Laundromat Business Profit Margin: One Store's Month, Worked

October 26, 2026 · Selling products and running the numbers

A laundromat business profit margin is net profit divided by revenue for the month: what the washers, dryers, wash-and-fold and vending take in, less the utility bills, fixed costs and the cost of the side services. In the illustrative store below, $24,450.00 comes in, $20,700.00 goes out, and the store keeps $3,750.00, a 15.3% margin. That margin moves a lot with two things it hides: the loan payments inside the fixed costs, and the owner’s own unpaid hours.

Every figure here belongs to one made-up self-service store with 20 washers and matching dryers, open 15 hours a day. None of it is a market figure: not a vend price, a utility rate, a rent or what a laundromat earns or sells for. Your machine counters, bills and lease replace them.

The laundromat profit formula

net per load      = wash price + dryer revenue - card fees
utility per load  = this month's water, gas and electric bills
                    split over this month's washes and dries
break-even loads  = fixed costs a month
                    / (net per load - utility per load)
net profit        = revenue - utility bills - fixed costs
                    - wash-and-fold and vending costs
profit margin     = net profit / revenue

Step 1: what one wash and one dry take in

The example charges $4.50 a wash. Its dryers sell 6 minutes for $0.25, and its dryer counters show 36 minutes bought per load, so 6 time blocks. 40% of turns are paid by card at 3% plus $0.10 a swipe, blended here across all turns.

Card fees take 2.5% of the load. That is small, but it comes off every turn, so it belongs in the per-load figure, not in a year-end surprise.

Step 2: turns per washer

120 wash loads a day across 20 washers is 6.00 turns each. A 30-minute cycle plus 10 minutes to unload, reload and pay allows 22.50 turns in a 15-hour day, so the washers run 26.7% of the turns they could. The ceiling is a limit, not a target: customers come in waves. Over 30 days, the washer side nets $15,861.60 and the dryer side $5,191.20, both after card fees.

Step 3: utility cost per wash and per dry

Divide the month’s bills by the month’s cycles from the counters. The whole $1,800 water and sewer bill goes to washers. Of the $1,500 gas bill, the example’s own estimate puts 60% on the dryers and the rest on heating wash water; of the $900 electric bill, 30% on the dryers and the rest on washers, lights and the building. Over 3,600 washes and as many dryer loads:

• utility per wash: $0.842, 18.7% of the wash price
• utility per dry: $0.325, 21.7% of the dryer revenue
• utility per wash-and-dry load: $1.167

The dryer side gives up the larger share of what it takes in, so in this example dryer pricing is where utility costs bite harder.

Step 4: break-even loads a month

Fixed costs are $6,000 of rent, $500 of insurance and licenses, $3,000 of loan and lease payments, $4,000 of attendant wages, $600 set aside for repairs and $400 of other costs: $14,500 a month. Each wash-and-dry load leaves $4.681 after card fees and utilities, so the self-service floor breaks even at 3,098 loads a month, or 5.16 turns per washer a day. The 6.00 turns from step 2 clear that.

But not by much. This month’s 3,600 loads leave $2,351.60 from the self-service floor, and loads could fall only 14.0% before it loses money. With 70% of this store’s costs fixed, the cushion is thin even in a profitable month.

Step 5: the laundromat business profit margin

The profit sheet enters the washer and dryer months from step 2 rounded to the nearest $10, and adds wash-and-fold and vending with their own costs.

The insight: the margin depends on the loan and leaves out your time

The 15.3% margin is real for this owner, this month, but two lines decide it, and neither is about running laundry.

The loan. The $14,500 of fixed costs includes $3,000 of loan and lease payments. Before those, the store throws off $6,750.00 a month, a 27.6% share of revenue. Part of a loan payment is repaying principal, and a buyer would carry their own financing, not the seller’s, so the same store can show very different margins under two owners.

Your hours. The owner puts in 80 hours a month that no line pays for. Net profit over those hours is $46.88 an hour. If you would have to hire someone to do those hours, their cost comes out of the $3,750.00 before it is profit.

What to pay for the store. Cash before loan payments is $81,000.00 a year. At a 4-year payback target - the buyer’s own choice, not a valuation or a market multiple - that supports a price of up to $324,000.00, and that figure still assumes the owner works the 80 hours a month for free, that equipment does not need replacing, and leaves out tax and the lease terms.

A price raise. Raising the wash from $4.50 to $5.00 lifts what a turn leaves after card fees and utility from $3.564 to $4.058. If 5% of turns go elsewhere, the washer side still gains $1,047.96 a month, and the raise keeps paying until 12.2% of turns are lost. Treat that as the washer side only: customers who leave take their dryer loads too.

For a coin-and-card business with a smaller footprint, the vending machine profit calculator works the same per-sale arithmetic, and the break-even analysis formula post covers the general break-even method.

How these were calculated

Dryer revenue per load is the minutes bought divided by the minutes per block, rounded up, times the block price. Card fees are the share of turns paid by card times (price x the percentage fee + the per-swipe fee), one swipe for the wash and one for the dry. Utility per wash is the water bill plus the washer shares of gas and electric, over the month’s washes; utility per dry is the dryer shares over the month’s dryer loads. Break-even loads are fixed costs divided by (net per load - utility per load). Net profit is revenue less utility bills, fixed costs and the wash-and-fold and vending costs, and the margin is net profit over revenue. The most-to-pay figure is (net profit + loan payments) x 12 x the payback years. Per-cycle figures carry between steps rounded to a tenth of a cent, as the spreadsheet shows them. Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program that charges card fees on the whole load at once and counts the break-even loads one at a time, and the two agree. All inputs are illustrative. None of this is financial, legal, tax or investment advice, and the most-to-pay figure is not a valuation.

To run this on your own counters, bills and lease, the pack below has eight linked calculators, from revenue per turn to the payback on a new washer and the most you could pay for a store.