Laundry Cost Calculator

Introduction to the Real Cost of One Laundry Load

A load of laundry never appears as its own line on any bill, which is exactly why its cost hides in plain sight. The washer draws a modest amount of electricity for its motor and controls, the water heater quietly burns fuel to bring the wash fill up to temperature, the dryer pulls several kilowatt-hours over half an hour, the water utility bills both the water and the sewer volume, and a dose of detergent disappears. None of that feels like money at the moment you press start, yet a household running five loads a week is spending somewhere between $130 and $400 a year on the routine.

This calculator pulls those pieces apart and prices them separately, so you get one auditable number: what a complete wash-and-dry cycle costs on your machines, at your utility rates. It is built around published figures rather than round guesses. Water volumes come from the ENERGY STAR clothes washer program, dryer energy comes from the U.S. Department of Energy combined energy factor that appears on every dryer's efficiency rating, energy prices default to the U.S. Energy Information Administration national residential averages, and the water-heating arithmetic uses the ordinary physics of raising a known mass of water through a known temperature rise.

The important modelling decision is that water heating is treated as a separate line item. Most simple laundry calculators multiply a washer's nameplate wattage by the cycle length and stop there, which quietly ignores the largest energy demand a wash creates. ENERGY STAR reports that water heating accounts for roughly 90 percent of the energy a clothes washer consumes, and on most American machines that energy is bought from the house water heater rather than from the washer's own plug. Ignoring it makes a hot wash look identical to a cold wash, which is the single most useful comparison a laundry calculator can make.

How to Use the Laundry Cost Calculator Inputs

Every field maps to one physical part of a laundry cycle. Most values can be read off an appliance label, an EnergyGuide sticker, or a recent utility bill, and each field is pre-filled with a defensible national default so the tool produces a sensible answer before you change anything.

Washer and water volume

Pick a washer type and the calculator fills in a water volume and a machine-energy figure for you. ENERGY STAR reports that a full-sized certified clothes washer uses about 14 gallons per load against about 20 gallons for a standard new machine, and older conventional top-loaders with a center agitator typically fall in the 30 to 45 gallon range because they fill the tub rather than tumbling clothes through a shallow bath. Choosing Custom leaves the gallons field alone so you can enter a measured value from your own manual.

The wash-fill share is the fraction of that total water volume drawn for the wash itself rather than for rinses. Only the wash fill can be heated: essentially every residential machine sold in the United States rinses in cold water, and the DOE test procedure assumes exactly that. A 50 percent default means half the load's water is the wash fill and half is rinse water.

Wash temperature and water heating

The wash temperature setting is converted into a hot-water fraction rather than a target temperature, because that is how a mixing valve actually behaves: cold draws 0 percent hot, warm draws about 50 percent hot, and hot draws 100 percent hot. The DOE clothes-washer test procedure holds the hot supply between 130 and 135 degrees Fahrenheit and the cold supply between 55 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and tests warm settings at fixed positions between the two extremes, which is where the 50 percent figure comes from.

Your water heater type sets a uniform energy factor (UEF), the ratio of useful heat delivered to energy purchased. Electric resistance storage tanks land near 0.92, ENERGY STAR heat-pump water heaters reach 3.30 or better because they move heat rather than make it, gas storage tanks sit near 0.64, and gas tankless units near 0.87. Set the heater setpoint to the temperature on your tank dial; the DOE recommends 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The incoming water temperature is your cold main, typically 50 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit depending on climate and season.

Drying

Dryers are rated by combined energy factor (CEF), the pounds of clothes dried per kilowatt-hour of total energy including standby. The federal minimum for a standard vented electric dryer is 3.73 pounds per kWh and for a standard vented gas dryer 3.30 pounds per kWh. The DOE test load is 8.45 pounds of dry cloth for standard-capacity machines and 3 pounds for compact machines, so entering your own realistic load weight scales the result honestly. Choosing line dry sets the drying energy to zero, which is the single largest lever on the whole estimate.

Rates and supplies

The electricity rate defaults to 17.3 cents per kWh, the EIA national residential average for 2025. The gas rate defaults to $1.48 per therm, derived from the EIA 2025 residential price of $15.34 per thousand cubic feet at roughly 10.37 therms per thousand cubic feet. The water and sewer rate should be the combined figure from your bill: choose the unit your utility prints (per gallon, per 1,000 gallons, per CCF of 748 gallons, or per cubic meter of 264.172 gallons) and the calculator converts it. Finally, detergent and supplies is what one dose of detergent plus any softener or booster costs; divide a bulk container's price by the number of loads printed on the label.

The Per-Load Laundry Cost Formula and Its Constants

The estimate is built from four independent pieces that are then added. Nothing is weighted or fudged, so every figure the tool reports can be reproduced with a pocket calculator.

First, the energy needed to heat the wash fill. The mass of water is its volume times 8.34 pounds per gallon, the specific heat of water is 1 British thermal unit per pound per degree Fahrenheit, and 1 kilowatt-hour equals 3,412.14 British thermal units:

Here G is gallons per load, s is the wash-fill share, f is the hot-water fraction for the chosen temperature, T_set is the water-heater setpoint, T_in is the incoming cold temperature, and UEF is the water-heater uniform energy factor. If the setpoint is at or below the incoming temperature the term is held at zero rather than allowed to go negative.

Second, the dryer. Combined energy factor is defined as load weight divided by cycle energy, so the cycle energy is simply the inverse:

For a gas dryer that same quantity is the total cycle energy expressed in kilowatt-hour equivalents. The calculator subtracts the auxiliary electricity the drum motor and controls draw, then converts the remainder to therms at 100,000 British thermal units per therm:

Third, water and sewer. The billed rate is divided by the number of gallons in its unit before being multiplied by the load volume:

Fourth, the total. Every electrical term is priced at one electricity rate, the gas term at the gas rate, and detergent enters at face value:

Turning one cycle into a household budget is a straight multiplication by the number of loads you run, where n is loads per week:

Worked Example: A Warm HE Wash With a Vented Electric Dryer

Run the calculator on its defaults and every intermediate figure can be checked by hand. The setup is an ENERGY STAR front-load washer at 14.0 gallons per load, a 50 percent wash-fill share, a warm wash, an electric resistance water heater at UEF 0.92 with a 120 degree setpoint and a 58 degree incoming main, 0.12 kWh of washer machine energy, a vented electric dryer at the federal minimum 3.73 pounds per kWh drying an 8.45 pound load, electricity at $0.173 per kWh, water and sewer at $12.00 per 1,000 gallons, and $0.28 of detergent.

Step 1: hot water volume

The wash fill is 14.0 gallons multiplied by the 50 percent share, or 7.0 gallons. A warm setting draws half of that as hot water, so 3.50 gallons of heated water enter the machine.

Step 2: heat required and energy purchased

3.50 gallons weigh 3.50 × 8.34 = 29.19 pounds. Raising that from 58 to 120 degrees is a 62 degree rise, so the heat needed is 29.19 × 62 = 1,809.8 British thermal units, or 1,809.8 ÷ 3,412.14 = 0.530 kWh delivered. Dividing by the 0.92 uniform energy factor gives 0.577 kWh purchased, which at $0.173 costs $0.0997.

Step 3: washer machine energy

The drum motor, pump, and controls draw 0.12 kWh, which costs 0.12 × $0.173 = $0.0208. That is the entire electrical cost of the washer's own plug, and it is deliberately small.

Step 4: dryer energy

8.45 pounds divided by 3.73 pounds per kWh is 2.265 kWh, costing 2.265 × $0.173 = $0.3919. The dryer alone is roughly four times the warm-wash water heating and nineteen times the washer's own draw.

Step 5: water, sewer, and detergent

$12.00 per 1,000 gallons is $0.012 per gallon, so 14 gallons costs 14 × $0.012 = $0.168. Detergent adds $0.28 flat.

Step 6: the total

Adding the five components gives $0.0997 + $0.0208 + $0.3919 + $0.168 + $0.28 = $0.96 per load, using 2.96 kWh and 14 gallons. At five loads a week that is about $4.80 a week, $20.81 a month, and $249.71 a year. Switching the wash to cold removes the $0.0997 heating line and takes the load to about $0.86. Line drying instead removes the $0.3919 dryer line and takes it to about $0.57. Doing both lands near $0.47, less than half the starting figure.

Reference Figures Behind the Defaults

The table below collects the published values the calculator ships with, so you can see at a glance which number you would need to change to model a different household. Every figure is editable in the form.

Reading the Result and Comparing Habits

The headline number is one complete wash-and-dry cycle. On its own a figure such as "$0.96" means little, so the calculator also prints the two comparison scenarios that matter most, and it helps to know where your own result sits:

• Under about $0.60 per load: efficient machine, cold or warm wash, and either a heat-pump dryer or a drying rack.
• $0.60 to $1.20 per load: the common band for an efficient washer with a conventional vented electric dryer at average U.S. rates.
• Above $1.50 per load: expect high local electricity or water prices, an old high-fill washer, hot washes as the default, or an oversized load weight.

The two habit levers dwarf everything else. Dropping a warm wash to cold removes the entire water-heating line, which at default rates is around 10 cents a load or about $26 a year at five loads a week. Line drying removes the dryer line, which is around 39 cents a load or roughly $102 a year on the same schedule. Buying cheaper detergent, by contrast, might move the total by two or three cents. If your goal is to cut the laundry bill, the order of operations is drying first, wash temperature second, and everything else a distant third.

One habit the calculator cannot price directly is load size. Because a washer uses close to the same water and the same wash-fill heat whether it is half full or full, running fewer, fuller loads reduces the number of cycles you multiply by. Change the loads-per-week field rather than the per-load cost to model that.

Limitations and Assumptions of This Laundry Estimate

This is a usage estimate, not a full accounting of every dollar laundry touches. Knowing where the boundaries sit keeps you from over-trusting the number:

• Average power, not a measured profile. Real machines vary their draw across fill, agitation, spin, and heat stages. The calculator uses one machine-energy figure per load rather than integrating a real power curve.
• Cold rinses assumed. Only the wash fill is heated. If your machine offers a warm rinse and you use it, raise the wash-fill share to reflect the extra heated volume.
• Onboard washer heaters ignored by default. Some machines heat water internally with a resistance element in the tub. Model that by choosing the internal-heater option, which sets the uniform energy factor to 1.00 and prices the heat at the electricity rate.
• No moisture-sensor credit. Combined energy factor already reflects a standard cycle, but a modern moisture sensor that ends the cycle early on a small load will beat the rated figure, and an over-dry setting will lose to it.
• No equipment ownership costs. Purchase price, delivery, installation, maintenance, repairs, and eventual replacement are excluded. That is why a home load looks so much cheaper than a laundromat cycle, which bundles all of it into the coin price.
• No fixed utility charges. Monthly service fees, minimum bills, demand charges, and taxes are not modelled. Only the marginal usage cost of one more load is.
• National default rates. Electricity and gas defaults are national averages. State-level electricity prices range from about 12 cents to more than 46 cents per kWh, so replacing the rate with your own bill figure changes the answer far more than any other single edit.

Because of these assumptions the result is best used comparatively: run it twice with one field changed and trust the difference more than the absolute figure.

Frequently Asked Questions About Laundry Costs

Sources and Standards Checked for These Figures

Every default in the form was checked against a primary source rather than a secondary summary. The water and dryer efficiency figures come from federal efficiency programs, the prices come from federal energy statistics, and the thermodynamic constants are standard unit definitions.

• ENERGY STAR: Clothes Washers - certified full-size washers use about 14 gallons per load versus about 20 gallons for a standard machine, roughly 20 percent less energy and 30 percent less water, and water heating is about 90 percent of a washer's energy use.
• ENERGY STAR: Clothes Dryers Key Product Criteria - combined energy factor definition, the 8.45 pound standard test load and 3 pound compact test load, and the certification thresholds above the federal minimums of 3.73 lb per kWh electric and 3.30 lb per kWh gas.
• ENERGY STAR: Heat Pump Dryers - certified heat-pump dryers use at least 28 percent less energy than a standard dryer, which is the basis for the 5.20 lb per kWh default.
• 10 CFR Part 430, Subpart B, Appendix J2 (DOE clothes washer test procedure) - hot supply held at 130-135 degrees Fahrenheit, cold supply at 55-60 degrees Fahrenheit, and warm settings tested at fixed positions between them.
• U.S. EIA Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.3 - U.S. residential electricity averaged 17.30 cents per kWh in 2025 and 18.11 cents per kWh year to date through May 2026.
• U.S. EIA Natural Gas Prices - the U.S. residential price averaged $15.34 per thousand cubic feet in 2025, about $1.48 per therm at roughly 10.37 therms per thousand cubic feet.
• EPA WaterSense: How the WaterSense Calculator Works - assumes $6.06 per 1,000 gallons for water alone, which is why the combined water-and-sewer default here is set higher and left editable.
• U.S. DOE Energy Saver: Laundry - washing in warm rather than hot can cut a load's energy roughly in half, and washers use about the same energy regardless of load size.

Unit conversions use exact or standard definitions: 1 therm is 100,000 British thermal units by definition, 1 kilowatt-hour is 3,412.14 British thermal units, water weighs about 8.34 pounds per U.S. gallon near room temperature with a specific heat of 1 British thermal unit per pound per degree Fahrenheit, 1 CCF is 748 gallons, and 1 cubic meter is 264.172 gallons.