Laundry Cost Calculator

It's an average between a typical top-loader (around 20 gallons per load) and a more water-efficient front-loader (around 13 gallons), used because the calculator doesn't ask which type you own. If you know your machine's actual water usage per cycle, the water-cost line will be more accurate if you substitute your washer's real gallons-per-load figure into the water-cost-per-gallon calculation by hand.

The dryer alone is estimated at 3.75 kWh per load (a 5,000-watt heating element running about 45 minutes), compared to just 0.5 kWh for the washer — so the dryer is the single largest electricity line item by a wide margin, roughly 7.5 times the washer's usage. Toggling it off to model air-drying removes that entire 3.75 kWh cost from every load, which is why it's flagged as the biggest lever in the whole calculator.

Monthly cost is weekly cost multiplied by 4.33, which is the average number of weeks in a month (52 weeks ÷ 12 months ≈ 4.33) rather than a flat 4 — using exactly 4 would understate real monthly cost by about 8% over a full year, since most months have more than 4 full weeks in them.

Both the water figure (17 gallons) and the electricity figures (0.5 kWh washer, 3.75 kWh dryer) are fixed national-average assumptions rather than based on your specific appliances' actual ratings. A high-efficiency front-loader paired with a heat-pump dryer — which uses roughly half to a third the energy of a standard resistive-heat dryer — could realistically cost half of what this calculator estimates, while an older top-loader and electric coil dryer could cost meaningfully more.