranches carry thin skim-coat walls that crack along ceiling seams where add-on framing meets the original house — that's a re-taping job, not a caulk job. Meanwhile the 1990s subdivisions around Fair Lakes and Greenbriar are almost all orange peel texture, which is faster to match.
Ageing bathroom vent fans that still run but no longer move air are the most common water culprit here.
Cherrydale, Ashton Heights, Ballston
Cherrydale and Ashton Heights are plaster over lath and need a two-step skim. The most-reported crack in Arlington is the stairwell corner where a later addition meets the original 1940s structure. In the high-rises around Ballston and Clarendon, water usually arrives from the unit above — which makes it a building-management conversation before it's a drywall one.
Getting the texture wrong — smooth plaster versus Ballston orange peel — is the most visible drywall mistake in the county.
We also repair drywall in Springfield, Vienna, Reston, McLean and all of Northern Virginia.
We get paid to do this, so take our view with the obvious grain of salt. But here's the genuinely useful version — some drywall jobs are a reasonable weekend project, and some will cost you more to fix than to have done right the first time.
The cost of getting it wrong
A failed DIY patch usually costs more to correct than starting fresh, because the repair now includes removing someone else's mud and re-doing the tape. If you're going to attempt it, watch a full feathering demonstration first — not a 60-second clip that skips straight from mud to paint. The drying time between coats is the part everyone skips, and it's the part that decides whether the patch is invisible or not.
The questions we actually get asked on estimates, answered straight.