Pickleball Court Painting Schedule in the Rainy Season: When You Can Paint and Play in Negros Oriental

The crew can wait under a tarp. The paint cannot be hurried, and neither can the slab. Illustrative photo.

Short answer: on a new slab, the date you can first play is set by three waits that no crew can shorten: the slab's cure before priming, the minimum hours between coats, and the manual's 72 hours before play. The painters' own days are the small part. With this page's default settings, a slab poured on Monday 2 November 2026 reaches its earliest play date on Sunday 20 December 2026, 48 days after the pour, and about 34 of those days are the slab and the paint waiting. Rain adds 6 days to that, because Dumaguete's PAGASA normals have 11 rainy days in November and 12 in December, and the calculator treats each rainy day as a no-paint day. Take the rain out and the same six-day crew plays on Monday 14 December 2026. The calculator has no “number of painters” box on purpose: more painters would move none of the waiting.

If you are building or recoating a court in Dumaguete, Bais, Tanjay, Manjuyod or anywhere else in Negros Oriental, put your own pour or start date in the calculator. It builds a day-by-day schedule with a live Gantt chart. Below it: the order of work and each hold, what the manual and the data sheets say (and do not say), Dumaguete's weather from PAGASA, what rain, dew and humidity do to each step, and how AEDO sequenced its own Manjuyod job. There is no plan or section drawing on this page, because a schedule is not geometry.

1. The Order of Work and the Holds

A court is painted in a fixed order, and between most of the steps something has to happen that nobody can speed up. The table lists each step, what decides its length, and the number we could read. Where we could not find a number, the table says so, because an invented hold is the easiest way to ruin a court.

The pattern is what matters. Four of the nine steps are pure waits and three more end in one, and the long wait comes first. The painters do their part in a handful of working days, spread across weeks in which the slab and the paint are doing the work. That is why a court that was poured in the wrong month can sit finished-looking and unplayable for weeks, and why the date to argue about is the pour date, not the painter's start date. Our surface options guide covers the systems and their costs, and our paint types guide goes into each coat.

2. What the Manual and the Data Sheets Say

Every number in the calculator comes from one of four places, and it helps to know which.

• The ASBA and USA Pickleball construction manual (2020). A US industry manual, so a design reference, not a Philippine code. No Philippine standard we found sets painting or cure times for a pickleball court. It supplies the seven-day moist cure, the 21 to 38 additional days (post-tensioned slabs), the 55°F and no-rain rule for patching, the flood test, the rule that each coat must dry before the next, and the 72 hours before play. We read it ourselves from the City of Salem, New Hampshire copy, printed pages 36 and 41 to 42, plus the indoor chapter (pages 99 and 101).
• Nippon Paint technical data sheets. Three sheets, none of them a Philippine sheet: Floor-Pro 702 Sport Floor Finish (Nippon Paint Singapore, issued August 2020), High Performance Primer (Nippon Paint Malaysia, updated January 2025) and FloorSports 1K Epoxy Hybrid (Nippon Paint Malaysia, updated October 2025). AEDO's Manjuyod job plan says “Nippon epoxy primer” and “Nippon rubberized top coat” and does not name product codes, so we cannot say these sheets describe the exact products on that job. We name Nippon as the maker of the sheets we read and the system on one AEDO job; we are not a Nippon dealer, and nothing here is an endorsement.
• AEDO's Manjuyod job plan. The 28-day minimum, the plastic-sheet test, the no-densifier instruction and the polishing sequence. That is AEDO working practice on one job, not a code. Where a sheet we read agrees (28 days on Floor-Pro 702), we say so.
• AEDO planning assumptions. Days for prep, patching and dry-back, the lines wait, and how much rain stops work. They are labelled in the calculator and in the “Where These Figures Come From” box. They are the numbers to replace first.

What we did not find. A maximum overcoat time on any sheet we read; a time to light traffic or full cure on any of them; any statement of what rain during the 72 hours does to the cure; and a cure figure in the manual's outdoor chapter for an ordinary reinforced slab. The manual does say, in its post-tensioned passage (printed page 41), that the slab must be dry so vapour emissions do not affect adhesion and that the surfacing maker has the test methods; its indoor chapter (printed pages 99 and 101) says strength curing occurs between 21 and 45 days and that a slab under indoor sports flooring should have been in place at least 60 days and tested for moisture. Those are indoor-installation figures, not an outdoor court rule, so the calculator does not use them. The 72 hours is the manual's “generally,” so ask the supplier for the figure for your product, written, before you open the court. One non-Nippon sheet reads differently: Sika's Sikafloor-2045 Courtkote sheet (Singapore, May 2026), which we also read for our paint types guide, allows a minimum of 4 hours between coats, says the court is ready for use 24 hours after the final coat, and says application and curing must be protected from rain. That is a different product, so the calculator keeps the manual's more cautious 72 hours as its default; if your supplier's written figure is shorter, enter it. The Floor-Pro 702 sheet's “recoating time: within 14–18 hrs @ 28°C” sits beside its separate “second coat after a minimum 4 hours” and is worded loosely enough that we do not use it as either a minimum or a maximum; ask Nippon or your supplier which it is.

3. Dumaguete Weather, From PAGASA

The climate source is PAGASA's Climatological Normals sheet for Dumaguete City, Negros Oriental (09°19'59.43"N, 123°17'57.53"E, elevation 7.048 m), period 1991–2020. These are 30-year averages, not a forecast and not records. PAGASA defines a rainy day as a 24-hour period from 8 AM to 8 AM with at least 1 mm of rain, and relative humidity as the ratio of the water vapour actually in the air to the most it could hold at that temperature.

Source: PAGASA Climatological Normals, Dumaguete City, 1991–2020. The last column is ours: PAGASA's dry bulb temperature (air temperature at the time of observation) minus its dew point temperature, both from the same sheet. The sheet does not say which hours the dry bulb, dew point and humidity columns average over.

What this shows, and what it does not:

• There are fewer-rain months, not dry months. PAGASA's climate page describes a national rainy season from June to November and a dry season from December to May. Dumaguete's own sheet does not follow that label: December has 12 rainy days and 134.0 mm, January 11 and 96.7 mm. The fewest rainy days are in April (5, 49.1 mm) and March (7, 68.2 mm), and the most are in July (14) and October (13, 158.6 mm, the highest rainfall). No month has fewer than five rainy days. So we do not tell anyone to wait for dry months.
• A cold morning is not the risk here. The manual's 55°F is about 12.8°C, and Nippon's primer sheet says not to apply below 7°C and its Floor-Pro 702 sheet sets a 10°C minimum. Dumaguete's normal daily minimum never falls below 24.4°C. Rain and humidity are what stop painting, not cold.
• The humidity limit sits close to normal. All three Nippon sheets we read set a humidity ceiling and a dew-point margin: the primer and epoxy hybrid sheets say not to apply when relative humidity exceeds 85%, Floor-Pro 702 asks for relative humidity under 85%, and all three want the surface at least 3°C above the dew point. Dumaguete's normal humidity runs 79 to 84%, and the normal air-minus-dew-point gap runs 3.0 to 4.1°C. Those are averages over PAGASA's observation hours, and the sheets' rule is a reading taken on the slab at the time of application, so an average cannot tell you whether a particular morning passes. What it does say is that the margin is thin in ordinary weather. Expect some mornings, and the hours after rain, when the check says wait.
• A hot slab is a different limit. Floor-Pro 702's sheet limits concrete temperature to 35°C and recommends coating in the cool morning or evening. Dumaguete's normal daily maximum air temperature runs 29.2 to 31.9°C. A slab in full sun is usually hotter than the air above it (our reasoning, not a PAGASA figure), so measure the slab surface, not the weather app.
• Typhoons are a separate delay. PAGASA's tropical cyclone page says an average of 20 tropical cyclones a year enter the Philippine Area of Responsibility, about 8 or 9 of them crossing the Philippines, with the peak of the season from July through October. A typhoon shutdown is not a rainy day. Carry extra float if your painting weeks fall in those months.

This is one coastal station. Bais, Tanjay, Manjuyod, Canlaon and the other towns have their own weather, and an inland or upland site can differ from a station 7 metres above sea level. We read only the Dumaguete sheet, and the calculator's rain mode is only as good as that one sheet is for your site; use the “own number” setting if you have a better local record. Our best time to build guide shows the same normals beside other stations and explains how a rain allowance works in a contract. Two differences from that guide are deliberate: its house planner counts a rainy day as 30% of a day lost to painting under a roof, while this tool defaults to a whole day because a court coat has no roof over it (both are AEDO assumptions), and the guide labels a month “dry” at 6 or fewer rainy days (April here, with 5), which is its own threshold and not a PAGASA label.

4. What Rain, Dew and Humidity Do at Each Step

Not every step cares. Some of what follows is read from a sheet, and some is our reasoning; each row says which.

5. Holds Set by the Product, Not the Crew

This is the point that surprises owners, and it is why the calculator has no crew-size input. Doubling the painters shortens the orange blocks in the figure and leaves every blue block exactly where it was. The slab does not cure faster for a bigger crew, a coat does not dry sooner because three people rolled it, and the 72 hours after the lines runs on the clock whoever is standing on the court.

Rain and rest days work the other way round: they add no-paint days in front of the work blocks, and sometimes push a coat to the next morning, but they do not make any wait shorter. The calculator reports the three effects separately so you can see them: the waits, the days added by the crew's calendar, and the days added by rain. Try the crew set to 7 days a week and then 5: only the middle number moves. Our how long to build a house guide makes the same point about the slab and formwork holds in a house, and our formwork removal guide covers the concrete side.

6. How AEDO Sequenced the Manjuyod Court

AEDO's 2-court job in Manjuyod, Negros Oriental, has a written painting plan, and we quote it here only as far as it goes. It is AEDO working practice on one job, not a code, and not a recommendation for your paint system.

• The system. One coat of epoxy primer, then two coats of rubberized top coat, with silica sand mixed into the second coat over the interior playing area only, plus line marking paint. No third coat: the plan treats the silica-loaded coat as the finished playing surface.
• Polishing comes before painting, by someone else. The plan sends polishing to a third party, who needs the slab cured, and tells them not to apply a densifier or hardener because a densified surface will not take the primer. It notes that subcontracting the polishing puts the slab-cure wait on the subcontractor's schedule.
• 28 days minimum before priming. The plan's coating-failure notes list coating green concrete too early as a major cause of failure and set 28 days as the minimum cure before priming, with a plastic-sheet test of 16 to 24 hours before any primer goes down.
• What the plan does with the cure window. It fills the window with other work in the scope: the front wall, plastering, lighting installation and clean-up, about 8.3 crew-days in all. It says that at a 7-day cure that float disappears, and that at 14 days the crew would be demobilised and recalled for painting. Read next to the 28-day rule in the same plan, the recall date is a labour decision, and the 28 days is the coating hold. We read the plan to mean the primer goes on after the 28 days, not at the crew's recall date.

That is the whole of what we publish of the programme. We do not publish the job's pricing breakdown, and the plan is for one site and one owner. The point for your court is the order: pour, cure, polish or prep, test, patch, prime, coat, coat, lines, wait, play, and a name against each hold. Our surface options guide shows the Manjuyod floor lines as built, and our paint peeling and blistering guide explains why the 28 days and the moisture test exist.

7. Choosing the Pour Month

Because the painting comes at least 28 days after the pour, the month you pour is the month, four weeks later, in which you want the fewest rain days. The table is the calculator's own result at its default settings (six-day crew, PAGASA Dumaguete normals, every rainy day stopping work, no extra dry-back day) for a pour on the first working day of each month (Monday to Saturday, skipping 1 January and 1 May as holidays; the pour dates are illustrative, and the 1 October row is already past). It is a model of averages, not a forecast, and one real year can look nothing like it.

Two readings, both from the model, and neither a promise. First, the rain allowance runs from 1 day (pours in February and March, so the painting lands in March and April, the months with the fewest rainy days in the normals) to 9 days (a June pour, painting in July, the month with the most). Second, the long cure dominates every row: the best row is still 43 days from pour to play. The practical lever is not to hunt for a dry month. It is to pour early enough that the cure ends before your deadline with room for the rain days, and to put the cure and paint dates into the programme and the contract on day one. Our best time to build guide explains how to write a rain-delay allowance into the contract, and the court construction cost guide covers the rest of the build. If you are converting an existing slab, set the slab to “existing” and the cure drops out; the moisture test and the flood test do not. See also our basketball to pickleball conversion guide and our line marking and colours guide for the lines step.

8. A Rain Plan to Agree Before Paint Goes On

Ask the applicator for the answers to these in writing, and put the answers in the contract or the quotation. None of them needs a price from us, and several of them are what separates a clean job from an argument in January.

• The go or no-go check on the morning. Who measures surface temperature, dew point and humidity on the slab, with what instrument, and who has the authority to say no. The sheets we read put the limits at 85% relative humidity and 3°C above dew point; the manual wants no precipitation in the immediate forecast when patching.
• What happens to a coat that is rained on before it dries. Redo at whose cost, and does the wait before the next coat restart. No data sheet we read answers this.
• Mixed material. A two-pack primer has a pot life measured in hours. Who pays for the pail that was mixed before the rain came.
• Remobilisation. Is there a charge to come back, and for how many rain days does the quoted date still hold.
• The cure before play. The applicator's written number for your product, and what rain during it does. The manual's 72 hours is a general figure.
• A named allowance. A number of rain days written into the programme for the painting weeks, using the PAGASA table above or your own record, so that a rainy week is a line in the log and not an argument. The contract-allowance approach is in our best time to build guide; it is contract practice, not a legal requirement, and a lawyer should read a large contract.

9. What AEDO Does

Frequently Asked Questions