Data Report · June 2026 · 5 min
The median for-sale laundromat grosses $278,000 a year and nets $95,000 in owner cash flow — a 37% margin. Computed from 220 active listings with disclosed financials, June 2026, full distribution included. Here's what laundromats actually make, and what drives the spread.
By Matt Heim, laundromat operator & matyard founderThe median laundromat on the market grosses and delivers — the owner's total annual cash benefit — for a (matyard analysis of active BizBuySell laundromat listings with disclosed financials, June 2026; revenue n=220, SDE n=170, margin n=156). Half of all stores fall between $159,900 and $452,750 in revenue, and between $60,000 and $180,000 in owner cash flow.
If you've seen "laundromats make $5,000–$25,000 a month" or "$100k–$300k a year" quoted around the internet, those ranges are so wide they're useless for a real decision — and none of them publish a sample, a date, or a distribution. Here is the actual spread, from stores currently on the market with their financials attached:
| Metric | 25th percentile | Median | 75th percentile | Sample |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gross revenue / year | $159,900 | $278,000 | $452,750 | n=220 |
| Owner cash flow (SDE) / year | $60,000 | $95,000 | $180,000 | n=170 |
| SDE margin (cash flow ÷ revenue) | — | 37% | — | n=156 |
(matyard analysis of active BizBuySell laundromat listings seen within 45 days of June 13, 2026; financial fields are seller-reported. Read the caveats below before using these numbers in a model.)
The figures come from for-sale listings with disclosed financials, which is both their strength and their bias. The strength: these are specific dollar amounts attached to specific stores, not survey vibes. The bias runs in two directions at once:
Net effect: treat the medians here as describing a functioning, brokerable laundromat — not the average of every storefront in the country. For the floor of the market, the 25th percentile ($60,000 SDE) is the more honest anchor.
"How much does a laundromat make" really asks three different questions, and conflating them is how bad deals get bought:
The 37% median SDE margin is the structural signature of the business: high fixed costs (rent, utilities, equipment) and almost no marginal cost per turn. It's why the spread is so wide — a store past its fixed-cost break-even converts incremental revenue to cash at a very high rate, and a store below it bleeds.
The interquartile range — $60,000 to $180,000 of owner cash flow — is a 3x spread inside the same industry. From the listing corpus and the cost structure, the spread comes from a handful of levers:
An independent sanity check from a completely different instrument: the US Census counts 41,070 paid employees across 10,911 employer laundromats, with a total annual payroll of about $1.04 billion (Census County Business Patterns, NAICS 812310, 2022) — roughly $95,000 of payroll per staffed establishment, spread across ~3.8 employees. The staffed segment of the industry runs on thin labor: a few attendants per store, ~$25k per head. That's consistent with the listing data's picture — this is a fixed-cost, low-headcount business where the owner's margin lives in the gap between machine revenue and rent + utilities, not in labor leverage.
A median is a starting point, not an underwriting. Your store's answer is a function of its machine count, turns per day, vend pricing, rent, and utility rates — five inputs you can estimate for any specific location:
The median for-sale laundromat grosses $278,000 a year and nets $95,000 in owner cash flow (SDE), per matyard's analysis of 220 active listings with disclosed financials (June 2026). The middle half of stores gross between $159,900 and $452,750, with owner cash flow between $60,000 and $180,000.
Median seller's discretionary earnings are $95,000 — but that assumes the owner works the store. If you hire out the counter and management, subtract that wage: a $95,000-SDE store with $40,000 of management labor is a ~$55,000 passive investment. Debt service on an acquisition loan comes out of the same pool.
The median SDE margin across stores reporting both revenue and cash flow is 37% (n=156). The structure is high fixed costs and near-zero marginal cost per wash — so margin rises steeply once a store clears its fixed-cost break-even, and the spread between weak and strong stores is wide.
They are a stable, fragmented, operations-driven business — not a growth category. The US storefront base has been roughly flat for years (see how many laundromats there are), so returns come from buying right (the median ask is ~3.95x SDE) and operating better: service mix, rent discipline, utility efficiency, and effective hours.
Most published ranges ("$5,000–$25,000/month") come from vendor blogs without samples or dates. Real stores genuinely vary 3x across the interquartile range, so any single number misleads — which is why this report publishes the distribution, the sample size, the date, and the bias direction (seller-reported, for-sale stores skew functional).