Is It Worth Repairing a Washing Machine? Run the Numbers

A washing machine repair is worth it when it buys you more years of service than it costs you per year. That sounds circular until you put numbers to it, so here is the short version: a $250 repair on a five-year-old machine is almost always worth doing, a $600 repair on a twelve-year-old machine almost never is, and everything in between depends on one number no repair quote gives you — how many more years you actually expect to get out of it.

The calculator below works out that number for you. Everything after it explains what the number means and when to ignore it.

Costs and lifespans verified August 2026.

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The 50% rule is a decent guess and a bad rule

Ask a technician and you will hear the 50% rule: if the repair costs more than half a new machine, replace it. Some versions add an age test — if the machine is past half its expected life, replace it.

It is a useful gut-check. It is also wrong in two predictable directions.

It is too harsh on cheap appliances. Thumbtack’s average dishwasher repair, $220, against a $400 builder-grade replacement is 55% — the 50% rule fires. Or it does not, depending which page of Thumbtack’s own site you open: its dishwasher page puts the same repair at $187, which is 47% of that $400 and leaves the rule silent — same company, same March 31, 2026 update date, neither figure labeled as superseding the other. A threshold that flips on which of one aggregator’s two pages you happened to read is already telling you something about the threshold, and it is the same point the rest of this section makes the long way round. But if that repair buys four more years and the new unit lasts nine, you are paying $55 a year to keep the old one versus $44 a year for the new one. That is not a clear replace — that is a coin flip, and the rule told you it was obvious.

And that comparison is still being generous to the rule, because $400 is not what putting a dishwasher into that slot costs. A dishwasher is plumbed in, so replacing one is an installation rather than a delivery — Homewyse’s own line items put that at $308–$372. Add it and the denominator lands at $740: $82 a year over nine years against the old machine’s $55. The rule fired on a comparison it had no business firing on, and it did so because the price it was handed was a shelf price. The dishwasher page runs that adjustment through every price tier.

It is too generous to machines with nothing left. A $400 repair on a $1,600 premium washer passes the 50% test comfortably. If that washer is fourteen years old and the repair buys two more years, you are spending $200 a year to avoid spending $160 a year. The rule waved it through.

The rule fails in both directions for the same reason: it compares two prices while ignoring what each price buys. A repair buys years. So does a new machine. Cost per year is the comparison that matters, and it is the one the calculator makes.

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The number the decision actually turns on

Feed the calculator a quote and it hands back a sentence like this:

This repair pays for itself only if the machine lasts 3.9 more years.

That framing matters more than the verdict, because it converts an unanswerable question (“should I fix it?”) into one you can actually judge (“will this washer last four more years?”). You know things about your machine that no calculator does — whether it has been loud for a year, whether it is on its third fault, whether it gets two loads a day or two a week.

Two figures anchor the estimate:

• The life expectancy chart published by InterNACHI, the home inspectors’ certification body, puts a washing machine at 5 to 15 years. That is a wide band because usage varies enormously.
• Consumer Reports puts the average closer to 10 years in its repair-or-replace guidance.

Here is the part a calculator that starts from your machine’s age can get wrong: neither figure is a countdown, and neither source offers it as one. InterNACHI publishes 5 to 15 as a band and says its figures “should be used as guidelines only, and not relied upon as guarantees or warranties.” A tool that treats “rated life minus age” as remaining life will tell you an eleven-year-old machine has zero years left and that no repair can ever be justified — while the chart it took that number from puts eleven inside the band, with four years above it.

There is a second problem underneath the first: the survey figure is counting the wrong event. the National Association of Home Builders’ report notes that appliances are “often replaced long before they are worn out” as styling and technology move on — so the number describes when machines leave kitchens, not when they stop working. Those are different quantities, and the gap runs in your favor. Where these figures come from traces both charts to their sources.

So remaining life is an input you control, not an assumption buried in the code. The default is rated life minus age with a three-year floor. Override it if you know better.

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Four variables, in order of how much they move the answer

1. How many more years you expect from it

Already covered, and it dominates everything else. Moving from three years to five years cuts your repair’s annual cost by 40% on its own.

2. The quote — and whether it is the whole quote

Reported washing machine repair costs cluster in the $125–$500 range according to Inch Calculator, on a page last updated September 5, 2023.

That guide also puts the service call fee at $50–$150, and this is the one figure on this page the site has measured rather than quoted — the measurement disagrees at both ends. Querying GE Appliances’ own service pricing tool across 46 US ZIP codes on August 15, 2026 returned $114.95 at 23 of the 32 locations that quoted a price at all, topping out at $153.95 in Manhattan. Four sellers’ published price lists run $89 to $153.95 on a standard appliance, and Samsung’s in-home terms charge a non-refundable $155.00 to decline once the technician is on site. Nothing in that evidence is under $89, so the bottom half of the quoted band is not a discount you might get — it is a price nobody was offered, and the top of the band is low as well. Where the fee moves, where it does not, and where nobody will quote you one at all is the whole of that measurement.

Consumer Reports’ 2024 member survey puts median out-of-pocket repair costs lower, and breaks them out by machine type and price tier:

Washer type	Median out-of-pocket repair
Top-load agitator	$123–$175
Top-load high-efficiency	$142–$213
Front-load	$158–$214
Compact	about $186

CR reports these as ranges because the median differs by whether the machine was a low-end, midrange or high-end (over $1,000) model. They exclude the diagnostic service fee.

Add the service call back before you compare, or this table will alarm you on a normal quote. The exclusion in the line above is not a footnote — it is most of the difference. CR’s own washer page puts the charge at “at least $100 to $150”, and the $114.95 measured above sits inside that. So a top-load agitator at the top of its band is $175 on CR’s basis and about $290 on the bill you are handed, and a $250 quote — which looks like half again the top of the band — is in fact under it.

Two things follow. If your quote sits well above the top of your machine’s band once you have added the visit, that is worth a second opinion before it is worth a decision. And check which kind of shop you called: of the five price lists the service call fee page reads, three add the fee to an approved repair and two waive it in full — so on a bill from the other two there is nothing to add, and the band is comparable as printed.

But the more useful question is what you are actually paying for. The same total can be mostly part or mostly labor, and that changes what you should do about it:

Failure	Part alone	Bench time	Part or hours
Drain pump (23 listings)	$43–$236	30–60 min	Part. The quote is close to floor — a second opinion won’t move it much
Main / motor control board	$218–$291	Under 30 min	Part. Fast swap; a high quote here is markup, not hours
Door lock / latch (8 listings)	$21–$103	30–60 min	Part
Tub bearing + seal kit	$104	2–4 hours	Labor. Part is cheap; you are buying hours
Gearcase / transmission (9 listings)	$204–$400	2–4 hours	Labor

Part prices are OEM catalog listings, and each row names the document it comes from, because an earlier version of this caption did not. The two control boards and the bearing kit are single AppliancePartsPros listings, built up part by part, with part numbers, on the cost page, read August 2026. The pump and the gearcase are not single listings at all — they are ranges across that catalog’s Whirlpool Pump and Whirlpool Gearcase category pages, which is why those two rows carry a listing count where the others carry a part number; both were re-derived at source, scoped to the washer listings on every page of each category, on September 10, 2026; the latch band is eight of the ten listings PartSelect features in its washer latches category, read September 8 and re-read September 10, 2026.

The other two latch listings are, by PartSelect’s own descriptions, a magnetic plunger that holds the door open and a catch “designed to fit with dryers”; the plunger was the $19 floor. RepairClinic and PartSelect are cited for the pump row and only the pump row — both are pump-category pages, as this page’s own source list has always called them, and they publish nothing about boards, latches, bearings or gearcases. The bench times are this site’s working estimates, not published figures. What we checked before saying so, and what the estimate does to the number, is under the component table. That last column weighs the part against the hours, which is not the same thing as the part’s share of the invoice.

Short jobs bill at a shop’s minimum rather than by the clock, and against the $145 minimum this site builds every other cost table on — two shops’ published figure, Sarasota and Houston, rather than a national one, a $43–$236 pump is 23–62% of the bill, and under half of it on 16 of the 23 listings — the same range the dryer page carries for this part. The same arithmetic run across eight failures puts the part at 43% at its highest on every progressive failure; on that same part-plus-minimum basis a control board is the only one of the eight where it clears half. The tub bearing in the table above is the exception that page names: its printed bracket is priced by the hour instead, and against that the part runs 15–51%.

The practical rule that falls out of this: on a labor-dominated repair, a second quote is worth getting — but only from a shop that bills by the clock. Fixr publishes $50–$150 an hour for washer repair, in a guide dated January 31, 2025, and across the two-to-four-hour teardowns in the table above that band alone is $100 to $600 of labor. The catch is that most of the trade does not bill that way — it prices each job from a national flat-rate book, and two shops reading the same book come back within a few dollars of each other.

That “most” is contested by the guide the rate above comes from: Fixr says a flat fee for a washer repair is “rare … unless it is a simple fix like leveling out the feet on your machine.” What supports the flat-rate reading is mainly the trade’s own job book and the shops that publish which model they bill on; the cost guides split, Thumbtack on both sides, so the honest version of this rule is that you cannot tell from the outside which model your quote was built on. So the question that decides whether a second diagnostic visit is worth paying for is “is that your book rate for this job, or time and materials?”, and the cost page works through what the flat rate is actually made of. On a part-dominated repair, shopping around mostly moves the markup, not the price.

We break every component down in what a washing machine repair costs.

3. Whether you will be paying again

A first repair attempt is not certain to be the last one, and the calculator adds an allowance for that by default. You can switch it off.

A note on where that allowance comes from, because it changed. Consumer Reports used to publish a washer-specific figure — 91% of professional repairs succeeding, with 19% needing a follow-up visit — and earlier versions of this page cited it. CR has since revised its washing-machine article and that figure is no longer in it, so we no longer quote it — re-checked against the live article on September 7, 2026, which now carries a 2025 member survey and no repair-success measurement at all. CR does still publish that measurement for four other appliances, and they cluster tightly — but read the vintages before reading the cluster. The dishwasher and range figures are from CR’s 2021 surveys; the refrigerator figures CR itself introduces with “Earlier surveys indicated,” undated and older still. None was refreshed when the washer article moved to 2025 data:

Appliance	Fixed on the first attempt	Succeeded on a further attempt	Never fixed
Dishwasher	73%	18%	9%
Gas range	70%	17%	13%
Electric range	69%	17%	14%
Pro-style range	62%	22%	16%
Refrigerator	62%	25%	13%†

† CR prints the refrigerator’s 62% and 25% directly — “62 percent of repairs being successful on the first attempt and an additional 25 percent being successful after two or more attempts” — so the middle column is CR’s own measurement here exactly as it is in the four rows above. Only the 13% is ours, the remainder that makes the row sum to 100. CR publishes no cumulative figure for refrigerators; the 87% quoted for this row on the master cost table is 62 + 25.

Read the middle column for what it is: the share that succeeded on a further attempt, which is CR’s own wording — the dishwasher page quotes it verbatim, “18 percent succeeded with subsequent attempts.” It is not the share that needed one. Those two are different populations, and the difference is the column sitting to its right: a repair that was never fixed did not succeed on the first attempt either. So the share of repairs that did not work the first time is the first column’s complement — 27% of dishwashers, 30% of gas ranges, 31% of electric ranges, and 38% of both pro-style ranges and refrigerators, which is where the master cost table takes it up. CR does not say whether the never-fixed repairs drew a second visit before the owner gave up, so the true second-visit rate sits somewhere between the two columns: at least 17–25%, at most 27–38%.

That is worth stating plainly because it cuts against this site’s own default. The calculator’s 20% follow-up allowance was picked as a mid-point of the 17–25% column; measured against the wider band it is a floor, and on the two appliances at the top of the narrow one — the refrigerator at 25% and the pro-style range at 22% — it is below even that. Only the refrigerator is among the nine the calculator prices; its two range rows are gas and electric. If you want the pessimistic version of the repair side, set the quote up by a third rather than a fifth. The right-hand column is the other thing most repair-cost pages omit: on some appliances close to one repair in seven is never completed successfully.

For washers specifically, the one current figure CR does give is a reassuring one: from its 2025 member survey, “only 13 percent of washers broke down during the second through fifth years of ownership.”

If this is the second failure on the same machine within a year, add a further repair to the reserve. Machines that fail twice tend to fail a third time.

4. Energy, on the three appliances that have a figure

ENERGY STAR publishes the washer saving as about $530 in energy costs over the lifetime of the product — over the lifetime, not per year, and it names no lifetime in years. Across the 10-year rated life this page uses, that is about $53 a year, and the division is ours rather than ENERGY STAR’s. And note what that $530 is measured against, because it is not the machine in your laundry room. The sentence immediately before it reads “ENERGY STAR certified clothes washers use about 20% less energy and about 30% less water than regular washers” — a gap between two new machines, one certified and one not. Used here as the penalty for keeping an old one, it is a floor rather than an estimate: an eleven-year-old washer is worse than a new uncertified one, by an amount ENERGY STAR does not publish for washers. It does for refrigerators, on the same site — an old fridge uses “about 20% more energy than a model that has earned the ENERGY STAR”, the same 20% quoted for certified against regular washers — which suggests the understatement is real but not large.

The figure you will see everywhere else is $60 a year, and it is not ENERGY STAR’s. It is NRDC’s, published March 14, 2014, in a sentence that pairs it with 284 kWh and 3,385 gallons of water a year. It is not invented and it was not wrong in 2014 — it is twelve years old, and NRDC’s own page is the one pointing out that average washer energy use fell 75% between 1987 and 2010. A saving measured against “a non-ENERGY STAR model” shrinks every time the federal minimum moves, so an old differential is high rather than merely stale. This site quoted the $60 to ENERGY STAR until August 31, 2026, and this line is the correction.

It reads as a rounding error and it is not, because of where it lands in the arithmetic: the $53 comes off the annual cost of the replacement, not off the repair. A $950 machine over a 10-year rated life costs $95 a year; take $53 off and the repair has to beat $42 a year instead of $95, which more than doubles the break-even. The second worked example below is that exact case. It is fourth on this list because it is zero for most appliances and most ages — not because it is small when it applies. What it will not do is rescue a repair that was already bad, and it is irrelevant if your machine is only five years old and already reasonably efficient.

The calculator applies it on four of the nine appliances and each on its own terms: a washer from ten years old, a refrigerator only from fifteen, and a dryer and a standalone freezer at any age. The other five start at zero, and you can overwrite any of them.

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Three worked examples

All three hold the follow-up allowance at “No,” and the tool does not. It ships set to Yes — add 20%, which multiplies the quote before any division happens, so the break-even the widget prints on these same inputs is exactly a fifth higher than the number worked through here. Both figures are given below: the lower one shows you the division, the higher one is what appears on screen. Act on the higher one — as the allowance section above sets out, 20% is a floor against Consumer Reports’ 27%–38% band rather than a midpoint of it.

A five-year-old top-loader, $250 quote, $950 replacement. Break-even is 2.6 years — $250 divided by the $95 a year a $950 machine costs across the 10-year rated life the calculator starts from — or 3.2 years with the allowance left on. The tool seeds five remaining years at this age, so it clears either bar. Repair, and it is not close.

A ten-year-old front-loader, $500 quote for a bearing job, $950 replacement. Break-even lands at 11.9 years once the energy penalty is counted, or 14.3 with the allowance left on. That penalty is what moves it: at ten years old the ENERGY STAR gap applies, so $53 a year comes off the $95, and the repair has to beat $42 a year rather than $95. Without it the same quote breaks even at 5.3 years, or 6.3 with the allowance. No realistic lifespan gets you to 12, let alone 14. Replace.

Both examples use $950 because that is the price the calculator seeds, and $950 is not a published figure. It is this site’s pick from inside HomeGuide’s $700–$1,300 range for a washer, and it sits below the middle of it. Put the $1,300 top of that same range in instead and the second example breaks even at 6.5 years, not 11.9 — 7.8 rather than 14.3 with the allowance on — and the energy gap still lifts the hurdle by about two-thirds, but more than doubles is a property of the $950 rather than of the $53. That is the general shape of these comparisons and the reason the denominator decides them: the replacement price you picture moves the answer further than the quote does. Overwrite it before you read anything else off the tool.

It is worth knowing why this repair costs what it does, because it is the one job where a high quote is usually honest. Reaching a front-loader’s tub bearing means pulling the front panel, the counterweight, the tub springs and the motor, then splitting the outer tub to get at a bearing pressed into the rear housing. That is two to four hours of bench time against thirty to sixty minutes for most other repairs, on a part that may itself cost under $100. Built from the $104.34 kit and Fixr’s published $50–$150/hour across those hours, that comes to $204–$704 — arithmetic on published figures, not a price anyone quoted. The hours are the soft input: AppliancePartsPros publishes no time rating for the bearing kit at all, only owner reports running from two hours to eight, so the two-to-four is this site’s working estimate and it is what moves the total most.

Two things follow. A $500 bearing quote is not a technician taking advantage of you — it is what the job costs. And because the tub has to come apart either way, it is the repair most likely to turn into two jobs on the same invoice — as the next paragraph shows, the teardown exposes a second part that may need doing while the machine is open.

It also has two names and two possible causes, and quotes rarely separate them. Consumer Reports calls this part the drum bearing, not the tub bearing — its laundry expert Larry Ciufo puts the difficulty plainly: “If you need to replace the drum bearing for a front-load washer, it’s complicated. You basically need to take the whole thing apart to get to it.” Same job, two names, both worth recognizing on an invoice. The more useful thing the naming hides is that the noise has a second candidate. AppliancePartsPros’ own replacement guide opens on the identical symptom — “noisier than usual or vibrating excessively” — and attributes it to the spider arm assembly, which it calls “a crucial component for drum stability.” One representative OEM listing, Samsung DC97-12528A, is $215.62, re-read September 10, 2026 and down from the $224.22 this page carried — still more than double the $104.34 bearing-and-seal kit priced in washing machine repair cost.

So a rumbling drum is not one quote, it is two. A bearing kit on a sound spider is the $204–$704 job above. A spider that has gone with it adds a part costing more than the kit, on a teardown you are paying for either way, and pushes the total into the range where the $950 replacement wins outright. The teardown is identical, so a shop with the machine open already knows which one it is — ask before you approve.

An eight-year-old machine, $320 quote, $950 replacement. Break-even is 3.4 years against a default assumption of 3 — a gap of five months, which widens to a full year once the allowance is left on and the break-even becomes 4.0. The tool’s own settings push this row further toward replace than the bare division does — far enough to cross a band. On these exact inputs the widget prints Replace it, not the Genuinely a toss-up verdict this case reads like, and it misses that band by about one percent: three expected years against a 4.0-year break-even is a margin of 0.74, and the toss-up band opens at 0.75. A $316 quote rather than $320 would have tipped it back.

Read the break-even and the ladder under it before the red panel talks you out of a repair the arithmetic barely rejects. It is still the genuinely ambiguous middle that Consumer Reports flags as the hardest call, and the honest answer is that neither figure decides it — the machine’s history does. If it has been reliable and quiet, four more years is plausible and the repair is fine. If it has been noisy, walking, or throwing codes, it is not.

That third case is the common one, and it is why a verdict on its own is worth so little — this site’s included, as the band it just missed shows. What the tool is for is the number underneath the verdict: the years the repair has to buy, and the ladder showing what happens when your guess at those years is wrong.

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What overrides the math entirely

Five situations where you should stop calculating.

Anything gas, anything scorched, any water inside the cabinet. If a gas appliance smells of gas, a dryer has overheated or scorched, or anything smells of burning wiring, shut off the supply and stop using it. The washer equivalent is water the machine has found inside itself: LG’s AE appears only once the anti-flood switch has tripped, so it reports a leak rather than predicting one. A machine standing in its own water while still plugged in is a safety fault too, not a budget question.

The part is discontinued or backordered. A repair with no parts ETA is not a repair, it is an open-ended wait with a deposit attached. Get the ETA in writing before approving the job.

The transmission or the sealed drum. On washers, these are the jobs where the labor alone approaches a new entry-level machine. A quote in that territory deserves a second opinion, not a decision.

You already hate the machine. If it has never washed well, is too small, or is in the wrong place, “should I repair it” was never really the question. Money spent keeping a machine you dislike is money spent badly, and no calculator will tell you that.

A washer bought new in Quebec from October 5, 2026, and less than five years from delivery. Quebec’s Consumer Protection Act gives it a statutory warranty of good working order covering parts and labor, and the merchant or the manufacturer owes the repair, including to a later owner (ss. 38.1–38.6; the five years is set by Décret 1459-2025). Normal maintenance and damage from abuse are excluded (s. 38.3). Otherwise a fault inside that window is not a repair-or-replace question; it is a call to the store or the maker. What else Quebec law gives a buyer is on the extended warranty page.

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How this calculator works, and what it assumes

Worth stating plainly, because a tool that hides its assumptions is asking you to trust a number you cannot check.

It annualizes both sides. Repair cost divided by the years it buys, against replacement cost divided by the years it buys. Two things sit on top of that division rather than inside it, and neither is hidden on screen: the follow-up allowance, which is set to Yes when the page loads and raises your quote by 20% before anything is divided, and any energy saving, which is added to the repair side and subtracted from the replacement side. Both can be set to zero, and the worked examples above give the numbers each way. Nothing else is going on.

It uses published lifespans as starting points, not verdicts. The defaults come from InterNACHI’s chart. They populate a field you can edit, because your machine’s history beats any national average.

It does not invent numbers. Five of the nine appliances start with the energy field at zero, and the field’s own hint says why in each case. On three of them — the dishwasher and both ranges — no saving figure is published, and that zero is not a claim that replacing them saves no electricity. The ranges are the cleanest case: ENERGY STAR certifies no cooking appliances at all, so there is no certified model to measure yours against. On the microwave and the garbage disposal the zero means something else again — the tool calls the saving negligible at typical household use, which is its own judgment rather than a figure anyone publishes, and the field is still yours to overwrite.

Four have a figure, and only one of the four is published as a per-year number: a refrigerator over fifteen years old, at roughly $95. The other three ENERGY STAR states over the life of the product — about $530 for a washer, about $210 for a dryer and about $300 for a standalone freezer — so the $53, the $16 and the $25 the tool loads are divisions rather than quotations, and the dryer page shows that one worked through. The three are not equally ours, and the difference is worth knowing before you trust one. ENERGY STAR attaches no product lifetime to the washer’s total or the dryer’s, so those two conversions borrow a lifespan from somewhere else — this tool’s own 10 and 13 — and a shorter borrowed lifespan makes the annual saving larger, which pushes toward replacing.

The freezer’s does not borrow anything: ENERGY STAR states the twelve years on the same page as the $300, so $25 is its arithmetic and not ours. That the dryer’s is small is the point: it is under a third of the washer’s, on the appliance where the efficiency argument gets made most loudly. One distinction survives all of this. ENERGY STAR also publishes what a certified freezer costs to run — about $30 a year for a chest model, $60 for an upright — and that is a different quantity from the $300 it saves you against the unit already in your basement. The two sit on one page and carry the same dollar sign, and using the wrong one here is how this tool once carried a $60 freezer default that nobody had published.

That distinction earns its space because of where the number lands in the arithmetic. An energy saving is not only added to the cost of keeping the old machine; it is subtracted from the annual cost of the new one, on the reasoning that a replacement partly pays for itself. So on an appliance that is cheap to buy and slow to wear out, a guessed figure can quietly exceed the entire annualized cost of replacing it. A $700 freezer annualizes to about $47 across the fifteen years this tool starts it from — and that fifteen is the midpoint of InterNACHI’s 10-to-20 band, arithmetic we did rather than a figure either chart publishes. It is the default here that moves the most: on NAHB’s 11 the same freezer annualizes to $64, and the guessed figure below no longer swamps it.

The field is not empty any more — it carries the sourced $25 described above — and that is exactly what makes the margin worth stating: $25 is already more than half of $47, so the distance between a cited figure and a verdict-breaking one is about twenty dollars. Put a plausible-looking $60 in there and the model concludes that no repair is worth doing at any price, a free one included — a verdict produced entirely by a number invented to fill the gap. A made-up figure does not just make the output look more precise than it is. On the right appliance it reverses the answer.

It does not discount future money. A dollar spent in year four is treated as a dollar. Adding a discount rate would be more technically correct and would change almost no household’s decision, so it is left out in favor of arithmetic you can follow.

What it cannot know: the condition of everything that has not failed yet. A washer with a fresh pump and worn bearings and a washer with a fresh pump and sound bearings produce identical outputs here. That is the gap the technician fills, and it is why the questions below are worth asking.

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Questions worth asking the technician before you approve anything

• What exactly failed, and what caused it to fail? A drain pump that died because of a sock is a different situation from one that died because the bearings are going.
• Is the service call fee credited toward the repair if I go ahead?
• What is the warranty on the part and the labor? There is no standard term to measure it against. Of the four makers’ own service arms set side by side here, none covers labor for a year: GE’s labor term is 30 days, LG and Samsung cover the repair for 90, and Whirlpool publishes none. Worth knowing for context: Consumer Reports notes most new washers ship with only a one-year manufacturer warranty, with Speed Queen an outlier at up to seven years on select models — so “buy new and you’re covered” is a weaker argument than it sounds.
• Is this a part-dominated or labor-dominated job — and do you price it from a job-rate book, or by the hour? Use the part-or-labor table above for the first half. The second half decides what a second quote is worth: two shops reading the same flat-rate book return nearly the same number, and only an hourly shop can undercut one.
• Is the part in stock, and if not, when?
• Have you seen this failure on this model before? Model-specific failure patterns are the most useful thing a technician knows.

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Seven years, one third, and the question the math can’t answer

Repair if the machine is under about seven years old, the quote is under roughly a third of a replacement, and it has not failed before. Replace if it is past ten, the quote is over half, or the fault is in the transmission or sealed drum.

For everything in between — which is most of the calls people actually face — run the numbers above, then ask yourself the only question that really matters: do I believe this machine has that many years left in it?

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If you are still deciding

• How long do appliances actually last? — the full lifespan table, every appliance type, source by source
• What a washing machine repair costs, by failed component — pump, bearings, control board, transmission
• Appliance repair costs by type, 2026 — the same three sources, every appliance type
• Which washing machine brands are most reliable? — if you have landed on replace
• What to look for when replacing a washing machine — spec checklist by household size
• LG washer error codes — if you are still diagnosing
• The repair-or-replace section in full — all nine decision pages, and why cost per year rather than cost is the comparison that settles it

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Sources: InterNACHI Standard Estimated Life Expectancy Chart · Consumer Reports, “Should You Repair or Replace Your Broken Washing Machine” · Inch Calculator appliance repair cost guide · HomeGuide appliance prices · RepairClinic washer pump parts · PartSelect washer pumps · PartSelect washer latches · AppliancePartsPros washer pump, bearing, gearcase and control-board listings · Fixr washing machine repair cost · ENERGY STAR clothes washers · Consumer Reports, repair or replace your broken dishwasher · CR, range · CR, refrigerator · Quebec Consumer Protection Act · Décret 1459-2025, Gazette officielle du Québec, December 17, 2025

Costs and lifespans verified August 2026. Next scheduled review November 2026.