Your numbers
Fill in what you know and press Calculate. The figures shown are a delivery-route example, not a benchmark — replace them with your own.
What one order costs
| Cost component | Per order | Per pound | Share |
|---|
What to look at
What this does and doesn't do
This is arithmetic on numbers you supply: it totals what one order costs you and compares that to what one order earns. It does not know your water, sewer, gas or electricity tariff, your local wage rules, your machines' actual consumption, or what customers in your town will pay — every one of those is an input you read off your own bills, payroll and equipment specifications. Treat the output as the cost floor underneath your own pricing decision, not a recommended price.
Running a route of recurring residential stops is the half of this that is not laundry at all. If you also price visit-based work by drive time and minutes on site, the dog walking and pet sitting rate calculator does the same per-stop arithmetic for a route of recurring client visits, and rolls a client list up against a monthly income goal.
Common questions
How much should I charge per pound for wash and fold?
There is no single right number, because the cost side varies more than the price side: a shop paying $0.09 a gallon for water with 40 lb washers has a different floor than one paying $0.02 with 20 lb machines. Work out your own cost per pound first — labour minutes, wash and dry cycles, supplies, any delivery stops, and a share of overhead — then set the price above it by the margin you need. This calculator does that arithmetic on your own numbers; what your market will bear is a separate question it cannot answer.
Why does a small wash and fold order lose money at the same price per pound?
Because a lot of the cost is per order rather than per pound. Intake, tagging, staging, bagging and checkout take the same minutes on a 10 lb order as on a 30 lb one, a pickup and a delivery are two stops either way, and a half-full washer costs a full cycle. Spread over ten pounds instead of thirty, those fixed costs are three times as heavy per pound — which is what a minimum charge exists to cover.
What should the wash cost per load include?
Everything one cycle consumes: water at your metered rate, sewer if it is billed on water volume, the gas or electricity to heat that water, the electricity the machine draws, and a wear-and-replacement allowance for the machine itself. Read the rates off your own utility bills and your machine's rated water consumption per cycle rather than a published average, because tariffs and machine efficiency differ enormously between towns and between machines.
Should pickup and delivery be priced into the per-pound rate or charged separately?
Either works, and the calculator shows why the choice matters: delivery cost is per stop, so it falls per pound as orders get bigger. Folding it into the per-pound rate means large orders subsidise small ones; charging a delivery fee or setting a route minimum puts the cost where it is incurred. Enter your stops per order, drive minutes and vehicle cost per mile to see how big the effect is at your average order weight.
Does anything I type here get uploaded?
No. Every calculation runs in this browser, and nothing you enter is sent anywhere — there are no accounts, no cookies, and no analytics vendor. If you use the save button, your numbers are written to this browser's own local storage on this device only, and the forget button deletes them. The Copy shareable link button puts the same numbers in the page's own URL fragment instead of a server, which your browser never sends anywhere. Anonymous feature counts (estimate, example_loaded, inputs_saved, link_copied) are stored the same local way and can be switched off.