If your home was built before 1978, there’s a federal rule that applies to your repaint — and a fair number of homeowners have never heard of it until a contractor hands them a pamphlet.
Northern Virginia has a lot of pre-1978 housing. Older Alexandria and Falls Church neighborhoods, the original sections of Reston, mid-century Vienna and Oakton, and plenty of Fairfax County ramblers and colonials all fall inside that window. If that’s your house, this is worth ten minutes of your time.
Lead was used in household paint for its durability and color retention until it was banned for residential use in 1978. Homes built before then may have lead-based paint somewhere in them — often on trim, windows, doors, stair components, and exterior surfaces, where the harder, glossier lead formulations were most commonly used.
Intact, undisturbed lead paint sitting under decades of newer coatings is generally not the hazard. The hazard is created when it’s disturbed. Sanding, scraping, and heat stripping turn a stable surface into airborne dust and chips — and lead dust is the primary exposure route, particularly for young children and pregnant women.
Which is exactly what a repaint involves.
The EPA’s Renovation, Repair and Painting Rule — usually just called the RRP Rule — governs this. It requires that firms performing renovation, repair, and painting projects that disturb lead-based paint in homes, child care facilities, and preschools built before 1978 be certified by EPA (or an EPA-authorized state), use certified renovators trained by EPA-approved training providers, and follow lead-safe work practices.
Virginia has not taken over administration of the program, so the EPA enforces the RRP Rule in Virginia directly. That means the certification your contractor needs is a federal EPA certification, not a state one.
In practice, a compliant contractor working on your pre-1978 home should:
The rule has minimum thresholds — small repairs below a certain surface area are treated as minor maintenance. But most interior repaints involving any scraping or sanding, and essentially all exterior repaints on an older home, are well past those thresholds.
Not necessarily. The rule allows a contractor to either test the surfaces or simply presume lead is present and use lead-safe practices throughout. Presuming is often the practical route — testing every component in an older home has its own cost, and if the answer changes nothing about how the work is done, the testing wasn’t decisive.
Testing makes sense when the answer would genuinely change the plan. If lead turns out to be confined to a few exterior window sashes, containment might be scoped very differently than if it’s throughout the interior trim.
If you do want testing, note the difference between two things. A lead inspection tells you whether lead-based paint is present and where. A risk assessment tells you whether it’s currently creating a hazard and what to do about it. Both are performed by separately certified professionals — and that’s a different credential from the RRP renovator certification your painter carries.
There are also consumer test kits sold at hardware stores. They’re inexpensive and can be a reasonable first look, but they produce false results in both directions and aren’t a substitute for professional testing when it matters.
Two honest expectations.
It takes longer. Containment setup, controlled work practices, HEPA cleanup, and verification all add time compared to the same scope in a newer home. A repaint that would take four days in a 1995 house may take longer in a 1962 one.
It costs more. The added labor, materials, and disposal are real. A bid that treats a 1958 Vienna colonial identically to a new build in Brambleton is either overlooking the rule or ignoring it.
That second point is worth dwelling on, because it’s where homeowners get burned. If you collect three bids on an older home and one is dramatically cheaper, ask specifically whether that contractor is EPA Lead-Safe Certified and whether lead-safe practices are included in the price. Sometimes the low bid is efficient. Sometimes it’s cheap because it skips a federal requirement — and the dust ends up in your house.
You can verify a firm’s certification independently through the EPA’s Lead-Safe Certified Firm lookup at epa.gov/lead — worth doing, and it takes about a minute.
Mike Katounas is the owner of Home Works Painting, a painting business in Northern Virginia. He has over 15 years of experience in residential interior and exterior painting, drywall installation/repair, carpentry, wallpaper removal, power washing, commercial painting, color consultation, and staining/sealing. Their service areas include Chantilly, Fairfax, Herndon, Oakton, Reston. Mike takes pride in his work, and he always follows a strict code of conduct that includes the use of quality paint, a clean workspace, and an honest, respectful approach to his customers.