Laundromat Benchmarks: Turns, Vend Prices, Utilities, Margin

By Jason Taken, business broker · HedgeStone Business Advisors · Updated 2026-09-04 · 8 min read

What These Numbers Are

Everything on this page comes from named, retrievable sources, and the qualifications matter as much as the figures.

The CLA's 2024 Laundry Industry Survey was fielded to operators in PlanetLaundry's circulation and reports 377 respondents who owned at least one self-service store, describing 2023 operations. It is a trade survey of engaged operators, not a probability sample of every U.S. store. It will skew toward operators who read industry publications and respond to surveys, which is a meaningfully different population from all laundromat owners.

BizBuySell's benchmarks cover 855 laundromat and coin-laundry sales reported to that platform over the five years ended 2025. Those are transactions reported to one marketplace, not every U.S. sale, and stores that come to market skew smaller than the surveyed operator base.

Census County Business Patterns counts employer establishments in NAICS 812310, a category titled Coin-Operated Laundries and Drycleaners that excludes businesses with no paid employees.

Use them to notice when a specific store is unusual and to ask why. Do not use them as targets, and do not blend them.

Store Profile

Source: CLA 2024 Laundry Industry Survey.

Revenue per square foot is the most portable of these. Store size varies enormously, and revenue alone tells you little without it. A 4,200 square-foot store doing $335,000 is a materially weaker business than a 2,100 square-foot store doing the same, and the per-square-foot figure surfaces that immediately.

The 56% rented figure is why lease term dominates so much of the discussion on this site.

Vend Prices

Mean 2023 washer vend prices by capacity:

Dryers were most often priced on time. Mean minutes per $0.25:

Source: CLA 2024 Laundry Industry Survey.

Two uses. Screening: a store priced well below these means either has unexercised pricing room or is defending against a nearby competitor — find out which before assuming the first. Modeling: these feed the physical revenue ceiling calculation, where a weighted average vend price across the actual machine mix bounds what a store can possibly produce.

Turns Per Day

Turns per day is paid washer cycles divided by installed washers and days measured. It is the metric that converts machine count into revenue capacity.

There is no universal national benchmark, and this page will not manufacture one. The Coin Laundry Association describes TPD as the standard equipment-performance metric but does not publish a single national figure on its public overview. Numbers circulating online as "the industry standard" are generally repeated rather than sourced.

Establish a store's own figure:

1. Count paid cycles over a defined period, from the payment system where one exists.
2. Divide by installed washers and by days.
3. Observe across different weekdays, including a first-of-month period and a weekend, because volume varies substantially.
4. Record which machines were out of service each time.

Then use it as a bound: machines × capacity × vend price × turns × 365 gives a ceiling that claimed revenue cannot exceed. That test has ended more overstated revenue claims than any document review.

Cost Structure

Source: CLA 2024 Laundry Industry Survey.

Occupancy cost is the line that is hardest to change after purchase, because it is set by a lease. All-in cost per square foot, including CAM, taxes, and insurance, is the comparable figure — not base rent.

Utilities deserve a specific caution: electricity has a published state benchmark, with the EIA reporting a 12.94 cents/kWh U.S. all-sector average for 2024 and wide state variation. Water and sewer have no equivalent, because they are set by the local utility, and sewer is frequently billed as a multiple of metered water. That makes state averages useless for underwriting a specific store.

Service Mix

Source: CLA 2024 Laundry Industry Survey.

The $0.40 spread between drop-off and delivery-inclusive pricing has to cover the entire route cost: vehicle, driver time, software, bags, claims, and rewash. See wash-and-fold and delivery economics.

Payment Mix

Multiple responses were allowed, so these percentages must not be added and the market must not be described as cashless. Most stores accept several methods.

Transaction Benchmarks

Source: BizBuySell Valuation Benchmarks, 2021-2025.

Note the gap between the survey's $335,000 median revenue and the transaction data's $219,878. Those describe different populations — engaged operators versus stores that came to market — and the difference is a reminder that "average laundromat" depends entirely on which average you mean.

Industry Scale

Never add these together, and never present CBP as the total number of laundromats.

Geographic Benchmarks

For comparing one market against another, Census County Business Patterns is the only dataset collected identically everywhere. The 2023 file reports employer establishments in NAICS 812310 by state and metro, which is a competition and supply signal rather than a store count — it excludes businesses with no paid employees and mixes in dry cleaners.

Alongside it, two demographic measures do most of the screening work:

The state pages and metro pages on this site carry all four for 50 states and 80 metros, along with the qualifications each one requires.

The critical omission from that list: water and sewer rates, which have no comparable national dataset because they are set by thousands of individual utilities. Sewer is frequently billed as a multiple of metered water, which often makes it the largest single utility line in a laundromat. There is no substitute for pulling the serving utility's current commercial schedule for a specific address.

How to Use a Benchmark Properly

A benchmark is a prompt for a question, not a verdict.

That last row matters most. A store that beats every operating benchmark on numbers nobody can verify is not a good store — it is an unverified claim.

Benchmarks This Site Will Not Publish

Because no credible source supports them:

• A national failure rate. Figures circulating online trace to other content pages, not to a dataset.
• A universal turns-per-day standard. Establish it per store.
• A national average water bill or sewer multiplier. Both are local.
• A state-specific valuation multiple. No source produces one.
• A single water-to-revenue ratio. The honest output of that analysis is a range.

Summary

Use these as comparisons, not targets, and keep the qualifications attached: a 377-respondent trade survey for operations, an 855-transaction marketplace dataset for prices, and Census establishment counts for geography. Revenue per square foot and utility share are the two most useful screens. Turns per day has to be observed rather than looked up. And where no credible number exists, the honest answer is that none exists.

The Next Step

This page is general information about laundromat transactions, not legal, tax, or investment advice, and not a guarantee of sale price, timing, or financing approval. Verify current rules with your own CPA, attorney, lender, and the relevant state or municipal agency before acting.