Appliance Repair-or-Replace Calculator

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.

Appliance

How old is it? (years)

Repair quote Parts and labor, including the service call fee.

Price of the replacement you'd actually buy

Adjust the assumptions

Years you expect to get out of it after the repair

Delivery, install, haul-away Whatever your retailer charges on top. Often bundled free — leave at 0 if so.

Yearly energy saving from a new unit

Allow for a follow-up visit on this repair Consumer Reports publishes the share of professional repairs needing a further attempt: 18% dishwashers, 17% gas and electric ranges, 22% pro-style ranges, 25% refrigerators. 20% is a mid-range allowance across them. CR no longer publishes a washer-specific figure.

Further repairs to budget for in that window

Years you expect from the new unit Defaults to the appliance's rated life — the midpoint, where the chart gives a range.

—

Repair it

— per year

Replace it

— per year

Show the math

Cost of repairing, line by line
Repairing	Amount

Cost of replacing, line by line
Replacing	Amount

Both sides are annualized — total spend divided by the years of service it buys. That is what the 50% rule is trying to approximate, and it is why the rule misfires on cheap appliances and on machines that still have most of their life ahead of them.

How sensitive is this?

The verdict at a range of assumed remaining lifespans, everything else held where you set it.

If the repair buys you…	Repair, per year	Verdict

Things that override the math

The fault is in the sealed system — compressor, evaporator, or a refrigerant leak It's a gas appliance and you can smell gas, or a dryer that has overheated or scorched The part is backordered or discontinued for this model This is the second failure on the same appliance within 12 months

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: Consumer Reports member survey. 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. Energy figures: ENERGY STAR — and only two of the nine appliances have one. A washer starts at $60/yr and a refrigerator over 15 years old at $95/yr, both published differences against a new certified unit. The other seven start at $0, which is not a claim that replacing them saves no energy — it is that we found no published per-unit figure to put there. The field is yours to fill from your own bill.

Rated lifespans are averages, which means roughly half of all units outlast them. 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.