When to Replace a Dryer Instead of Repairing It
Almost never, on cost alone.
A dryer is the cheapest major appliance to fix at the bottom of the market, and one of the longest-lived at every price. Consumer Reports’ 2024 survey puts the median professional repair at $116–$200 depending on fuel type and price tier — a spread wide enough that a top-tier dryer costs more to fix than a typical dishwasher, whose CR median is $142 — and CR’s 2025 survey of 86,609 dryer owners reports that 90 percent of all dryers purchased from 2015 to 2025 are still in use. Against a mid-priced replacement, a repair at that level has to buy only about three more years to win. So the useful question is not should I replace it — it is which faults are the exceptions. There are five, and they are listed further down.
Consumer Reports’ six dryer repair medians and the AppliancePartsPros part listings below were read in August 2026, and both have been back to source since: the CR dryer article in full on September 16, 2026, and every page of the four part categories on September 10, 2026. Next scheduled review November 2026.
The whole decision in one grid
Set the annualized cost of the repair against the annualized cost of a new machine. A mid-priced electric dryer — Consumer Reports tiers its survey at $700–$900 for that band — spread over the 13-year dryer life expectancy in the NAHB study of home component life expectancies comes to roughly $62 a year.
That $62 is the bar — $800 ÷ 13, or $61.54 before rounding, which is the figure the break-even columns on this page divide by. Every cell below is a repair quote divided by the years you think the machine has left. Anything under $62 means repairing is the cheaper of the two.
| Quote ↓ / more years → | 1 yr | 2 yr | 3 yr | 5 yr | 8 yr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $100 | $100 | $50 ✓ | $33 ✓ | $20 ✓ | $13 ✓ |
| $150 | $150 | $75 | $50 ✓ | $30 ✓ | $19 ✓ |
| $200 | $200 | $100 | $67 | $40 ✓ | $25 ✓ |
| $250 | $250 | $125 | $83 | $50 ✓ | $31 ✓ |
| $300 | $300 | $150 | $100 | $60 ✓ | $38 ✓ |
| $400 | $400 | $200 | $133 | $80 | $50 ✓ |
| $500 | $500 | $250 | $167 | $100 | $63 |
✓ = cheaper per year than buying a new $800 dryer.
Read as break-even points, the same numbers say:
| If the quote is | the dryer has to last |
|---|---|
| $100 | 1.6 more years |
| $150 | 2.4 more years |
| $200 | 3.3 more years |
| $300 | 4.9 more years |
| $400 | 6.5 more years |
| $500 | 8.1 more years |
Arithmetic on published figures, not quoted prices. Substitute your own replacement cost — HomeAdvisor puts a new dryer with installation at $300–$2,000, which is a wide enough band to move the bar substantially. And the calculator further down does not use this bar — it is stricter, not looser.
It starts a dryer at $900 rather than the $800 used here, which on its own would raise the bar to $69 a year; but it also credits the ENERGY STAR saving for a certified dryer, about $210 over the life of the product and so roughly $16 a year across the same 13 years, and it subtracts that from the cost of the new machine. The tool’s hurdle is therefore about $53 a year, below this page’s $62 rather than above it. One cell in the grid moves because of it, and it moves toward replace: a $300 quote against 5 more years is $60 a year, which this grid ticks and the tool does not. $800 is the midpoint of the $700–$900 tier Consumer Reports surveyed and $900 is the top of it, so the price disagreement is the width of one survey band; the energy credit is the larger half of the gap and it is the half this page leaves out. Type the price you would actually pay into the tool and neither number matters.
Now put the survey medians next to it. Consumer Reports publishes six of them — three price tiers for each fuel — and the whole spread fits inside a single year of break-even:
| CR median repair | Machine | Has to last |
|---|---|---|
| $116 | Gas, under $700 new | 1.9 more years |
| $118 | Electric, under $700 new | 1.9 more years |
| $158 | Gas, $700–$900 | 2.6 more years |
| $160 | Electric, $700–$900 | 2.6 more years |
| $188 | Electric, over $900 | 3.1 more years |
| $200 | Gas, over $900 | 3.3 more years |
Thumbtack’s national figure, last updated March 31, 2026, is that most people pay around $203, which needs 3.3 — the same answer as CR’s most expensive tier. Thumbtack does not agree with itself here, and the difference is worth a line. Its cross-appliance cost page, carrying the same March 31, 2026 update date, puts a dryer repair at $170 instead, against the $203 from its own dryer page — a 19% gap. That one needs 2.8 years rather than 3.3, so on this page’s arithmetic the two never disagree about the verdict, only about half a year of it. The appliance-specific number is the one used here because it is what Thumbtack publishes for this machine; the cost-comparison page sets both columns out and explains why they differ.
The useful thing in that table is not any single row, it is how flat it is. The gap between the cheapest dryer repair CR records and the dearest is $84, and it buys 1.4 years of break-even. Fuel type barely registers at all — gas and electric land within $2 of each other on the two lower tiers. What moves the number is what the dryer cost new, not what broke. On a machine class where 90% of dryers bought between 2015 and 2025 are still in use — Consumer Reports’ 2025 survey, 86,609 owners — every one of those bars is low.
The calculator below runs the same arithmetic with your actual numbers, including the option to reserve for a follow-up repair.
Repair-or-replace calculator
Most calculators apply the 50% rule and hand you a verdict. This one tells you the number the decision actually turns on: how many more years the repair has to buy you before it pays for itself.
Adjust the assumptions
—
Repair it
Replace it
Show the math
| Repairing | Amount |
|---|
| Replacing | Amount |
|---|
Both sides are annualized — total spend divided by the years of service it buys. That is what the 50% rule is trying to approximate, and it is why the rule misfires on cheap appliances and on machines that still have most of their life ahead of them.
How sensitive is this?
The verdict at a range of assumed remaining lifespans, everything else held where you set it.
| If the repair buys you… | Repair, per year | Verdict |
|---|
Things that override the math
Figures verified August 2026.
Rated lifespans: InterNACHI Standard Estimated Life Expectancy Chart. Where that chart publishes a range rather than one number, the years this tool starts you at are the midpoint of the range — our arithmetic, not a figure InterNACHI publishes. That applies to five of the nine appliances here: washing machine (5–15 → 10), refrigerator (9–13 → 11), electric range (13–15 → 14), gas range (15–17 → 16) and standalone freezer (10–20 → 15). It matters most on the freezer, where the 20-year top of the band pulls the midpoint to 15 while NAHB's study puts a freezer at 11 — a four-year gap on the input this whole calculation turns on. Overwrite it. Follow-up-visit rate — CR’s share of repairs that succeeded on a further attempt, from member surveys of dishwashers (18%), ranges (17%–22%) and refrigerators (25%). Not CR’s washing-machine survey — it carried a 19% washer figure, CR removed it in a revision, and this site no longer quotes it. The 20% here is not a figure CR prints, and it is not the mid-point it looks like: CR’s 17–25% counts only the repairs that succeeded later, while 27–38% of repairs did not succeed on the first attempt at all. The honest second-visit rate sits between the two, so this input is a floor and the page it sits on works through why. Typical repair costs: Thumbtack appliance repair cost, national average job, last updated March 31, 2026 — the same column published in our appliance repair cost by type table, which sets it against Consumer Reports’ member medians and HomeGuide’s quoted ranges. Thumbtack publishes no standalone-freezer figure; that one appliance starts from its refrigerator average as a proxy. Replacement price ranges: HomeGuide appliance prices. The single price this tool starts you at is not HomeGuide’s or anyone else’s published figure — it is our own pick. Against HomeGuide’s published average bands it sits below the middle on five of the nine appliances and above it on four, and on the dishwasher it sits below the band altogether. Corrected 2026-09-08: six of these bands had not been HomeGuide’s figures at all, and the “below the middle on all nine” reading this note used to give was an artifact of those. That default matters more than any other here, because a lower replacement price makes replacing look cheaper. At this tool’s own starting figures, moving the washer from $950 to the $1,300 top of its own printed range takes the break-even from 2.8 years to 2.1. The denominator decides these comparisons, so this is the first field to overwrite. Delivery, install and haul-away: Best Buy prices haul-away of one large unit at $49.99 when it comes with the delivery and $199.99 standalone, and Lowe’s states that haul-away is an additional purchase. Installation is a separate line from haul-away and adds to it: HomeAdvisor prices it per appliance (updated June 20, 2026) — $50–$175 for a washer or a dryer, $130–$250 for a refrigerator, $105–$125 for a range, $110–$270 for a dishwasher, $70–$500 for a microwave, a row it publishes unqualified, without splitting it by mounting type. It publishes no row for a standalone freezer or a garbage disposal, and those two hints say so specifically rather than implying that nothing is published anywhere. This field starts at $0 on eight of the nine appliances, and that $0 is a placeholder rather than a finding. The dishwasher is the exception, seeded at $340: a dishwasher is plumbed in, and Homewyse’s own line items put the installation at $308–$372 — arithmetic on those line items, not a total Homewyse publishes. It is added straight to the replacement side, so a 0 left in here makes replacing look cheaper than it is. That adjustment runs through every price tier here. Energy figures: ENERGY STAR — and only four of the nine appliances have one, and two of those are gated on age: a washer from ten years old starts at $53/yr and a refrigerator from fifteen at $95/yr, while a dryer at $16/yr and a standalone freezer at $25/yr apply at any age. Only the refrigerator’s is published as a per-year figure. ENERGY STAR states the other three over the life of the product — $530 for a washer, $210 for a dryer, $300 for a freezer — and the divisions into $53, $16 and $25 are ours. On the washer and the dryer it names no product lifetime at all, so those two denominators are ours as well. The one lifetime it does state anywhere in this product family is 12 years, on the refrigerator and freezer pages — so the freezer’s $25 is ENERGY STAR’s own arithmetic ($300 over its own 12 years), and it is the better-sourced of the three. Read against that same 12, the laundry pair miss in opposite directions rather than both being high: the washer’s 10 is shorter, which makes $53 a little generous, and the dryer’s 13 is longer, which makes $16 a little conservative. Neither is ENERGY STAR’s assumption for laundry, which it does not publish. All four are differences against a new certified unit — but they are not measured from the same starting point, and only one of the two is what this field asks for. The refrigerator’s and the freezer’s are stated against your old machine: ENERGY STAR words them “refrigerators over 15 years old” and “replacing your old freezer.” The washer’s and the dryer’s are not. The $530 arrives one sentence after “certified clothes washers use about 20% less energy and about 30% less water than regular washers” — two new machines, a purchase-tier gap rather than an old-versus-new saving — and the $210 sentence names no comparison term at all. Since an old machine is worse than a new uncertified one, those two understate what replacing yours would save, so the error runs toward repairing rather than away from it. ENERGY STAR’s nearest check on the size of the gap is on the same refrigerators page: an old fridge uses “about 20% more energy than a model that has earned the ENERGY STAR” — the same 20% it quotes for certified against regular washers. The other five start at $0 for two different reasons, and the field’s own hint names which one applies — as do the washer’s and the refrigerator’s, which both load at $0 too, because the age this tool starts them at is below their threshold. On three of them — the dishwasher and both ranges — the field starts at $0, and that zero is not a claim that replacing them saves no energy. The two ranges are a genuine blank — ENERGY STAR certifies no cooking appliances at all — and the dishwasher publishes a running cost and a comparison against handwashing, neither of which is a saving against an older machine. The freezer changed on 2026-09-09. This paragraph used to say no saving figure was published for it, and that was wrong: the $300 above is on the same page as the figure it was being confused with. Do not confuse those two either — about $30/yr chest and $60/yr upright is what a certified freezer costs to run, not what it saves you, and they carry the same dollar sign. The $25 is applied at any age because ENERGY STAR sets no threshold for it, and it is the most consequential energy figure in this tool: a $700 freezer annualizes to about $47, so $25 is more than half the replacement side. If your freezer is only a few years old, lower it. On the microwave and the disposal the saving is called negligible at typical household use — this tool’s own judgment, not a published figure. The field is yours to fill from your own bill.
Rated lifespans are guidelines, not countdowns. InterNACHI publishes several of them as bands and states they should not be relied upon as guarantees or warranties; NAHB's report describes a summer-2006 telephone survey, but that is the study's overall method, not this table's: the appliance block of NAHB Table 1 carries its own source line, “Appliance Magazine, Sep 2005 issue, Grainger” — a trade-magazine issue and an industrial distributor, predating the survey by a year. Neither is a distribution, and neither supports a claim about how many units outlast it. This calculator therefore treats remaining life as something you estimate, not something it asserts. Your own quote and your own electricity rate beat every default in here — overwrite them.
The four words this tool ends on are its own, and nobody else’s. Every input above says whose number it is; the cutoffs that turn the arithmetic into a verdict said nothing until 2026-09-09. They are ratios of your assumed remaining years to the break-even year: at or above 1.35 it prints Repair it, from 1.0 Repair it — but the margin is thin, from 0.75 Genuinely a toss-up, and below that Replace it. No source publishes those boundaries. They are also deliberately asymmetric about the break-even point — a quarter short of it still reads as a toss-up while a third past it already reads as a repair — because clearing the break-even is the thing being measured, and falling short of it is not the mirror image of clearing it. Read the break-even year itself, and the sensitivity ladder under it, rather than the word: the number is the finding and the word is a rounding of it.
Why the 50% rule barely fires on a mid-priced dryer, and why that is not its worst problem
The rule of thumb HomeAdvisor states — “if the cost of repairing your dryer exceeds 50% of the cost of a new dryer, you’re better off buying a new one” — is a reasonable heuristic on a washer or a refrigerator. On a mid-priced dryer it fires only in the tail.
Half of an $800 dryer is $400. Consumer Reports’ highest median is $200 and the top of Thumbtack’s national average band is $324 — neither of them reaches it. But the rule is not inert, and where it does fire is worth seeing. The same Thumbtack page that gives the $203 typical also publishes a high-end dryer repair cost of $637, and a low-end of $66, either side of that average band. A $637 job clears the $400 threshold comfortably. So against an $800 replacement the rule is a detector for the unusual quote, not a tool for the ordinary one — which is a different criticism from the one this page used to make, and a fairer one.
The threshold moves more than the quote does, and that is the real objection. Thumbtack prices a new dryer on that same page from $400 entry-level to $2,000; HomeAdvisor’s installed band is $300–$2,000. On a $400 machine the threshold is $200 — which CR’s most expensive median meets exactly and Thumbtack’s own $203 typical clears. The identical quote is a repair against an $800 replacement and a replace against a $400 one, and nothing about the dryer changed. That is the structural flaw, stress-tested across every major appliance in is a repair worth it after 10 years. This page uses the annualized comparison instead, which asks you for the replacement you would actually buy; the same objection is worked against a washer in is it worth repairing a washing machine, where the rule at least sometimes applies.
The third guide this page cites narrows that objection, and then its own two tables split on it. HomeGuide prices a new dryer at $800 to $1,200 for the unit alone — neither HomeAdvisor’s $300–$2,000 installed nor Thumbtack’s $400–$2,000. On that band the 50% threshold runs $400–$600, a $200 spread, against the $200 spread on the same page’s $100–$300 repair band: here the bar moves no more than the quote does, and much of the width above is the width of an installed price carrying delivery and hookup a replacement may not need. But the by-part table on that same page reaches $500 for a drum or a control board, which clears the $400 threshold on its cheapest new dryer while its own headline $100–$300 band never comes near it — so HomeGuide’s summary and HomeGuide’s parts list answer this question differently, and its FAQ recommends the rule regardless. What survives all three guides is the first objection rather than the second: on ordinary faults the rule sits idle, and what it catches is the unusual quote.
What a dryer repair bill is actually made of
Split the job total and, on a dryer, the physical part can be close to a rounding error — at the cheap end of the catalog, which is where all four listings below sit. These are current OEM catalog listings set against typical quoted job totals.
| Repair | OEM part, catalog price | Typical quoted job | Part as share of bill |
|---|---|---|---|
| Drive belt | $14.95 — Whirlpool 341241 | $100–$250 | 6–15% |
| Rear drum roller kit | $18.23 — Whirlpool 349241T | $100–$300 | 6–18% |
| Thermal fuse | $16.95 — Whirlpool WP3392519 | $75–$150 | 11–23% |
| Heating element (Whirlpool) | $33.70 — WP4391960 | $150–$350 | 10–22% |
Part prices are single-listing catalog prices from AppliancePartsPros, not quotes. The job totals are HomeGuide’s, and only HomeGuide’s — from its dryer repair cost page, whose title says “(2026)” but whose byline and structured data both date it to November 14, 2024, and whose table is identical in Wayback captures from October 2025 to today. Corrected September 8, 2026: two of these four totals were printed narrower than anything either credited source publishes — the belt at $100–$200 against HomeGuide’s $100–$250, the heating element at $150–$250 against its $150–$350 — and the share column was computed on the narrowed figures. HomeAdvisor was credited alongside HomeGuide for this column and cannot have supplied either number, because its by-part table is part prices, not job totals: a drive belt at $15–$35, a thermal fuse at $5–$20, and no heating-element or roller row at all. Those belong in the company of the left column, not this one, and its real contribution to this page is the labor and service-fee figures below. The share column is arithmetic on HomeGuide’s totals, not a figure it publishes.
So on every repair in that table, the part is under a quarter of the bill — labor and the service call are the rest. That is the inverse of a washing machine’s control boards — $218.47 of a $363 job and $291.88 of a $437 one, where shopping around only moves the markup. Note which washer part does not make that contrast: on the same table a drain pump runs 23% to 62% of the bill depending on the listing, so at the cheap end it is the dryer’s profile, not the washer’s. The part/labor split is a property of the component, not of the appliance.
The under-a-quarter figure is a floor, not a typical case: each of the four is the cheapest listing Whirlpool sells for its job. Whirlpool’s 13 drum and drive belts run $14.95–$66.78 and its 17 dryer heating elements $33.70–$235.95, and at the middle listing of each band the part is 19–48% of HomeGuide’s belt job and 42–99% of its element job. Only the roller kit, three listings from $18.23 to $20.95, stays a rounding error whichever one your dryer takes. On an element the part number decides it, which is why the dryer code hub prices elements as a band rather than by one listing.
One row on that table is not a wear part, and pricing it like one is how a dryer gets fixed twice. A thermal fuse is a safety cutout: it opens when the dryer overheats, and on a vented dryer overheating is usually restricted airflow rather than a tired fuse — the same restriction the vent section below costs out. Fit a new one without finding out why the old one opened and the machine goes back into the condition that tripped it. Samsung’s US no-heat guide puts the checks ahead of any part: cycle the breaker, then run the dryer’s vent blockage test, and “if the vent blockage test passes, but your dryer is not heating at all, then visit our Support Center to request service.” And before any of it, there is a check that costs nothing — a North American electric dryer runs on two 120V legs making up a 240V supply, and losing one leaves the drum and panel running with no heat, which presents identically to a dead element. The warning-signs page works that sequence through.
The practical consequence: on a dryer, a second quote is almost always worth getting. HomeAdvisor puts appliance labor at $50–$100 an hour with a $50–$80 service fee (page updated June 17, 2026); Thumbtack reports service fees of $30–$100 (March 31, 2026). Two shops quoting the same belt job can differ by more than the belt costs, several times over.
Both of those bands sit below anything this site has been able to observe, and that matters more here than elsewhere, because a second quote means a second visit. Querying GE Appliances’ own pricing tool across 46 US ZIP codes in August 2026 returned $114.95 at 23 of the 32 locations that quoted a price at all, and the four sellers’ published price lists run $89 to $153.95. Nothing measured or published came in under $89, so a $30 second opinion is not something to plan around. And the advertised fee is the wrong number to compare anyway — what decides the cost of that second visit is whether it is waived, and the four sellers do four different things: one waives it in full if you approve the work, one waives it but sets a $145 labor minimum, one adds it to the bill regardless, and one charges it either way while crediting $60 toward a new machine. Which sellers do which, and the twelve metros where nobody will quote a fee at all.
The two parts that break the rule
There are exactly two places where the part is the bill, and both are worth knowing before you approve anything:
- Main control boards. Samsung’s DC92-01596D dryer control board lists at $258.95 on its own, and none of the four Samsung dryer boards in that catalog is under $254.95.
- Heating elements sold as an assembly. Samsung’s DC97-14486A lists at $263.95, against $33.70 for the bare Whirlpool element above — a 7.8× spread. Note what that gap measures, though, because it is not Samsung against Whirlpool, and it is only partly assembly against bare element. Whirlpool sells a $235.95 heater assembly of its own and bare elements up to $167.95. Samsung’s one bare element, DC47-00019A at $82.62, sits inside that bare band, so one listing per brand gives no like-for-like brand spread to read. Across 40 dryer elements from five brands, every assembly costs $131.78 or more and every listing under that is a bare element — but bare elements run to $236.96, so the word assembly sets the floor of the price, not the price. An assembly drags the housing and its attached thermostats along whether they failed or not. The five-brand band table is in the dryer error code hub.
On those two faults, a second quote will not save you, because the money is in the box, not the hours.
Why dryer parts are so cheap in the first place
This is not a coincidence and it is worth understanding, because it is what makes the whole decision lopsided.
A conventional vented dryer — which is the machine every price on this page comes from — has no pump, no water inlet valve, no sealed refrigeration circuit, no transmission. It is a metal drum in an insulated box, turned by one belt looped around one motor that also drives the blower, heated by a resistance coil or a gas burner. Its drum does not ride in a bearing pressed into a sealed tub the way a front-load washer’s does — it rests on plastic support rollers described in the manufacturer’s own catalog as parts to replace “when rollers are worn or damaged,” and parts sellers bundle the belt, four rollers and the idler pulley as a single routine kit.
Three of those four absences stop being true the moment you leave that machine class, and the exceptions are not hypothetical. A heat pump dryer is a sealed refrigeration circuit — that is the design, and it is the same exception ENERGY STAR names further down this page. LG publishes dryer fault codes for a steam cycle water supply (E05), a steam feeder that needs water (Add) and a frozen sump on hybrid models (E13); its washer-dryer combos get a drain pump code (E21), and GE’s UltraFast Combo gets a pump filter code (18). All five are in the dryer code hub, read off LG’s and GE’s own published code lists. Only the last of the four — no transmission — carries across every dryer. So if your machine is a heat pump, steam, hybrid or combo unit, this section is the part of the page that does not describe it.
That matters because of the contrast. On a front-load washer, the noisy-drum repair means splitting the outer tub, and the part price plus a published hourly rate builds to $204–$704. On a dryer, the noisy-drum repair is an $18 roller kit and a $15 belt. The catastrophic mechanical failure that justifies replacing a washer or a refrigerator does not really have a dryer equivalent. The comparable numbers across every appliance are in the 2026 master repair cost table.
Three arguments against replacing that are usually left out
Energy savings barely exist on a dryer. This is the one most likely to change a decision. ENERGY STAR states that a certified full-size electric dryer “saves approximately $210 in energy bills over the life of the product” — over the life, not per year. Across the 13-year NAHB figure that is about $16 a year — the division is this site’s, since ENERGY STAR attaches no product lifetime to the $210. It attaches no comparison term either — the sentence never says what the certified dryer is $210 cheaper than, so unlike a fridge figure worded “refrigerators over 15 years old,” it is not a saving measured against the machine you are deciding about.
ENERGY STAR states the washer saving the same way, about $530 over the lifetime, which across a 10-year washer life is roughly $53 a year. (The $60-a-year washer figure quoted all over the web is NRDC’s and dates from March 14, 2014, not ENERGY STAR’s.) So on like-for-like terms the dryer gap is under a third of the washer’s. So the “a new one will pay for itself in efficiency” argument, which carries real weight on a washer or a fridge, is worth roughly one takeout meal annually on a dryer. Heat pump dryers are the genuine exception — ENERGY STAR puts them at “around 70% less energy than a conventional clothes dryer” — but they cost more up front, and that is a purchase decision, not a repair decision.
The most common complaint is not usually a broken dryer. Consumer Reports found the single most common dryer problem, at 12 percent, was simply that it “wasn’t drying.” Manufacturer documentation is nearly unanimous that this most often points at the vent rather than the machine: Samsung’s whole over-temperature code family carries “clean the vent” as its fix, and LG and Whirlpool both publish vent-length budgets in which a single 90° elbow costs 8–11 feet of allowance. A blocked or over-long run makes a perfectly healthy dryer behave exactly like a failing one — and a new dryer plugged into the same vent behaves the same way. Check the vent before pricing machines. The U.S. Fire Administration, drawing on National Fire Incident Reporting System data, also reports that “failure to clean (31%) was the leading factor contributing to the ignition of clothes dryer fires in homes from 2018–2020” — so this is not only a money question.
Extended warranties are a poor hedge here. Consumer Reports’ 2025 dryer survey reports that “only 21 percent of respondents purchased an extended warranty or service contract” — a minority buying the product at all, on an appliance whose median repair is $116–$200. Worth knowing before a salesperson frames the warranty as the reason to replace rather than repair. In Quebec the hedge comes free on a dryer bought new from October 5, 2026: the province’s Consumer Protection Act gives it a five-year statutory warranty of good working order from delivery, parts and labor, owed by the store or the maker (ss. 38.1–38.6; Décret 1459-2025). For those five years a breakdown is theirs to fix, normal maintenance and abuse excepted (s. 38.3), and a merchant offering you a plan on top must first tell you how long the statutory term runs (s. 228.2).
An earlier version of this page added that 78% of those buyers never used the plan. CR’s revision of this article dropped that measurement — the purchase rate moved from 16% to 21% at the same time — so we no longer carry it. The extended warranty page works the break-even from plan prices and repair medians instead, which does not depend on the withdrawn figure.
The five faults that do justify replacing
Given all of the above, the case for replacing has to come from something other than the size of the quote.
- A main control board on a brand that only sells the assembly. At $250–$270 for the part alone, plus labor, on a machine that may be over ten years old.
- A second major failure within about a year. Two boards, or a board after a motor, is a pattern, not bad luck.
- Anything scorched, or any smell of gas. A dryer that has overheated or a gas dryer that smells of gas is a safety fault. Shut off the supply and stop using it — this is not a budget question, and the USFA fire data is the reason.
- The part is discontinued with no ETA. Whirlpool publishes a parts commitment of “at least seven years” in North America; GE, LG and Samsung state no period at all (the commitments, brand by brand). A repair with no parts date is an open-ended wait with a deposit attached; get the ETA in writing before approving.
- You are changing type, not fixing a fault. Vented to heat pump, gas to electric, or a real capacity change. That is a legitimate reason to buy — it just is not a repair-or-replace calculation, and it should not be dressed up as one.
Notice what is not on that list: age by itself, a noisy drum, no heat, or a quote in the $200–$300 range. Those are repairs.
If you do land on one of the five, price the disposal into the replacement rather than treating it as an afterthought. A dryer earns you nothing from the utility recycling programs — those pay only for refrigerators and freezers still cooling on the day — so removal is a cost, and the size of it depends entirely on timing. Best Buy charges $49.99 for haul-away of one unit, and only when it is delivering the replacement; collecting on its own is $199.99 for up to two large items. For the single dryer this page is about, that is a four-fold price difference on the same machine, decided entirely by whether you book the disposal with the delivery or after it; the rest of the routes, and the three preparation rules that cause refused pickups, are in how to dispose of an old appliance.
More on dryers
- Appliance repair costs by type, 2026 — dryer figures set against every other appliance, three sources side by side
- Dryer error codes, all brands — including the full heating-element price table and the vent-length charts
- How long do appliances actually last? — where the 13-year figure comes from and what it does and doesn’t mean
- Is it worth repairing a washing machine? — the same framework on the appliance where the answer is genuinely closer
- Should I repair or replace my refrigerator? — the sealed-system split
- Appliance extended warranty vs a repair fund — how many covered repairs a plan has to prevent before it pays for itself, appliance by appliance
- How to dispose of an old appliance — the $49.99-with-delivery vs $199.99-standalone gap, and why no one pays you for a dryer
- Where the rest of the decision pages live — four appliances and the four rules of thumb they get argued with, one framework, and the calculator on a page of its own
Sources: Consumer Reports, “Should You Repair or Replace Your Broken Clothes Dryer” (repair medians from CR’s 2024 survey, which the article gives no sample size for; the 86,609-owner count and the 90% survival figure are from its 2025 survey — an earlier reading of it gave 96,315 dryers bought 2015–2025, and that figure has been cut rather than carried. This article previously carried a 2023 survey of 52,374 owners with medians of $133–$215, superseded by CR in place) · NAHB Study of Life Expectancy of Home Components · HomeAdvisor dryer repair cost, 2026 · HomeGuide dryer repair cost, dated November 14, 2024 on the page itself · Thumbtack dryer repair cost, updated March 31, 2026 · AppliancePartsPros catalog listings · ENERGY STAR clothes dryers · U.S. Fire Administration · Samsung US, “Clothes are not dry after using Samsung dryer” · Best Buy Appliance Haul-Away (1 unit) · Quebec Consumer Protection Act · Décret 1459-2025, Gazette officielle du Québec, December 17, 2025
Consumer Reports’ six dryer repair medians and the AppliancePartsPros part listings on this page were read in August 2026. Neither has been left at that reading: the CR dryer article was re-read in full on September 16, 2026, which is where its medians were traced to CR’s 2024 survey rather than the 2025 one this page had credited, and every page of the belt, roller, fuse and heating-element categories was read on September 10, 2026. The 13-year life expectancy the whole grid divides by is the National Association of Home Builders’ Table 1 figure — whose appliance rows the 2007 report credits not to its own 2006 telephone survey but to Appliance Magazine, September 2005 — and that one does not move: NAHB and InterNACHI both publish 13, for gas and electric alike. So it is the medians and the catalog that set this page’s clock — next scheduled review November 2026.