Laundromat Market Report: Closed Sales, Multiples, and What Moves Them

By Jason Taken, business broker · HedgeStone Business Advisors · Updated 2026-09-04 · 10 min read

The Closed-Sale Numbers

BizBuySell reports 855 laundromat and coin-laundry sales over the five years ended 2025. These are transactions reported to that platform rather than every U.S. sale, which makes them the best publicly available transaction evidence and not a census.

(Source: BizBuySell, 2021-2025 closed sales.)

The same source reports a 2025 average earnings multiple of 4.12x, a 2025 median sale price of $287,000, and a 2025 sale-to-ask ratio of 0.91. Single-year figures are noisier than the five-year distribution and should always carry their year label.

The Two Datasets Describe Different Stores

A discrepancy worth understanding, because mixing the two produces nonsense.

Two plausible explanations, and both probably contribute. Smaller stores transact more often, so a set of stores that sold skews smaller than a set of stores being operated. And survey respondents skew toward engaged operators — people who read the trade publication and complete a survey are not a random sample of every owner.

The practical instruction: use the transaction data to price a sale, and the operator survey to benchmark operations. Applying survey revenue medians to a transaction analysis, or vice versa, compares different populations.

What the Multiple Actually Measures

The 3.50x median applies to owner earnings — normalized seller's discretionary earnings, after adjusting the filed return for owner compensation, non-recurring items, and documented personal expenses, and after deducting a market wage for owner labor a buyer will not perform.

That last deduction is where presented multiples and real multiples most often diverge. A store advertised at "3.2x" on earnings that include the owner's 25 unpaid weekly hours is not a 3.2x store to a buyer who must hire.

The revenue multiple — median 1.21x, middle half 0.93x to 1.64x — is a cross-check, not a method. Identical revenue produces different earnings after rent, utilities, labor, repairs, and service mix, and buyers finance earnings.

Where a Store Lands in the Range

The spread from 2.72x to 4.50x is the whole question. On the median store's $76,560 of earnings, that range spans roughly $208,000 to $345,000 — a difference of about $137,000 on identical earnings.

Evidence that moves a store up:

Evidence that moves a store down: thin margins, heavy owner involvement, direct competition, a short or non-assignable lease, undocumented cash, deferred repairs, concentrated accounts, and near-term capital expenditure.

Note that four of the six upward factors are documentary rather than operational. A store can be well run and still price at the bottom of the range because nobody can prove it.

Days on Market, Read Correctly

The 139-day median measures listing to accepted offer. It does not measure listing to funded closing, and it does not start when an owner decides to sell.

The full timeline for a prepared seller with a financed buyer:

Six to nine months end to end is realistic. The three middle-stage items run in parallel, not in sequence, which explains why they add 60 to 90 days rather than several months — provided all three start in the first week after an accepted offer.

Asking Versus Achieved

Median asking across the dataset was $275,000 against a $250,000 median sale, and the reported 2025 sale-to-ask ratio was 0.91.

What that does not mean: that any given store should be priced 10% above target, or that any offer should open 9% below asking. It is a market-wide average across stores priced well and priced badly.

What it does mean: overpricing produces days on market rather than dollars. A store asking above what its earnings support sits, then reduces, and carries the stigma of having sat. The 139-day median already reflects a market where stores take months to sell when priced correctly.

Transaction Activity in Context

The CLA's 2024 survey found 47% of responding operators planning at least one acquisition, sale, or new build within twelve months: 21% planned to buy an existing store, 17% to sell, and 13% to build (Source: Coin Laundry Association, 2024 Laundry Industry Survey).

Set that alongside an industry the CLA estimates at about 29,500 coin laundries generating nearly $5 billion in annual gross revenue (Source: Coin Laundry Association, Industry Overview), and against Census County Business Patterns reporting 10,890 employer establishments in NAICS 812310 for 2023 (Source: U.S. Census Bureau).

The picture is a liquid small-business market: a fragmented owner base, a meaningful share transacting each year, multiples clustered in a defined band, and a few months of marketing time.

Using This Report

If you are selling: find where your store sits against the six upward factors, not against the median price. The median tells you about the market; the factors tell you about your store. Most of them are improvable with 12 to 24 months of work, and the improvement is worth six figures on a typical store.

If you are buying: use the range as a starting point and the factors as the pricing argument. A store with a six-year lease, no card system, and a fleet approaching replacement does not deserve the median multiple, and saying so with evidence is a stronger position than negotiating on the headline.

For both: the numbers here bound a conversation. They do not price a specific store, because a specific store's price depends on documented earnings, a lease, a machine schedule, a utility position, and a trade area — none of which appear in a national median.

How Do You Read the Quartiles Rather Than the Median?

Most people take the median from a dataset like this and stop. The quartiles carry more information.

The earnings multiple's lower quartile is 2.72x and its upper quartile is 4.50x. That means a quarter of reported sales closed below 2.72x and a quarter closed above 4.50x — so the "typical" band is wide, and the tails are populated.

The revenue multiple quartiles tell a similar story: 0.93x to 1.64x. A store selling at 0.93x revenue and one selling at 1.64x are both ordinary transactions, and the difference between them is a factor of nearly two on identical revenue.

The practical use is calibration. A seller told their store is worth "about 3.5x" has been given the middle of a wide distribution, not an assessment. The useful question is which quartile the store's evidence supports — and that question has a checkable answer based on the lease, the documentation, the equipment, and the utility position.

The same applies to a buyer hearing that a store is priced "at market." At market where in the distribution, and on what evidence?

What This Report Cannot Tell You

• Whether a specific store is worth the median. It almost certainly is not, in one direction or the other.
• What your market looks like. Regional and metro conditions differ, and the state and metro pages on this site carry local data.
• Whether the revenue is real. Multiples apply to verified earnings, and verification is separate work.
• Where the market goes next. These are historical closed sales, not a forecast.

Data Vintage and Method Note

Transaction benchmarks age, and it is worth being explicit about what this page rests on.

The closed-sale figures cover the five years ended 2025 and come from sales reported to one platform. That platform is the most complete public source for small-business transaction data in this category, and it is not a census of U.S. laundromat sales — private transactions, broker-to-broker deals, and sales never listed publicly are absent from it.

The operator survey figures describe 2023 operations and were published in 2024, from 377 respondents to a trade publication's circulation. The establishment counts come from the 2023 County Business Patterns file.

What follows from that:

• Five-year distributions are more durable than single years. A single year's average multiple moves with the mix of stores that happened to sell.
• Reported medians describe reported sales. A market with a different mix — larger stores, different regions — would produce different medians.
• Local conditions are not in these numbers. Rent, utility structure, and competitive density are local, and they are where a specific store's economics actually get decided.

This page is dated, and the figures are labeled with their vintage throughout so that a reader arriving later can tell how old the evidence is. That is the honest way to publish market data: not by claiming currency, but by naming the source and the period and letting the reader judge.

Summary

The laundromat transaction market shows a $250,000 median price on $76,560 of median owner earnings across 855 reported sales, at a 3.50x median multiple with a 2.72x-4.50x middle half and 139 median days to an accepted offer. The spread within that range is worth roughly $137,000 on the median store, and it is decided by lease term, documentation quality, equipment condition, utility evidence, service transferability, and owner independence — six factors that are mostly improvable with time.

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.