Dry Cleaning Cost per Garment Calculator

Solvent cost per garment is the full cost of the solvent used in a load (cost per gallon times gallons per load) spread across however many garments that load actually holds. If you run a load at half its usual capacity, the same solvent expense gets divided among half as many garments, so the per-garment solvent cost effectively doubles — maximizing garments per load is one of the biggest levers for lowering cost per piece.

Overhead is a percentage applied on top of your direct cost (solvent plus labor), not a fixed dollar add-on: total cost equals direct cost times (1 + overhead % / 100). That means a higher overhead percentage compounds against whatever your direct costs already are, so a shop with high solvent or labor costs feels a given overhead percentage more in absolute dollars than a leaner shop does.

It's a fixed multiplier applied to your fully-loaded cost per garment (direct cost plus overhead), reflecting a common industry rule of thumb rather than a market-researched or location-specific price. Actual competitive pricing, local labor markets, and premium services like leather or wedding gowns should all be used to adjust it rather than taking 2.75x as a final number.

Garments per load is typically an average across a mixed batch, but solvent cost per garment scales inversely with how many garments actually share the load's solvent charge — a shop running a mix of bulky coats and light shirts will see real costs vary well outside a single blended average. If your garment mix isn't fairly uniform, consider running this separately for your dominant garment categories.

The calculator takes your stated minutes of hands-on time per garment — inspecting, spotting, pressing — divides by 60 to get hours, then multiplies by your hourly labor rate. So 8 minutes at an $18/hour rate works out to about $2.40 of labor cost per garment before overhead is applied.