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How much does a laundromat make a year?

Estimate what a laundromat actually pays its owner in a year. Bring your own turns per day, vend prices, rent and utility share (we will not guess them for you) and the ledger shows where the money goes on the way from the coin drop to your pocket: the utility bill that scales with every load, the rent that does not, and the labour that decides whether you own a business or a job.

§ 01 Your numbers

Change anything. The answer updates as you type.

Working washers on the floor. Count the ones that actually run, not the ones in the corner waiting for a part.
How many wash cycles one washer runs in a day, averaged across the week. This is the single figure that decides the store. If you are buying, ask the seller for water bills and back into it rather than taking a number on trust.
Blended across your machine sizes, since a large front loader vends for more than a small top loader. Your own figure; ours is a placeholder.
What a customer feeds the dryers for each load they washed. Dryers earn per minute rather than per cycle, so this is easier to estimate as a share of the wash than as a machine count.
Drop-off service, soap and snack vending, card fees you keep. Averaged to a monthly figure.
Base rent plus common area charges. Put zero only if you own the building outright, and read the note below before you do.
Water, sewer, gas and electricity together. This is the line to pull off the seller's actual bills, because it swings with local water and sewer rates more than with anything you control.
Wages plus your share of payroll taxes. Set it to zero for an unattended store, but then the hours are yours and the total below is your wage as much as your profit.
Liability insurance, parts and service calls, cleaning supplies, alarm and internet, and the processor's cut of card payments.
Estimated owner income per year
$33,343

Typical range $3,778 – $62,908

  • Wash and dry vend income$147,825
  • Wash-dry-fold, vending and other income$18,000
  • Water, sewer, gas and electricity-$36,482
  • Rent-$48,000
  • Attendant payroll-$31,200
  • Insurance, repairs, supplies and card fees-$16,800
  • Total$33,343
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$25,000 to $75,000 a year is a job you own. Worth checking how many of your own hours are inside that figure before you call it profit.

What this assumes, and where it could be wrong

Every one of these is a place the number could be off. They are here because you should be able to check our working, not because we are hedging.

WE DO NOT GUESS YOUR TURNS, YOUR RENT OR YOUR UTILITY SHARE, ON PURPOSE.
Those three decide the whole number and all three are local to one address. Turns per day is set by how many households near you do not have a washer at home; rent is set by your landlord; the utility share is set by your county's water and sewer rates, which vary far more than people expect. Our defaults are placeholders to overwrite. If you are buying an existing store, the figures to ask for by name are two years of water bills, two years of utility bills and the lease, and the water bills are the honest way to check a seller's turns claim, because water is metered whether or not the income was banked
TURNS ARE THE BUSINESS, AND THEY MOVE THE TOTAL WITH LEVERAGE RATHER THAN IN PROPORTION.
Rent, insurance and most of the payroll are the same bill whether your washers run twice a day or four times. So a change in turns does not scale your income, it scales your revenue against fixed costs that do not move, and the owner's income is what is left over after those. At our own placeholder defaults, rent and utilities together take roughly half the revenue before an hour of labour is paid, which is why a store with weak footfall can be busy, tidy, well run and still pay its owner very little

Utilities are modelled as a share of revenue, not as a fixed bill. Water and gas scale with wash loads, so a store that turns more pays more, and the share is roughly steady while the bill is not. That is the shape that fits a laundromat; if your bills say otherwise, set the percentage from your own figures.

The range flexes footfall, not the costs. Turns move with the season, the weather and the neighbourhood, while rent and payroll are contracted, so the high and low widen around vend income and hold the cost lines still. It is our own sensitivity band, not a survey of what other stores earned.

This total is pre-tax business income, before any loan payment on the purchase or the equipment, and before the cost of replacing machines as they age. If you own the building, put zero rent in and treat the difference as the rent your building is earning rather than as extra profit.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a laundromat make a year?
It depends almost entirely on turns: how many wash cycles each washer runs in a day at that address. This page asks for that rather than printing a figure, because two stores with identical machine counts and different footfall earn nothing alike, and a figure that fits one of them misleads the other. The shape worth understanding is that vend income scales with turns while rent, insurance and most of the payroll do not. So the money left for the owner is the gap between a revenue line that moves and a cost stack that largely holds still, and that gap widens and narrows much faster than the turns number itself does. Put your own turns, prices, rent, utility share and payroll into the form above and the ledger will show you where the money goes.
How do I check a seller's numbers when I am buying a laundromat?
Ask for the water bills, then do the arithmetic yourself. Water is metered by the utility rather than reported by the seller, so gallons are hard to inflate, and a wash load uses a fairly predictable quantity of water for a given machine size. Divide the metered gallons by the per-load figure on your machines' spec sheets and you have an independent estimate of the loads that store really ran, which you can compare against the income the seller is claiming. Ask for two years of them, along with the gas and electric bills and the lease, and treat any gap between the water story and the income story as the thing to resolve before you sign anything.
Is an unattended laundromat more profitable?
Set the payroll input to zero and the calculator will price it for you, but read the total carefully when you do. Cutting the attendant removes a real cost and usually removes some revenue with it, because wash-dry-fold service needs a person and and that service carries a better margin than the coin drop does. It also moves the hours onto you, which means the total is no longer purely profit; part of it is your wage for the cleaning, the change runs, the repairs and the calls. Run it both ways with an honest wash-dry-fold figure for each and compare what you keep per hour, not what you keep per year.
Why is my utility share so much higher than I expected?
Because water and sewer are usually billed together and sewer is often the larger half, charged on the assumption that everything metered in also goes out. A laundromat is close to the ideal customer for that arithmetic, so the sewer line can rival the water line even though nobody thinks of it as a cost of washing. Gas for the water heaters and dryers is the next piece, and it moves with the weather. This is the input to take from a real bill rather than an estimate, because it varies by county in a way that has nothing to do with how well the store is run.

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