Laundromat Industry Outlook: What the Data Actually Shows

By Jason Taken, business broker · HedgeStone Business Advisors · Updated 2026-09-04 · 9 min read

How Many Stores, and Why Two Numbers

Two counts circulate, and they answer different questions. They should never be combined.

The CLA figure is the right one for an industry-size statement. The Census figure is the right one for consistent comparisons between states and metros, because it is collected the same way everywhere.

The gap between them is mostly stores with no payroll — which is a substantial share of this industry, since many laundromats run unattended with the owner performing the work.

Who Owns Them

The CLA's 2024 survey reached 377 respondents who owned at least one self-service store. It is a trade survey, and not a probability sample of every U.S. store, and it is the best publicly available operator data.

Three-quarters of responding organizations owned one or two stores. That is the shape of this industry, and it holds even alongside the consolidation activity that gets discussed. See roll-ups and private equity.

Ownership of the premises splits too: 56% of respondents rented their space and 44% owned it. That single figure explains why lease term is the most consequential variable in most laundromat transactions — for the majority of stores, the right to occupy is granted rather than owned.

The Physical Profile

The mean machine count breaks into 36.5 washers and 30.4 dryer pockets. Dryer pockets are counted separately from dryer cabinets, which matters when comparing machine counts between stores.

These figures describe an illustrative store instead of a target. A 1,600 square foot store and a 4,500 square foot store are both ordinary, and revenue per square foot is the more useful comparison.

Revenue and Cost Structure

From the same survey, for 2023 operations:

Two cautions the survey itself flags, and they matter.

The rent mean is pulled upward by extreme responses. The median of 18% is the more representative figure.

The 27% operating profit is not what a buyer receives. It excludes taxes, debt service, and owner compensation, and it does not account for a replacement reserve for equipment. It is a useful operating benchmark and it is emphatically not a return, not free cash flow, and not a cash-on-cash figure.

How Do You Price and Services?

Mean 2023 washer vend prices from the survey, by machine size:

Dryer pricing was most often time-based, with mean minutes per $0.25 of 6.2 for 30 lb pockets, 4.9 for 45 lb, 4.0 for 50 lb, and 3.3 for 75 lb.

On the service side: median drop-off wash-dry-fold base price was $1.50 per pound, and the median base price including pickup and delivery was $1.90 per pound. Sixty-five percent of respondents offered drop-off wash-dry-fold, 38% offered pickup and delivery, and 51% served at least one commercial account. Sixty percent said wash-dry-fold customer levels increased somewhat or significantly from 2022 to 2023.

The attendant wage reported for 2023 was a $15.57 median and $15.34 mean for non-management attendants.

Payment Adoption

The survey allowed multiple responses, so the percentages describe what stores accept, not a market share split:

Only 21% were quarter-only and 12% laundry-card-only. Do not add these percentages, and do not describe the market as cashless. The accurate reading is that payment is hybrid — coin remains common while cards and apps have meaningful adoption, frequently within the same store.

For a buyer, the relevance is verification. Machine-level cycle revenue, starts, pricing changes, refunds, and collection records can be compared against deposits and utility consumption. That does not make diligence automatic: stored-value loads, machine-cycle revenue, promotions, management starts, cash, processing fees, and unsettled transactions all have to be distinguished.

What Operators Say Is Hard

Utilities lead by a wide margin, and that ranking is itself a signal about direction. Operators do not name a cost as their leading problem when it is stable.

Electricity has a published state benchmark — the EIA reports all-sector average retail prices by state, with a 12.94 cents/kWh U.S. average for 2024 (Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration) — and the state pages on this site carry each state's figure. Water and sewer do not, because the serving utility sets them, and sewer billed as a multiple of metered water is frequently the largest utility line in a laundromat.

On the efficiency side, ENERGY STAR reports that certified commercial washers are on average 9% more energy efficient and use about 45% less water than standard models (Source: ENERGY STAR). That applies to qualifying models and should be modeled against a specific store's cycle volume and tariffs rather than applied as a blanket percentage.

Transaction Activity

Forty-seven percent of surveyed operators planned at least one acquisition, sale, or new build in the following twelve months: 21% planned to buy an existing store, 17% to sell, and 13% to build.

On the transaction side, across 855 laundromat and coin-laundry sales reported to BizBuySell for 2021-2025, the median sale price was $250,000 on median owner earnings of $76,560 — a 3.50x median earnings multiple, with the middle half of deals between 2.72x and 4.50x (Source: BizBuySell, 2021-2025). Median time on market was 139 days to an accepted offer.

Read the two together and the picture is a functioning, liquid small-business market: a meaningful share of operators transacting each year, at multiples clustered in a defined band, with a few months of marketing time.

What the Data Does Not Support

Stated plainly, because these claims circulate widely and none of them survives sourcing:

No national failure rate. No defensible figure exists in the available data. Any specific number — favorable or unfavorable — should be treated as unsourced.

No single national turns-per-day benchmark. Turns per day is the standard equipment-performance metric, and no universal national figure should be presented as Census or CLA data without a retrieved table.

No national average water bill or sewer multiplier. Water and sewer are set by the serving utility and vary by meter size. A national average is not usable for underwriting a specific store.

No support for calling laundromats passive income. Store oversight, collections, repairs, cleaning, staffing, pricing, customer issues, and capital planning remain operating work even when tasks are delegated. Semi-absentee ownership is achievable at some stores and it costs real margin.

The 27% operating profit is not a return. It is before tax, before debt service, before owner compensation, and before any replacement reserve.

What This Means for a Buyer or Seller

For a buyer: the benchmarks are for testing a specific store, not for predicting one. A store at 26% utilities against a 20% median is not necessarily worse-run; it needs an explanation, and the six causes are checkable. Revenue per square foot against the $120 median is a fast reasonableness check once you know the store's size.

For a seller: the same benchmarks are what a buyer's analyst will compare your store against, so knowing where you sit — and why — turns diligence from an interrogation into a conversation.

For both: the fragmentation figure matters most. Three-quarters of surveyed organizations own one or two stores, which means most transactions in this industry are between individuals, priced on documented earnings, and decided by lease term and evidence quality.

How to Use These Benchmarks Without Misusing Them

Three rules that prevent most of the errors this data produces.

Never mix populations. The CLA survey describes stores whose owners responded; the transaction data describes stores that sold; County Business Patterns describes employer establishments. Each answers a different question, and combining them — using survey revenue with transaction multiples, for instance — compares different sets of stores.

Treat every figure as a question and not an answer. A store at 26% utilities against the 20% median is not condemned; it needs an explanation, and there are six checkable causes. A store at $95 revenue per square foot against a $120 median is either under-performing or unusually large, and finding out which matters more than the gap.

Watch the definitions. Machine counts include dryer pockets counted separately from cabinets. Payroll percentages exclude stores with no payroll. Operating profit excludes tax, debt service, and owner compensation. Payment-acceptance percentages allow multiple responses and do not sum to a market share. Each of those definitional details changes what a comparison means.

The benchmarks are useful precisely because they are specific and sourced. They stop being useful the moment they are used as targets rather than as tests.

Summary

The U.S. laundromat industry is roughly 29,500 stores producing nearly $5 billion in gross revenue, owned overwhelmingly by operators with one or two locations, running a median $335,000 of revenue at 20% utilities and 18% rent. Utilities are the leading operator concern by a wide margin. The transaction market is liquid at a 3.50x median earnings multiple. And several widely repeated claims — a national failure rate, a universal turns benchmark, a national water cost, and passive income — are not supported by any of it.

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.