What Is Easier: Staining or Painting Concrete Floors?

Concrete is a stand-alone material that you can leave unfinished as a building foundation or tooled with a variety of textures to serve as an actual finish surface. When you use it as a finish material, you have the option to paint or stain the surface depending on the look you desire, and depending on how labor intensive of a project you have time to do.

Concrete Surface

  1. Although there are standard measurements all concrete manufacturers use when mixing batches, there is still the human factor to consider. This means there is always a slight variation of color between batches. If you work on a small project, you may only need to mix one batch. Larger projects require multiple batches. As the concrete dries, these slight inconsistencies are visible as slightly different colored patches within the finish surface. The darker the patches, the more difficult they are to hide with surface applications.

Cracks and Texture

  1. Concrete is a porous, breathing material that regularly expands and contracts with the weather, leading to cracks that naturally form across the finish surface. These range from hairline cracks to separation fractures. In addition, the tools used to finish concrete leave a slight texture behind, and even a seasoned professional leaves behind trowel marks when smoothing concrete. These textures and cracks remain visible even when staining the concrete, while painting covers them depending on the thickness of the paint. Also, due to the porous nature of the concrete, stain soaks more readily into the surface in comparison to paint, making for a quicker drying time.

Stain Application

  1. Stain is technically a more difficult finish to work with in comparison to paint because once applied, it cannot be removed. Stain requires extra care and taping-off/covering adjacent sections of concrete to avoid over-spray and splatter. In addition, due to patch coloring, staining concrete requires multiple passes over lighter-colored sections to bring them to the same shade as the darker sections of concrete.


  1. Painting concrete is the easiest way to hide inconsistencies such as texture, cracks and off-color patches. While lighter-colored paints may require multiple coats to hide off-colored sections, darker paints often only require a single coat. In addition, if you accidentally over-spray or splatter paint onto concrete, you can generally clean it up without incident as long as you are quick about it and do not give it time to soak into the concrete and stain the underlying pores with coloring.