Paint color statistics (2026)
How many paint colors exist, how much brands copy each other, and which palette is the most original — measured across 26,597 named colors from 13 brands. The catalog figures below are computed live; the study findings are dated so you can cite them cleanly.
Short version: Paint Color HQ tracks 26,597 named paint colors across 13 brands. As of July 2026, two thirds of them — 66.6%, or 17,702 colors — have a near-identical twin within Delta E 1.0 at a competing brand, and 749 exact hex values are sold under different names by two or more brands. Collapse the near-identical overlap and about 14,700 genuinely distinct colors remain, roughly 55% of the catalog. Behr has the most original palette, with 48.5% of its colors unique to it; Hirshfield's the least, at 8.2%.
How many paint colors are there?
Paint Color HQ indexes 26,597 named colors across 13 brands. The table below counts every color in each brand's catalog and refreshes from the live database, so the totals stay current as brands add or retire colors. Behr and Benjamin Moore alone account for more than a third of every color we track.
| Brand | Colors |
|---|---|
| Behr | 5,786 |
| Benjamin Moore | 3,904 |
| PPG | 3,259 |
| Vista Paint | 2,864 |
| Valspar | 2,358 |
| Dunn-Edwards | 2,230 |
| Sherwin-Williams | 1,951 |
| Hirshfield's | 1,469 |
| Dutch Boy | 1,441 |
| Kilz | 827 |
| RAL | 213 |
| Farrow & Ball | 167 |
| Colorhouse | 128 |
| All brands | 26,597 |
How many are duplicates?
Different brands sell a lot of the same color. We measured every color against every other with the CIEDE2000 standard, where Delta E is the perceptual distance between two colors and anything under 1.0 is a difference the human eye can barely register. As of July 2026, 66.6% of colors — 17,702 of 26,597 — have a near-identical twin at a competing brand. The redundancy runs deeper than lookalikes: 749 exact hex values are sold identically by two or more brands, covering 1,555 named colors, with up to four brands sharing a single hex.
Strip out the overlap and the catalog shrinks. Collapsing every group of near-identical colors (each member within Delta E 1.0 of its reference) down to one leaves about 14,700 genuinely distinct colors — roughly 55% of the catalog. Tighten the threshold to Delta E 0.5, a difference almost nobody can see, and about 22,050 colors (around 83%) still stand apart.
The overlap is not spread evenly. The most intertwined pair is Behr and Benjamin Moore: roughly 2,400 colors in each brand's palette have a near-identical counterpart in the other. Separately, we track 243 discontinued or archived colors, each mapped to its closest current match. The full method and the color-by-color breakdown are in the most-duplicated paint color study.
Which brand has the most original palette?
Originality here is the share of a brand's colors that have no near-identical match (within Delta E 1.0) at any other brand — colors you can only get from that brand. Behr leads by a wide margin; Hirshfield's sits at the bottom, with more than nine in ten of its colors matched elsewhere. Figures are as of July 2026. RAL is excluded because it is an industrial color standard rather than a consumer paint line.
| Rank | Brand | Colors unique to it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Behr | 48.5% |
| 2 | Dunn-Edwards | 35.6% |
| 3 | Kilz | 34.8% |
| 4 | Valspar | 34.5% |
| 5 | Benjamin Moore | 34.0% |
| 6 | PPG | 32.8% |
| 7 | Colorhouse | 27.3% |
| 8 | Sherwin-Williams | 26.6% |
| 9 | Farrow & Ball | 26.3% |
| 10 | Dutch Boy | 26.1% |
| 11 | Vista Paint | 19.7% |
| 12 | Hirshfield's | 8.2% |
The most reused color names
Some names are near-universal. “Antique White” is the most reused: 8 of the 13 brands sell a color under that exact name — though, as the duplication data shows, those eight are rarely the same color underneath. Four more names appear at six brands each.
| Color name | Brands using it |
|---|---|
| Antique White | 8 of 13 |
| Swiss Coffee | 6 of 13 |
| Navajo White | 6 of 13 |
| Citron | 6 of 13 |
| White | 6 of 13 |
The lightest white each brand sells
LRV, or Light Reflectance Value, runs from 0 (absolute black) to 100 (pure white) and measures how much light a color bounces back. The brightest white on the market is Behr Ultra Pure White at an LRV of 97.3; the rest of the brands' whitest whites cluster in the low 90s and high 80s.
| Brand | Whitest color | LRV |
|---|---|---|
| Behr | Ultra Pure White | 97.3 |
| Farrow & Ball | All White | 94.2 |
| Kilz | Ultra Bright White | 93.3 |
| Dutch Boy | Tulle White | 93.1 |
| Hirshfield's | Touch of Sun | 92.7 |
| Valspar | Ultra White | 92.6 |
| Sherwin-Williams | High Reflective White | 92.6 |
| Vista Paint | Touch of Sun | 91.6 |
| Benjamin Moore | Ice Mist | 90.6 |
| PPG | Soft Candlelight | 88.7 |
How to cite this page
These numbers are free to cite and quote with attribution. Cite as:
Paint Color HQ, “Paint Color Statistics,” 2026, https://www.paintcolorhq.com/paint-color-statistics.
The catalog figures — the total and the per-brand counts — update as brand palettes change, so quote them with the date you accessed the page. The duplication and originality findings are fixed to our July 2026 analysis and are labeled as such throughout.
Frequently asked questions
How many paint colors are there?
Paint Color HQ tracks 26,597 named paint colors across 13 major brands. That count includes duplicates; once near-identical colors — those within Delta E 1.0 of another under the CIEDE2000 standard — are collapsed into one, roughly 14,700 are genuinely distinct, about 55% of the catalog, based on our July 2026 analysis.
Which paint brand has the most colors?
Behr has the largest catalog of the brands we track, ahead of Benjamin Moore and PPG. The per-brand table on this page shows the current count for each brand and updates as palettes change. Behr also has the most original palette: as of July 2026, 48.5% of its colors have no near-identical match at any other brand.
How many paint colors are duplicates of each other?
As of July 2026, 66.6% of the colors we track (17,702 of 26,597) have a near-identical twin — within Delta E 1.0 — at a competing brand, and 749 exact hex values are sold under different names by two or more brands. The overlap is heaviest between Behr and Benjamin Moore, which share about 2,400 near-identical colors.