How often is a passenger jet aircraft painted? I just read an article (published in 2012) telling the special livery for British airways' A320 to celebrate the Olympics game is made to last one year. I assume this mean those aircraft are painted once per year because painting is not free and thus it is reasonnable to change the livery only when painting is already schedule. But because this is a special livery, it may last less than other painting. As this is only assumptions, my question is the following:

How often is an Airbus or a Boeing painted (even without changing the livery)? Does it significally change from on airline to another? Does a special livery change this frequency?
As always, it depends. From what I've seen and read, it's usually redone every 5-10 years. This can vary on various factors from paintshop availability, to new color scheme rollout, to deterioration of the previous one due to bad painting, to quality of the paint used. Sometimes, special liveries are just an aviation specific sticker that's put onto an aircraft, other times it's fully painted onto the aircraft, just depending on the airline, the planned length of time for it to be special, and any other considerations.