Appliance Repair Cost by Type, 2026: Why Sources Disagree

ByWoojoong Kim

Two sets of published figures answer this question, and where both print a single number they disagree by 17 to 55%.

Consumer Reports members who had an appliance professionally repaired reported paying a median of $142 for a dishwasher, $123–$214 for a washer depending on type and price tier, $197 typical for a refrigerator, $116–$200 for a dryer and $206 for a range. The refrigerator figure is the one exception in that list: CR states $197 as the typical out-of-pocket cost of a repair and never calls it a median, so it is printed here as CR words it. Contractor-facing cost guides — Thumbtack and HomeGuide — put the same repairs at $100–$500.

Both are accurate. They are not measuring the same thing — and working out which of the two is the number you will actually be quoted is the most useful thing on this page. Below: the master table across three published sources, then what the gap consists of, then what a single bill is made of.

Costs verified August 2026. Next scheduled review November 2026.

Which number applies to you

Before the table, three sentences that decide which column to read.

  • Appliance under a year old, or a sealed refrigeration system under five years? Probably neither column. Check the factory warranty first — we set out the actual sealed-system terms for LG, Samsung, Whirlpool and GE in should I repair or replace my refrigerator.
  • Want to know what a fair quote looks like? Read the contractor columns. They price a full job at retail.
  • Want to know what people actually ended up paying? Read the Consumer Reports column — then add a service call to it on the washer and dryer rows, where CR says in its own words that its medians stop before the visit while the contractor columns include it. That exclusion is the largest of the structural reasons covered below. Do not add it to the refrigerator, range or dishwasher rows: on those three pages CR says the diagnostic charge is typically put toward the total bill rather than charged on top of it, and it prices the range as parts and labor.

Three sources, appliance by appliance

Appliance CR member median
(owner-reported; the washer and dryer pages
exclude the service call, the refrigerator and
range and dishwasher pages absorb it)		 Thumbtack 2026
(national average job)		 HomeGuide, July 2025
(range, parts + labor)
Dishwasher$142$220$100–$300
Clothes dryer$116–$200 by price tier$170$100–$300
Washing machine$123–$214 by type and tier$224$100–$400
Refrigerator$197 typical out-of-pocket$250$125–$500
Range / oven$206 — CR words this one parts and labor$241$100–$300 stove · $150–$350 oven
Microwave—$220$100–$250
Garbage disposal—$120$100–$250
Washer-dryer combo—$653 — not an average; see below—
Labor, per hour—$75 avg ($40–$110)$50–$125

Sources, in order: Consumer Reports member surveys — washing machines (2024 survey; CR states no sample size for washers on the current version of this article), dishwashers (125,000+ members; page last updated January 29, 2024, and CR attaches no survey year to the $142 itself), refrigerators (95,711 members, 108,573 refrigerators bought 2012–2022; page last updated January 29, 2024 — the $150–$240 band, the $562 compressor median and the 27% below come instead from what CR calls “a previous CR member survey”, which it neither dates nor sizes), clothes dryers (medians and the warranty split from CR’s 2024 survey, which the article gives no sample size for; its 86,609-owner count belongs to the separate 2025 survey of dryer problems), ranges (2021 survey, published January 29, 2024) · Thumbtack appliance repair cost, last updated March 31, 2026 · HomeGuide appliance repair costs, content dated July 14, 2025 on the page itself despite a title reading “(2026)”.

Two notes on the right-hand column, because a dash in it means something specific. HomeGuide has no range row at all — it prices stove at $100–$300 and oven at $150–$350, on the same page, and never reconciles them, so both are printed here rather than one picked. And the washer-dryer combo is the only appliance in this table HomeGuide does not price at all; that dash means the cited page carries no figure, not that none was looked for. The dashes in the left column mean the same thing — Consumer Reports runs a repair-or-replace article on over-the-range microwaves and it publishes no dollar median, only a repair success rate.

One caution about the middle column, because Thumbtack does not agree with itself. The figures above come from Thumbtack’s single cross-appliance page. Thumbtack also publishes a separate page for each appliance, and those carry different numbers: its washing machine page puts the typical job at $204 against the $224 above, its dryer page at $203 against $170, and its dishwasher page at $187 against $220, and its refrigerator page at $220 against $250 — a 19% gap on the dryer, 18% on the dishwasher, 14% on the refrigerator and 10% on the washer, from one company, on the same update date of March 31, 2026. The range is the one appliance in this column with no second figure to check: Thumbtack’s oven page publishes a $136–$346 band and no point average.

Neither is wrong; they are different samples presented without reconciliation. This site uses the cross-appliance page here so the column stays internally comparable. The pages devoted to individual machines carry both figures: dryers and washing machines work in the appliance-specific number, and the dishwasher decision page works in the cross-appliance $220 while printing the $187 beside it, because on a $400 machine the two land on opposite sides of the 50% rule. The ten-year rule page carries the whole second set, because that is where the choice between them decides a verdict rather than shading one: on its denominators the washer reads Replace by $1.50 on the $224 and Repair by $18.50 on the $204. It is the clearest illustration on this page of why a national average is a starting point and not a benchmark.

That disagreement is not confined to the dollar figures, and the bottom row of the table above is where it bites. Thumbtack introduces its $75-an-hour average with “Most labor costs are billed to consumers at an hourly rate.” Its dryer page, updated the same March 31, 2026, states the reverse — “Most appliance repair technicians charge a flat fee once they determine what repairs are needed and which appliance parts will be required” — and its washing machine page, same date again, splits it: “Some technicians charge flat rates. Others bill by the hour, plus parts.” Its dishwasher page takes no position at all. So the per-hour row is printed here because the source publishes it, not because Thumbtack establishes how most jobs are billed, and it is the one row in this table that may not correspond to a line on your invoice. How to read an appliance repair quote works through the flat-rate book a quote may be built from instead, and is the page to read before dividing any labor line by an hourly figure.

Two sub-breakdowns worth having, both from the same CR surveys:

Machine type Median repair
Top-load agitator washer$123–$175
Top-load high-efficiency washer$142–$213
Front-load washer$158–$214
Compact washerabout $186
Gas dryer, under $700 new$116
Electric dryer, under $700 new$118
Gas dryer, $700–$900 new$158
Electric dryer, $700–$900 new$160
Electric dryer, over $900 new$188
Gas dryer, over $900 new$200
Gas range$191
Electric range$212
Pro-style range$290

The dryer rows are the clearest demonstration of a pattern that runs through the whole table: a repair on an expensive machine costs more than the same repair on a cheap one. A $188 median on a premium electric dryer against $118 on a budget one is not a different fault — it is a costlier control board, a scarcer part, and in some cases a technician who has to order rather than carry it.

CR now publishes both fuels across the same three price tiers, and that makes the point sharper than a single column could. Gas and electric land within $2 of each other on the two lower tiers — $116 against $118 under $700, $158 against $160 between $700 and $900. Fuel type is the word a dryer’s listing leads with, and at the volume tiers it is worth almost nothing. Price tier moves the median by 59% on electric dryers and 72% on gas. Fuel moves it by under 2% — but only on the two tiers just quoted. On the top tier the pattern breaks in both size and direction: a gas dryer over $900 medians $200 against electric’s $188, a 6% gap, and it runs the other way after electric came in $2 dearer on each of the cheaper tiers. That reversal is why the over-$900 pair is the only one in this table printed electric-first — each fuel pair is ordered cheapest-first, and the machine types run in blocks rather than one continuous price order.

Why the columns disagree by 17–55%

The gap between these columns is not noise, and it is not regional variation. Five things account for almost all of it — and the fourth, on the two appliances where it can be checked, is large enough to account for the whole gap on its own.

1. The Consumer Reports figures are out-of-pocket, and a large minority of repairs were not paid out of pocket

This is the big one, and it is easy to miss because CR does not state it on every appliance page.

The dryer survey is where it is spelled out. Of members who used a professional, 68% paid out of pocket, 22% were at least partly covered by the manufacturer’s warranty, and 10% at least partly by an extended warranty — so roughly one repair in three had someone else paying part of the bill.

So the CR median is the median of what households wrote a check for, not what the job invoiced at. The contractor columns price the whole job. Those are different quantities and they should not agree.

An earlier version of this page put the figure higher, citing a CR statement that 56% of washer repairs were at least partly covered. CR has since revised its washing-machine article and that statement is no longer in it, so the claim now rests on the dryer survey alone — which puts the share at about a third rather than about a half.

What to do with that: if you are out of warranty and paying the whole thing, the contractor columns are the honest expectation. If you are inside the first year, or inside a sealed-system term on a refrigerator, the relevant number is probably not on this page at all.

2. The contractor guides quote work, not bills

They are compiled from what shops charge for a job, which includes the parts markup and the full labor block. Homewyse’s calculator makes this vivid: it puts a basic appliance repair at $412–$583 per repair as of May 2026, roughly double every other source here. But its estimate is two rows, and only the first one is labor. Appliance Repair Labor, Basic runs 2.9 hours at $271–$423, scoped to troubleshooting, testing “likely component failure scenarios in sequence”, setup and cleanup, and parts “costing up to $25”. Beneath it sits a second row, Appliance Repair Job Supplies, at $141–$161 for what Homewyse describes as “connectors and fittings”. So labor is about two-thirds of the low end and just under three-quarters of the high end rather than nearly all of it, and the component that actually failed is priced in neither row — that $25 cap is the entire allowance for it.

The doubling comes from both rows at once. Spread $271–$423 over 2.9 hours and Homewyse is assuming $93–$146 an hour, against HomeGuide’s $50–$125 and Thumbtack’s $75 average — and then it bills a supplies line on top that neither of the others itemizes at all.

That is a legitimate figure for what it measures. It is also the reason averaging published cost guides together produces a number that means nothing.

3. Survey medians are pulled down by the cheap, common faults

The faults people actually call about are mostly not the expensive ones. CR’s analysis of over 381,000 kitchen and laundry appliances purchased between 2008 and 2018 found the most-reported refrigerator problems were no water or ice from the dispenser (17%) and icemaker failure (13%) — not cooling failures. Separately, CR’s refrigerator repair guidance puts compressor problems at about 3% of units at the brand median, against 15% for dispensers and 14% for icemakers.

That matters because the compressor is where the money is: CR puts the median compressor repair at $562, against $150–$240 for the seven common problems it tracks. A median across all fridge repairs therefore leans on dispenser and icemaker calls far more than on the compressor, and tells you very little about the specific call you are about to make. We break the sealed-system job down in refrigerator compressor replacement cost.

4. The Consumer Reports medians do not contain the service call, and the contractor columns do

This is the one that ought to be checked before the three above, because on the two appliances where CR states its own fee basis it is bigger than the gap it is being asked to explain.

CR says so in its own words. The washing-machine article gives the medians by type and tier and then adds: “That’s not counting the service quote fee.” The dryer article never puts it that way, but it does not need to — “a $120 to $170 service charge is usually added to the total cost, according to Landers” is the same statement written from the other side. Both sentences are already quoted in the fee table under “What one bill is actually made of” below; what had not been done until September 9, 2026 is reading them against the left-hand column they govern.

The contractor columns run the other way, and this page already relies on that. The whole decomposition below subtracts a visit from Thumbtack’s job averages — that subtraction is only meaningful because the visit is in them. So the two columns are not priced on the same basis, and the difference is a whole service call.

Put them on one basis, using CR’s own fee figure for each appliance rather than a borrowed one:

Appliance CR median as printed CR’s own stated service charge CR, all-in Thumbtack average
Washing machine$123–$214“at least $100 to $150”$223–$364$224
Clothes dryer$116–$200$120–$170 “added to the total”$236–$370$170

On the washer the bottom of the grossed-up band lands within a dollar of Thumbtack’s average and the top sits 63% above it. On the dryer the band clears Thumbtack entirely — 1.4× to 2.2× it — where on the printed basis it had looked like the one row with no gap at all.

So the direction of the left column is not what the table appears to show. Read as printed, CR is the low column and causes 1–3 explain why. Read on the same basis as the columns beside it, CR is not low: on both appliances where its fee basis is stated, it is at or above the contractor average. Causes 1–3 are all real and all still apply — but they are being asked to explain a $35–$78 gap that a single unstated difference more than covers.

And Consumer Reports does not give the same answer on all five of its pages. This page said until September 9, 2026 that CR discusses the fee on the washer and dryer pages only, and that “the dishwasher, refrigerator and range pages say nothing about it either way.” Reading all five in full — not the figures, the surrounding paragraphs — that is wrong on all three, and the September 9 correction itself missed the dishwasher, which this page listed as silent until September 16, 2026. All five state a basis, and they split two against three:

CR page What the article says about the diagnostic fee Basis
Washing machine“That’s not counting the service quote fee.” Landers: “at least $100 to $150”Outside the median
Clothes dryer“a $120 to $170 service charge is usually added to the total cost, according to Landers”Outside the median
Refrigerator“some professionals will charge a fee for the initial visit… If you decide to use them for the job, they’ll typically put the fee toward the total repair cost.”Inside it
Range / oven“expect a charge for a visit just to diagnose the problem. This will typically be deducted from the cost of your total bill if you use the service to complete your repair, but that’s not always the case.”Inside it
Dishwasher“This kind of service fee typically costs $50 to $100, according to Home Advisor, and it will usually count toward the price of the repair if you follow through with the job.”Inside it

Every quotation in that table was read on the live article on September 9, 2026, and the dishwasher row again on September 16, 2026.

That is a real disagreement inside one publisher, and it decides which rows the gross-up may touch. Put the fee toward the total, deducted from the total and count toward the price of the repair describe the same practice; not counting the service quote fee and added to the total cost describe the other one. CR words its figures to match, too — the range is “the median cost for parts and labor to repair a broken range,” the one row in the left column CR never calls out-of-pocket. So the arithmetic above is run on the washer and dryer only, and it is not a coincidence that those are the two rows the arithmetic was already limited to: the refrigerator, range and dishwasher rows are not waiting to be grossed up, they are rows where a gross-up would count the visit twice. No row is left on an unknown basis. The dishwasher page is the one that prices the visit from a different source, HomeAdvisor’s $50 to $100 rather than Landers.

One further limit, stated rather than buried. A service call is not always a line on the bill even where CR says it sits outside the median: of the five sellers the service call fee page priced, two waive it in full once you approve the work and three add it, so the gross-up describes the three-in-five case rather than every household in CR’s sample.

5. The Consumer Reports medians only contain the repairs people agreed to

CR states this one itself, on two of its five pages, and it is a property of the method rather than of the appliance. On the range page it is a parenthesis:

“If the numbers below sound low, keep in mind that they reflect only the prices paid by people who went ahead with a repair. (Anyone who got sticker shock from a repair quote and decided to replace their range instead isn’t included.)”

On the refrigerator page it is said flatly, and it names which repairs go missing:

“Of course, those costs reflect completed repairs. Our data doesn’t factor in the estimated cost of repairs that CR members passed on for being too expensive.”

Every median in the left column is a survey of members who had a machine professionally repaired. A quote high enough to send the owner to a showroom leaves no figure behind — it is not a high value in the sample, it is absent from the sample. The contractor columns have no such filter: Thumbtack and HomeGuide price the job whether or not anybody accepts it.

The direction is the uncomfortable one, and it is the reverse of a rounding error. The CR column is thinnest exactly where a repair-or-replace decision is hardest. A $90 icemaker quote gets approved and lands in the median; a $700 sealed-system quote is the one an owner is most likely to decline, and declining it deletes it. So this compounds cause 3 rather than repeating it: that one says the median is dominated by cheap faults because cheap faults are the common ones, and this says the expensive ones are further under-represented among the repairs that actually went ahead.

One page puts a number on the phenomenon, and it is worth reading for what it does and does not measure. On refrigerators, CR reports that 27% of members who discarded a refrigerator rather than repairing it gave expensive repair costs as the reason. That sizes how often a quote is the thing that ends the machine’s life; it is not a measure of how much those quotes were for, and CR does not publish one. So no figure in the table above is adjusted for this. What the caveat settles is the direction — a filter that removes declined quotes can only push the left column down, never up — and, on one appliance, that it is not a rare event.

And one thing that is still not a further cause: the columns are not the same age

Worth stating plainly, because the table above does not show it and the year in this page’s heading invites the wrong assumption. Only one of the three columns is actually 2026. Thumbtack updated March 31, 2026, and says so on the page. HomeGuide’s is not, despite a headline that reads “How Much Does Appliance Repair Cost? (2026)” — the page’s own byline and its structured data both date the content to July 14, 2025, first published April 3, 2023. That parenthetical year is a freshness convention in the title tag, not a statement about when the figures were compiled, and this page took it for one until it checked. The Consumer Reports column is older still. Its range figures come from what CR itself calls “our 2021 survey”, on a page published January 29, 2024; its dishwasher and refrigerator pages were both last updated January 29, 2024 and attach no survey year to the figures used here — the refrigerator’s $197 is a typical cost, not a median, from what CR calls “our most recent survey” without dating it; only the washer and dryer figures carry a recent year, and both come from CR’s 2024 surveys. The dryer page does cite a 2025 survey of 86,609 owners, but for how often dryers break and what goes wrong, not for what the repair cost. So the left column spans 2021 to 2024, HomeGuide’s July 2025 content postdates all of it, and Thumbtack alone is current.

The tempting conclusion is that some of the 17–55% gap is simply five years of price inflation. This table argues against that, and it is worth following why. If time were driving the gap, the oldest CR row would show the widest one. It shows the narrowest. Ranges — the one row CR dates to 2021 outright — sit $206 against Thumbtack’s $241, a 17% gap, and that is the smallest of the three rows where both columns are single figures. The widest of those three is the dishwasher at 55%, from a page carrying the same January 2024 date and no survey year at all.

And the dryer row, one of the two newest in the column (2024, like the washer), does not show a gap in the same sense — its $116–$200 band contains Thumbtack’s $170. That last observation holds only on the printed basis, and cause 4 is why: add the $120–$170 service charge CR’s own dryer page says is “added to the total” and the band moves to $236–$370, clear of Thumbtack’s average rather than around it. The comparison below is deliberately left on the printed basis anyway, because CR states a fee basis on all five of its rows and not in the same direction on all five — the washer and dryer exclude the visit, the refrigerator, range and dishwasher absorb it — so a test run on mixed bases would not be a test.

One thing that reading gives back to the test, rather than taking away. The row the argument turns on is the range: oldest, and the narrowest gap. It is also, per cause 4, one of the two CR rows already priced on the contractor columns’ basis — parts and labor, with the diagnostic charge typically folded into the bill. So its 17% is a like-for-like comparison rather than an artifact of two different quantities, which makes the oldest row the cleanest row in the test and not its weakest. The washer and dryer rows are the ones whose printed gaps are partly basis, and both of them are newer than the range.

Run the test on just the rows that are comparable and it survives. All three single-figure rows sit on the contractor columns’ basis by CR’s own account — the range at $206 against $241, a 17% gap from a 2021 survey; the refrigerator at $197 against $250, a 27% gap; and the dishwasher at $142 against $220, a 55% gap, the last two from pages last updated January 29, 2024 that attach no survey year to either figure. Oldest row, narrowest gap, on every row where the comparison is honest. Until September 16, 2026 this paragraph set the dishwasher aside as the row whose basis CR never states. Its page does state one, the same as the refrigerator’s, so the widest gap in the test is also like-for-like, and a difference in basis cannot be what explains it.

That ordering is close to the reverse of what an inflation story predicts, which is why the five causes above are still the explanation and vintage is not a sixth one. Note that every row in that test is Consumer Reports against Thumbtack, the two columns whose dates are stated on their own pages — HomeGuide publishes ranges rather than single figures and so was never in it. Correcting HomeGuide’s vintage therefore moves nothing in the argument above; it moves the right-hand column from newer than CR to contemporaneous with CR’s most recent survey, which is worth knowing when that column is the one containing your appliance.

There is a federal index for this, and it is worth saying what it can and cannot settle. BLS publishes Repair of household items as series CUUR0000SEHP04, and it is not flat: it ran 319.5 in January 2023 and 393.4 in July 2024, up 23% in eighteen months, with the January-to-July 2024 stretch alone adding 4.2%. That is the period the CR pages above were last updated in, so those medians sit at the start of a steep climb rather than at the end of a calm one. But the series cannot close the question, for two reasons this site would rather state than bury: it is household items, a wider basket than appliance repair, and its last published reading is July 2024 — BLS puts it out irregularly, and the file records no value since.

The two years between that reading and this page are simply unmeasured. So the direction is documented and the magnitude is not, and no number on this page pretends otherwise. The best-time-to-buy page works the same series against the appliance-price index, where the contrast is the real one: appliances got cheaper while fixing them got dearer. Two practical consequences survive anyway. Treat the range and dishwasher medians as the softest numbers in the column — they are the two with the least recent provenance and, in the dishwasher’s case, no stated survey year to age against. And when a decision turns on a margin of twenty or thirty dollars, as it does on the ten-year question, the older figure is the one to stress-test first.

What one bill is actually made of

Every appliance repair bill has a fixed floor and a variable part. The floor is the service call, and it does not scale with the difficulty of the job.

Published figures for that floor, from three named sources, all differ — and a fourth source is this site’s own measurement, which is dearer than all but one of them. It is set out after the table below, because it changes what the table means rather than what is in it:

Source Service call / diagnostic fee Notes
This Old House, 2025 Home Warranty Survey$75–$125 per visitSurvey-based; the article notes dissatisfaction rises sharply above $150
Consumer Reports, washer guidance“at least $100 to $150”Stated as a floor, not a range
Consumer Reports, dryer guidance$120–$170 added to the totalHigher in major cities and coastal metros
Thumbtack$40–$60 minimum, some over $100Consultation fee; lowest figure of the four

Take the middle of that — call it $100 — and subtract it from Thumbtack’s job averages. What is left is what the actual repair costs once someone is standing in your kitchen. Read the $100 as the friendliest figure to the repair side, not as a neutral one; the paragraph under the table prices the same visit from sellers’ own rate cards and it comes out higher:

Appliance Average job Less ~$100 visit Which side of the bill dominates
Garbage disposal$120~$20Almost entirely the visit — the repair is ~17% of it
Dryer$170~$70Mostly the visit — the repair is ~41%
Microwave$220~$120Close to an even split — the repair is ~55%
Dishwasher$220~$120Close to an even split — the repair is ~55%
Washing machine$224~$124Close to an even split — the repair is ~55%
Oven$241~$141Mostly the repair — ~59%
Refrigerator$250~$150Mostly the repair — ~60%
Washer-dryer combo$653 (worst case, not an average)~$553Almost entirely the repair — ~85%

Every figure in that third column rests on the $100, and this site has measured the same fee directly rather than taking it from a survey. The service call fee page queried GE Appliances’ public pricing endpoint across 46 US ZIP codes on August 15, 2026 and set the result against four independent shops’ published price lists. Of the five sellers priced there, three add the fee to an approved repair bill, and all three land above $100 — GE at the $114.95 its own tool returned in 23 of the 32 US locations that quoted at all (and $153.95 in Manhattan), Yale Appliance’s Boston dispatch fee at $119.95, and American Appliance Service in New Jersey at $120, whose page states an approved total “includes the $120 service-call fee, parts, labor, applicable tax” — added, not absorbed.

Substitute the $114.95 and three rows above change category rather than shading: the microwave and dishwasher fall from ~55% to 47.8%, and the washing machine from 55% to 48.7% — so on all three the visit dominates the bill instead of splitting it evenly. The oven drops to 52.3% and the refrigerator to 54%, both still repair-led but barely; the dryer falls from 41% to 32.4%; and the garbage disposal’s chargeable work collapses from about $20 to $5.05. At the $120 end of that cluster the disposal reaches exactly zero — the whole national average is the visit. The column is kept on the $100 because it is the middle of the three published sources above and it keeps this table comparable with the rest of this site, but it is the reading most generous to the repair half of the bill, not a neutral one.

One thing cuts the other way, and it undoes the arithmetic rather than shifting it. Two of those same five sellers charge nothing for the visit once you approve the work — Central Minnesota Appliance waives its $129 fee in full, and Max Appliance in Houston waives its $89 but sets a $145 minimum labor charge in its place. On a bill from either, there is no visit line to subtract and the whole of this decomposition is the wrong question: what you are buying is a floor on the labor instead. So the split above describes the sellers who bill the visit through, and roughly two in five of the price lists this site has read do not.

The two ends of that column are the same fact read twice. On a garbage disposal you are paying a technician’s time to look at about $20 of work; on a job at the top of the range the visit is a rounding error against it. But the bottom row is not the same kind of number as the seven above it, and Thumbtack’s own page says so two sections down from the table it appears in. The pricing table lists “Washer / dryer combo $653” in a column headed simply Cost; the washing-machine section then writes that a washer repair “ranges between $137 and $364, but some customers have paid as much as $653 to fix a washer and dryer.” That is a reported maximum, and it is for two machines, not an average for one combined unit. The same page also publishes a High-end cost of $645 in a summary box headed simply “Appliance repairs cost” — which $653 exceeds.

But that box is worth reading against the sentence directly beneath it, because the two are not scoped alike, and this site quoted the box’s scope rather than the sentence’s until September 9, 2026. The prose reads “The national average cost of minor appliance repairs ranges from around $129-$329, and most people pay around $206″ — a qualifier the page never defines, on a page whose own table prices refrigerators and a washer-dryer combo. Two of the eight figures in that table fall outside the band the sentence sets: the $120 garbage disposal is below the $129 floor, and the $653 combo is above both the $329 ceiling and the $645 high end.

So the summary band and the per-appliance column are demonstrably not the same population, which is the reason the $653 is worth flagging and also the reason it cannot be flagged as “outside the range Thumbtack sets for everything it prices” — the range it publishes is qualified, and the per-appliance figures are not inside it either way. Read that way the ~85% is the arithmetic of a worst case, not of a typical combo bill: it is the honest ceiling on how far a repair can outrun the visit, and no reader should plan around it. Nothing else corroborates it either — the combo is the one appliance above that neither Consumer Reports nor HomeGuide prices at all.

Two practical consequences fall out of this, and neither is obvious from a range alone.

A second opinion costs a second service call. On a $500 quote that is an easy trade. On a $170 dryer job it is not — you would spend $75–$150 to challenge roughly $70 of chargeable work. The question worth asking on the phone before booking is whether the shop credits its diagnostic fee toward the repair if you approve the work — two of the five price lists this site has read do waive it in full, and three add it to the bill — because if it is waived, the second opinion is close to free and the arithmetic changes completely.

A repair that turns out to need a second visit does not cost twice as much — it costs the visit again. Which makes the next section a cost question, not a reliability one.

The odds your repair works the first time, by appliance

The quote you are given prices one visit. Whether that is what you pay depends on something the cost guides do not publish. Consumer Reports does:

Appliance Fixed on the first attempt Fixed eventually
Dishwasher73%91% (9% never fixed)
Gas range70%87% — 17% fixed on a later try, 13% never fixed
Electric range69%86% — 17% fixed on a later try, 14% never fixed
Pro-style range62%84% — 22% fixed on a later try, 16% never fixed
Refrigerator62%87% — 25% fixed on a later try, 13% never fixed†
Washing machine—no longer published — CR carried 91% successful with 19% needing a follow-up visit; its 2024/2025 revision of the washer article dropped the measurement

† The refrigerator row is the one place CR stops short. It prints the 62% and the 25% and no third figure, so the 13% here is the remainder rather than a published number — and the article introduces both with “Earlier surveys indicated,” against the dated 2021 surveys behind the dishwasher and range rows. Re-checked against all four live articles on September 7, 2026.

A refrigerator repair is meaningfully more likely to need a second trip than a dishwasher repair — 38% of fridge repairs were not resolved on the first attempt, against 27% of dishwasher repairs. Priced against the $89–$153.95 this site measured across four sellers’ published price lists — $114.95 being what GE’s own tool returned at 23 of the 32 US locations that quoted at all — that 38% adds $34–$59 to the honest expected cost of a fridge repair before anyone touches a part, or about $44 at that modal fee. That is arithmetic on published figures, not a quoted price, but it closes a real part of the gap between CR’s $197 and the $250 average — and it does so for a reason no cost table shows you.

Applied to the table above, the appliances whose published figures most understate the real expectation are refrigerators and pro-style ranges. Both are also the two most expensive to replace.

The third figure CR publishes is the one where the repair simply never works. It is 9% on a dishwasher, 13% on a gas range, 14% on an electric range — and 16% on a pro-style range, the machine CR’s own range guidance says it “almost always pays” to repair, because a replacement runs into thousands. Both of those are true at once: the repair is the right call on the arithmetic, and roughly one attempt in six ends with a technician’s bill and a range that still does not work. That is not an argument against repairing it. It is an argument for asking what the shop does if the first fix fails, before the visit rather than after.

Why your quote can sit outside every column above

Worth saying plainly, because a cost page that does not state its limits is asking to be trusted further than it should be.

  • It is national. Metro labor rates run well above the averages here; CR flags major cities and coastal areas explicitly on the dryer side.
  • The CR figures are historical. They cover machines purchased between 2008 and 2022 depending on the survey, and members reported repairs across that window. They are not August 2026 prices.
  • Medians hide the tail. The compressor at $562 and the washer transmission are in the same datasets as the $123 agitator repair. A median is a poor guide to a specific fault.
  • None of these sources publish a full methodology. Thumbtack describes tracking estimates from local professionals; HomeGuide gives one line — “Cost data is from research and project costs reported by HomeGuide members” — which names a source but no sample size, no period, and no split between the research half and the reported half. Only Consumer Reports states sample sizes, which is why its column is the one this page leads with despite being the least comparable to a quote.

If you have a quote in hand and the question is whether to pay it, the cost figure is only half the input. The other half is how many years it buys — run it through the repair-or-replace calculator.

Going deeper on any one number

Sources: Consumer Reports repair-or-replace guidance for washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators, clothes dryers and ranges · Consumer Reports, most common appliance problems · Thumbtack 2026 appliance repair costs · HomeGuide appliance repair costs · Homewyse cost to repair appliances · This Old House appliance repair statistics · BLS series CUUR0000SEHP04, Repair of household items

Costs verified August 2026. Next scheduled review November 2026.

Similar Posts