How to open a laundromat in 2026

A laundromat is one of the few small businesses people buy for the right reason: it is a machine that keeps running when the owner is not standing in it. That same quality is why almost every bad piece of advice about the trade exists. So start with the industry's own numbers, not the ones in a listing.

The Coin Laundry Association puts the US at about 29,500 coin laundries turning over close to $5 billion a year between them. Those two numbers divide to roughly $170,000 of gross revenue per store — a real business, not a windfall, and an average that hides an enormous spread. The association's own range for what a coin laundry is worth is $50,000 to more than $1 million, and for what one throws off, $15,000 to $300,000 of annual cash flow. Stores usually occupy 1,000 to 5,000 square feet. The category tells you almost nothing; the specific corner tells you everything.

Then the cost of getting in, which splits cleanly in two. Building a new store in an empty shell starts around $250,000 and runs to $3 million, according to figures the lender Nav published in January 2026 from the operator Dave Menz. Buying one that already exists is a different market entirely: Nav found listings running from $25,000 up to nearly $9.2 million for a three-store group in Buffalo, and put the minimum cash to buy a run-down store and retool it at $50,000 to $100,000. The same page quotes the cash flow of four stores then listed for sale: $4,119 in Baltimore County, $25,000 in Orange, Massachusetts, $94,592 in Daytona Beach and $144,000 in San Antonio. Nav states no period for those figures and the listing field they come from is an annual one, so read them as annual. Either way the point is the spread: four businesses with the same job description, thirty-five times apart in what they return to an owner.

Now the part that decides whether the number survives contact with a year. American Coin-Op's 2025 State of the Industry survey, published in March 2026, asked operators what their money goes on. Rent or mortgage averaged 18.4% of gross revenue, with individual answers ranging from 5% to 52%. Labor and payroll averaged 20.5%, ranging from 7% to 42%. Utilities were named the single hardest operational challenge by 65.1% of respondents — ahead of new equipment costs at 44.4%, labor costs at 39.7%, rent at 33.3% and maintenance at 27.0%. Water, gas and electricity are the cost of goods sold in this business, and unlike rent they are not fixed by a lease.

Two more facts worth having before the romance sets in. Coin laundries normally sell for three to five times net cash flow, which cuts in both directions: it caps what you can pay for a good store, and it means every dollar you add to annual cash flow adds three to five to what your store is worth when you leave. And machines die on a schedule — the association puts topload washers at five to eight years of useful life, and frontload washers, dryers and heating systems at ten to fifteen. A store full of twelve-year-old equipment is a capital expenditure wearing a business's clothes, and the price should say so.

Against all of that, the demand is unusually durable. Your customers are the households without a machine where they live — renters, apartment dwellers, students — and that work cannot be deferred for long and cannot be done online. 70.3% of the owners American Coin-Op surveyed said their self-service business improved in 2025, and about one in nine had opened or planned to open another store. It is a good business. It is not a passive one — in an earlier Your Views survey, 75% of owners called "an easy way to make a living" a myth rather than a reality, and they were the people already doing it.

Strip away the equipment brochures and opening a laundromat is four decisions, taken in this order. Everything else is paperwork that follows from them.

One: build or buy. Building lets you choose the layout, the machine mix and the vend prices, and it costs the most and takes the longest — you are paying for plumbing, gas, electrical service and a sewer connection that a working store already has. Buying gets you a revenue history, a customer base and a set of someone else's decisions, some of which will be wrong. Most first-time owners should buy, for one reason: you can read a working store's water bill. You cannot read a projection.

If you buy, the number that matters is not the asking price and not the gross. It is the net cash flow, verified — against utility bills, the coin or card system's own reports, the lease, and a few days of sitting in the store counting turns yourself. Three to five times that number is what the store is worth. Anything sold on "gross collections" that nobody can tie to a utility bill is a story.

Two: the location, which is really the lease and the sewer. A laundromat is a catchment business — your customers are the people within a few minutes' walk or drive who do not have a machine at home, which usually means apartment blocks, rentals and student housing rather than owner-occupied suburbs. Parking, safety after dark and visibility from the road do the rest. But the two things that quietly kill a site are the ones nobody looks at: a lease too short to outlive the equipment you are about to install, and a sewer or water service that cannot carry the flow. Get a long lease with options, and get the building's water line, gas capacity and sewer confirmed in writing before you sign anything.

Three: the machine mix. Big washers are what people come for and what earns most per square foot — a family doing a comforter is a customer no home machine can serve. Small washers fill in around them. Dryer capacity has to keep up with washer capacity or your whole store jams at the same moment every Saturday. And whether you take coins, cards, an app or all three is now a positioning decision as much as a payment one, because a card system also gives you the reporting that makes the store readable — and, eventually, saleable.

Four: whether you are attended, and whether you sell wash-dry-fold and pickup. An unattended store is cheaper and simpler and is the reason many people buy one. An attended store can sell wash-dry-fold, which is the highest-margin thing a laundromat does and the reason payroll runs at 20.5% of revenue for the average operator. Pickup and delivery goes one step further and turns a catchment business into a route business. None of these has to be decided on day one, but the building and the layout should not rule them out.

Then the mechanics, which are the same for any US small business: register the company, get the free EIN from the IRS, open a business bank account that never touches your own, and get the store's permits and insurance in place before you take a dollar. That sequence is covered step by step further down.

None of this is our opinion about your trade. It comes from the places where laundromat owners talk about the business of it in public — the trade press that has covered this industry for decades, and its annual owner surveys. Four themes recur, and only one of them is about machines.

You have to be able to fix things. Scott Olson runs six Maytag-equipped laundromats under the Village Spin name across west-northwest Wisconsin — Spooner, Grantsburg and, since 2025, Barron — buying some and building others, in towns most operators drive through. His advice to anyone getting in is blunt about where the margin actually goes: "If you're calling someone every time something breaks, you'll never make money." His second piece is about who you know rather than what you know — find a distributor who will pick up the phone. His third is the least glamorous and the most consistent with the industry's valuation math: "Keep the money in the business. Pay down your debt. That's what keeps you growing" (American Coin-Op, January 2026).

"We look for populations that are around 1,500 to 2,000 or more. A lot of operators won't touch a town that small, but we've figured out how to make it work." — Scott Olson, who runs the six Village Spin laundromats in Wisconsin, in American Coin-Op

The other end of the industry looks nothing like that — and agrees on the same thing. Jake Barone found the business the way a lot of people now do, by sorting a listings site by return: "I started looking for businesses for sale on BizBuySell and when I filtered from highest return to lowest, I saw all these laundromats." What he found when he went shopping is the single most common complaint from buyers in this market: "Every laundromat on the market was, like, a million dollars and they were all 20 to 30 years old." So he built instead — Laundry House in Brooklyn, 2,000 square feet, 34 washers and 34 dryer pockets, a $2 million project — and he measures it on the one number that actually describes a laundromat's health: "We have extremely high throughput, a little over nine turns a day. The goal is to get that to 13" (American Coin-Op, May 2025).

Turns per day is the metric, not machine count. Both of those owners are describing the same thing from opposite ends of the market. A washer that runs nine times a day earns three times what the identical washer earns running three times a day, and the difference is almost never the machine — it is location, hours, cleanliness, whether the dryers keep up, and whether people know you exist. When you are valuing a store to buy, turns are what you are actually buying.

And almost nobody in this industry markets. This is the strangest finding in the trade press and the most useful one if you are new. In American Coin-Op's April 2024 Your Views survey, 53% of laundry owners said they use neither a website nor social media — 6% had a website only, 11.8% social only, 29.4% both. Nearly two thirds, 65%, said they market less than most owners or not at all, and 58.8% had not advertised the store in twelve months. Meanwhile 82.4% said word of mouth matters more than any marketing they do — which is true, and is also exactly what a room full of people who do not market would say. Word of mouth and a findable store are not alternatives. The store people recommend still has to be the store a newcomer can find at 8pm on a Sunday.