We investigate electron spin relaxation in p-type GaAs quantum wells from a fully microscopic kinetic spin Bloch equation approach, with all the relevant scatterings, such as electron–impurity, electron–phonon, electron–electron Coulomb, electron–hole Coulomb and electron–hole exchange (the Bir–Aronov–Pikus (BAP) mechanism) scatterings, explicitly included. Via this approach, we examine the relative importance of the D'yakonov–Perel' (DP) and BAP mechanisms in wide ranges of temperature, hole density, excitation density and impurity density, and present a phase-diagram-like picture showing the parameter regime where the DP or BAP mechanism is more important. It is discovered that in the impurity-free case the temperature regime where the BAP mechanism is more efficient than the DP one is around the hole Fermi temperature for high hole density, regardless of excitation density. However, in the high impurity density case with the impurity density identical to the hole density, this regime is roughly from the electron Fermi temperature to the hole Fermi temperature. Moreover, we predict that for the impurity-free case, in the regime where the DP mechanism dominates the spin relaxation at all temperatures, the temperature dependence of the spin relaxation time (SRT) presents a peak around the hole Fermi temperature, which originates from the electron–hole Coulomb scattering. We also predict that at low temperature, the hole-density dependence of the electron SRT exhibits a double-peak structure in the impurity-free case, whereas it shows first a peak and then a valley in the case of identical impurity and hole densities. These intriguing behaviors are due to the contribution from holes in high subbands.