It prints a verdict, but the number under the verdict is the one to act on: how many more years the repair has to buy before it beats a new machine. No quote gives you that figure, and it is what the decision actually turns on.
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
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Repair it
Replace it
Show the math
| Repairing | Amount |
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| Replacing | Amount |
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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 |
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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 it solves for years rather than for a percentage
The rule everyone repeats is the 50% rule: if the repair costs more than half a new machine, replace it. It is a ratio, and a ratio throws away the two things that decide the answer — how long the repair buys you, and what you would actually pay to replace the machine including getting the old one out of the kitchen.
So this tool inverts it. It takes the quote, the machine’s age and a replacement price, and returns a break-even in years. If the repair has to buy nine more years on a machine rated for thirteen and already eleven years old, the arithmetic has answered you. The 50% rule stress-tested against real prices is the page that argument comes from.
Where every input comes from
Nine appliances, seven classes of input. Two of them are this site’s own choice rather than a published figure, and both are named as such here and in the widget’s own footer — they are disclosed rather than buried, because both move the verdict.
| Input | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Typical repair cost | Thumbtack, national average job, updated March 31, 2026 | Washer $224 · dryer $170 · fridge $250 · dishwasher $220 · ranges $241 · microwave $220 · disposal $120. The freezer is the exception: Thumbtack publishes no standalone-freezer figure, so it starts from the refrigerator average as a proxy, disclosed in the footer. |
| New-unit price range | HomeGuide | Printed to the reader as a range, not a point — HomeGuide’s Average column. Corrected 2026-09-08: six of the nine bands were not HomeGuide’s figures at all. The dishwasher was printed as $300–$2,000, the electric range $500–$2,500, the gas range $600–$2,800, the freezer $250–$1,500, the microwave $200–$900 and the disposal $100–$500 — matching no column, no prose sentence and no combination on the page they were credited to, with the dishwasher’s $300 and the range’s $500 falling below HomeGuide’s entire published span for those appliances. The page’s three-tier table is identical in Wayback captures from January 2025 to today, so these were never published and never went stale. Only the washer, dryer and refrigerator were right. Three of HomeGuide’s rows do not map onto this tool’s nine and the tool now says so at the field: the Stove / range row is not split by fuel, there is no standalone-freezer row (chest and upright are separate), and the microwave row spans countertop through built-in. |
| Seeded replacement price | None — this site’s own pick | Re-derived 2026-09-08 against the corrected bands above, and the previous reading does not survive. It said all nine sat below the midpoint of their own band (0.23–0.42; mean 0.32) and therefore biased the verdict toward replace. That was true of the six bands that were never published. Against HomeGuide’s actual average bands the nine run −0.25 to 0.75 of the way up (mean 0.44): four sit above the midpoint — the gas range at 0.71, the disposal at 0.75 — and the dishwasher’s $700 sits below its band entirely, HomeGuide’s average dishwasher starting at $800. So there is no single direction of bias left to state. Re-seeding each at its band midpoint now changes the printed verdict on one of nine, not four. Kept unchanged — no seeded price moved and no verdict moved, because these bands are display-only and nothing in compute() reads them — but whether the seeds should be re-picked against the real bands is ACTION-ITEMS.md item 42. |
| Rated lifespan | InterNACHI Estimated Life Expectancy Chart, chart values verified August 2026 on the lifespan page | The printed figure where the chart gives one (dryer, dishwasher, microwave, disposal). Range midpoint — our arithmetic, not InterNACHI’s — for the other five. |
| Follow-up-visit allowance | Consumer Reports’ succeeded on a further attempt rates: dishwasher 18%, range 17–22%, refrigerator 25% | Re-checked against all four live CR articles on September 7, 2026, from the cost-by-type page. Defaults to 20%. Measured against the 27–38% band — CR’s share of repairs that did not work the first time — that is a floor, not a midpoint, and it falls below two of the five rates this column publishes — the refrigerator’s 25% and the pro-style range’s 22%. Only the refrigerator is selectable here; the tool’s two range rows are gas and electric, and HomeGuide’s average band for a freestanding range tops out at $1,300, well below the $3,000 pro-style bracket. CR publishes no washing-machine figure. |
| Delivery, install and haul-away | Best Buy haul-away ($49.99 with a delivery, $199.99 standalone); dishwasher install $308–$372 from Homewyse line items; and HomeAdvisor’s per-appliance installation bands, updated June 20, 2026, which the widget prints as field hints — washer and dryer $50–$175, refrigerator $130–$250, range $105–$125, dishwasher $110–$270, microwave $70–$500, with no row for a standalone freezer or a disposal | Best Buy’s two prices re-read August 31, 2026 on the disposal guide; the Homewyse line items read August 2026 on the dishwasher page; HomeAdvisor’s six bands re-read at source September 19, 2026, all reproducing exactly. HomeAdvisor was missing from this table until then — it is printed in the widget as a hint on every appliance, and by the rule below that makes the table, not the widget, the thing that was wrong. The dishwasher is seeded at $340 because installation is not optional on one — an 85% adjustment at the entry tier, and omitting it is exactly what makes the 50% rule fire on cheap machines. The other eight default to 0, which is a placeholder rather than a finding: no per-appliance figure is published here, and inventing eight would break the rule below. |
| Energy saving | ENERGY STAR — washers, dryers, refrigerators, freezers | Washer $53/yr and dryer $16/yr are our division of ENERGY STAR’s published lifetime figures ($530 over 10 years, $210 over 13), not annual figures ENERGY STAR prints. Fridge $95/yr — the one figure here ENERGY STAR prints as a per-year number, in its own words: “Refrigerators over 15 years old could be costing you more about $95 per year to run.” Freezer $25/yr, added 2026-09-09 — $300 over the 12-year lifetime ENERGY STAR itself states on the freezers page, so it is the one figure here whose denominator is not ours. Two of the four are gated on age, and the tool’s starting age is below the gate in both cases, so those two fields land at 0: the washer’s applies only from 10 years, the fridge’s only from 15. The dryer’s and the freezer’s apply at any age, because ENERGY STAR attaches no threshold to either — but for opposite reasons, and the difference decides whether the figure is even the right quantity. The freezer’s sentence is about replacing your old freezer, which is exactly what this field asks for, so it needs no gate. The dryer’s $210 names no comparison term at all, and the washer’s $530 arrives one sentence after “certified clothes washers use about 20% less energy and about 30% less water than regular washers“ — a gap between two new machines, a purchase-tier choice rather than an old-versus-new saving. Both therefore understate what replacing an old machine saves, because an old one is worse than a new uncertified one, so the error on those two runs toward repairing rather than away from it. A8 states the washer’s figure with that comparison class intact — “the gap between a certified and a non-certified washer” — and is the one page on this site that always has. The 10-year threshold is ours, not ENERGY STAR’s, and withholding the credit can only make repairing look better. The freezer’s $25 runs the other way and is the most consequential figure in the tool — a $700 freezer annualizes to about $47, so $25 is more than half the replacement side and it pushes that verdict toward replacing; lower it if yours is young. Not loaded: the $150 over 12 years ENERGY STAR publishes for recycling and replacing an old fridge, because it averages over old fridges generally and already includes the 15-plus ones counted at $95 here. The other five appliances carry no energy default at all. |
The rule this table enforces, in both directions: if a figure is not in this table, it does not belong in the widget — and if it is in the widget and not in this table, the table is what is wrong. A specification that lags the code condemns a well-sourced figure by its own terms.
What it will not tell you
- Whether your quote is fair. That is a different question — what repairs actually cost, by type.
- What your error code means. Codes are per-brand, and within a brand they can differ by form factor, product line and machine type: error codes, by brand.
- How to do the repair. This site costs repairs; it never instructs them. The work belongs to your machine’s manual and a qualified technician.
- Anything model-specific. Every default is a class figure, not your serial number.
Inputs verified August 2026 — every row in the table above now carries its own date, and three were re-derived at source since: the new-unit bands and the seeded prices on September 8, 2026 and the freezer’s energy figure on September 9. August is the month shown rather than September because this page is built entirely from figures verified elsewhere on the site, and a tool is only as current as the input under it checked longest ago — here the lifespan chart and the installation line items, both August. The repair-cost and new-unit rows are the ones that move fastest; next scheduled review November 2026.