Appliance Repair Cost Calculator

How to read the number the calculator gives you

The figure is a range, and the range is the honest part. A symptom is not a repair. A refrigerator that has stopped cooling might need a condenser fan motor, a defrost heater, a control board or a sealed system repair, and those four jobs do not cost the same. Any company that answers “how much to fix a fridge that is not cooling” with a single number before seeing the appliance is quoting the cheapest possibility and hoping.

What we show instead is where the middle half of those jobs landed. Twenty five percent came in below the low end, twenty five percent came in above the high end, and the number in the middle is the median. If a technician tells you your repair is at the top of the range, that is not automatically a red flag – a quarter of jobs legitimately land there. It does mean the diagnosis is worth understanding before you approve it.

The second thing to notice is how narrow most of the ranges are. Across all 15,957 repairs, the middle half falls between $300 and $456, with a median of $370. That is not a coincidence and it is not pricing policy – it is arithmetic. The service call and the labor hours are close to identical whether the part costs fifteen dollars or two hundred, so the part moves the total far less than most people assume.

What a finished repair costs, by appliance

These are medians of the full invoice on completed repairs where a part was actually fitted. The range column is the middle half of jobs, and the count is how many repairs each figure rests on.

The part is not the price

This is where published repair estimates go wrong most often, including estimates that used to be on this website. They quote the price of the component. The component is rarely the expensive half.

Below are the parts we replace most often, priced the way you actually pay for them – part, labor and service call as one finished job.

Read the top and the bottom of that table together. A belt and a control board are separated by about $189 on the invoice, even though the parts themselves are nowhere near that close in price. The labor and the visit compress everything toward the middle. That is why the useful question on the phone is not “how much is the part” but “how many hours, and does the appliance have to come apart to reach it”.

Does the brand change what you pay?

Less than the internet suggests. Use the brand selector in the calculator and you will see the range move, but rarely by much, because two thirds of the invoice is labor and the visit. Where brand genuinely matters is availability: a discontinued board on an older unit, or a part that only the manufacturer sells, can add days to the repair and push the total toward the top of the range. That is a scheduling problem more than a pricing one.

Where brand matters most is at the extreme end. Sealed system work on a premium built in refrigerator is a different job from the same symptom on a freestanding unit, and the calculator will not show you a figure for combinations we have too few jobs to speak about honestly. When that happens it falls back to the closest level it does have data for and tells you which level it used.

What the same repair costs in different cities

Local medians across our service area. Cities are shown only where we have enough completed repairs for the number to mean something.

The spread between the most and least expensive cities on that list is roughly $79, and it is not explained by labor rates – our rates do not change by city. It tracks the appliance mix. Areas with more built in and premium units produce more sealed system and control board work, and those are the repairs that sit at the top of every range on this page.

What moves your quote up or down

• How the appliance is installed. A built in or stacked unit has to be pulled and reseated. That is labor before the repair even starts, which is why stacked washer-dryer units and double wall ovens carry a $150 service call rather than $99.
• Whether the part is current. A stocked component gets fitted the same visit. A discontinued one means sourcing, a second trip, and the upper half of the range.
• How long the fault has been running. A dryer run on a blocked vent kills heating elements repeatedly. Clearing the vent costs about what the element costs, and skipping it means paying for the element twice.
• How many faults there really are. Two symptoms on one appliance is often one cause, but not always. The calculator prices one repair.
• Discounts you may already qualify for. Veterans and seniors take $30 off, new customers $20, and the Priority Membership at $179 a year includes five free diagnostics and $30 off labor on every repair.

When the number tells you to stop

The calculator is as useful for talking you out of a repair as into one. Run your appliance through it, then set the answer against what a comparable new unit costs and how old yours is. If the repair lands in the upper quarter of its range, the appliance is past the middle of its expected life, and it has already needed work before, replacing is usually the better arithmetic. If it lands in the lower half on an appliance under seven years old, repairing almost always wins.

Our technicians are told to say so on site when the repair does not make sense, and that visit costs you the $99 service call and nothing more. For a fuller version of that decision, including expected lifespans by appliance, see the repair or replace guide.

Methodology

Source: 65,924 service visits recorded in our job management system across our service area, which is concentrated in Florida and Georgia with additional coverage in Texas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. Nothing here is modelled, surveyed or estimated – every figure is drawn from invoices.

• What counts as a repair. Completed jobs invoiced above $200, which is the line above which a part was fitted rather than the visit ending at diagnosis. That leaves 15,957 repairs in the calculator.
• What the figure includes. The whole invoice: part, labor and the service call. Not the price of a component.
• Appliance, brand and symptom. Each is used only when exactly one is present on the job, so a visit covering two appliances cannot contaminate either cell. Symptoms are read from the technician write up.
• Minimum sample. Cells are published only above a minimum count – 25 jobs for a brand or symptom cell, 40 for a city. Below that we show nothing rather than a number built on a handful of jobs.
• Cells we deliberately withhold. Where the upper quartile exceeds the lower by more than two and a half times, two different repairs are being averaged into one figure and the median describes neither. Those cells are dropped entirely rather than published with a caveat.
• What is not here. Anything about the age of the unit at failure, since installation dates are not in our records, and any figure about how appliances perform after we leave. Distribution of repairs by appliance and brand is published separately on most commonly repaired appliances and rests on a different denominator, so the two sets of percentages are not interchangeable.

Current release covers 378 published cells and is dated 2026-09-06.

Common questions