Short-term rental laundry: in-house machines vs a service

I spent two years believing my in-unit washer-dryer was free. It cost me about $1.90 in electricity and detergent per turnover, which is what I told myself the number was. Then I switched my cleaner from per-clean to hourly, looked at the first invoice, and found I was paying her $24 a month to stand in my kitchen watching a duvet cover tumble.

Laundry is the one line in a turnover where the cash cost and the real cost are two different numbers, and hosts almost always optimize the wrong one.

What one turnover actually weighs

Before you can compare anything, you need the unit. A turnover isn't "a load of laundry" — it's a specific pile with a specific weight, and every quote you'll ever get is priced against that weight.

A one-bedroom, two-guest turnover, weighed dry:

Call it 6 kg. That is one full load in a domestic 7–8 kg machine, and it is the number to hold in your head, because per-kilo laundry pricing is quoted on exactly this. A two-bed with four guests roughly doubles it to 11–12 kg, which is two loads, not one — a fact that quietly doubles your dryer time and is the single most common miscalculation in a same-day turnover plan.

The duvet cover is the item that sets the whole schedule. It's 25% of the weight and the slowest thing to dry — 90 minutes and up in a domestic dryer, longer if you stuff it in with the sheets and it balls up around them. Hosts who wash the duvet cover every second turnover are making a hygiene bet I wouldn't take, but they're at least making it consciously. Most hosts who "skip it sometimes" are just skipping it whenever the clock runs out, which is the same policy with worse timing.

In-house: the honest per-load number

Here's the full cost of running a domestic pair yourself, per load, with nothing hidden.

Capex, amortized. A decent 8 kg washer runs $500–700 and a condenser dryer $450–900. Call the pair $1,300. Manufacturers rate domestic machines for 2,000–3,000 cycles, but rental duty is not domestic duty — heavier loads, hotter washes, no rest days. Five years is a realistic life, and at 12 turnovers a month plus the odd extra load you're doing about 220 loads a year. That's 1,100 loads over the machine's life: $1.18 per load.

Electricity. A 40°C cotton cycle in an 8 kg washer draws 0.8–1.1 kWh. A condenser dryer takes 3.0–4.0 kWh for the same load; a heat-pump dryer takes 1.5–2.0 kWh but costs $300–500 more up front and runs a longer cycle. At the US average of $0.17/kWh, washer plus condenser dryer is about $0.77. At the European average of €0.30/kWh it's about €1.35 — the same machines, nearly double the running cost, which is why the heat-pump upgrade pays back in Europe and rarely does in Texas.

Water. Roughly 50 litres per cycle. At US rates including sewer that's about $0.08. In the EU, at €4 per cubic metre including wastewater, about €0.20.

Detergent and softener. Bought in 5-litre bulk rather than supermarket bottles: $0.25–0.40 per load.

Three and a half dollars. That's the number that convinces every new host that in-house laundry is a solved problem, and it's true right up until you count anybody's time.

What a service charges, and how it's priced

There are four different products sold under the word "laundry service", and they are not close to interchangeable.

Fluff-and-fold at a consumer laundromat. Priced per pound in the US at $1.25–2.50, so a 6 kg (13 lb) turnover costs $16–33. Priced per kilo in Europe at €2.50–4.50, so €15–27. Convenient, expensive, and the folding standard is whatever the person behind the counter feels like that day.

Commercial linen laundry, per piece. This is the hospitality product. Roughly $1.10–2.50 per sheet, $0.55–0.90 per bath towel, $2.50–4.00 for a duvet cover. A one-bed turnover lands at $8–14 in the US, €9–15 in Europe. It comes back pressed, sorted, and wrapped, and they will tell you which of your sheets are failing before you notice.

Linen rental. You don't own the linen at all; they deliver clean stock and take the dirty away. $12–20 per bed-set in the US, €12–18 in Europe. The highest per-turnover cost and the only option with zero linen capex and zero replacement management — no worn-elastic audits, no mid-season reorder, no three-sets-per-bed inventory math at all.

Your cleaner driving to a laundromat. Not a service, but it's what a third of hosts without in-unit machines actually do. Two hours of a paid person's time plus $8–12 in machines: $45–75 per turnover. This is the worst option available at any portfolio size, and hosts land in it by accident rather than by choosing it.

Two things make quoted prices lie. The first is minimums — most commercial routes want 20–25 kg per pickup or charge a $10–15 delivery fee below that, which means a single one-bed listing pays the fee on almost every collection. The second is turnaround, which is where the real cost hides.

The linen tax nobody prices in

A commercial service quotes 24 or 48 hours. Assume 48, because that's what you get in July.

That means every set you send is out of the building for two to three days. With 12 turnovers a month and a two-to-three-day round trip, the three-sets-per-bed floor stops being a floor and becomes tight: you need one on the bed, one in transit out, one coming back, and one clean in the closet for the guest who bleeds on the sheets on a Saturday. Realistically that's four sets per bed instead of three.

At $220–320 per bed set, the extra set is $250–300 of capex you wouldn't otherwise spend — and it lands in month one, not spread over the year. Outsourcing doesn't remove your linen investment; it increases it by about a third while removing the machines. Linen rental is the only version that actually removes both, which is exactly why it costs the most per turnover.

Nobody quotes you this. It shows up eight weeks in, when the service is a day late during peak season and you discover your rotation had no slack in it.

The crossover table

Read that table for cash cost alone and in-house wins by a mile at every portfolio size. That reading is wrong, and here's the correction.

The delta between in-house and a commercial linen route is about $10.50 per turnover. At 12 turnovers a month that's $126. Now price the two things the service actually buys back.

Cleaner time. Laundry that runs during the clean costs nothing extra. Laundry that outlasts the clean costs a wage. A duvet cover that needs 90 minutes in a dryer will not fit inside a 2.5-hour two-bed turnover that also has a bathroom in it — the turnover window math says you've got about 125 minutes of wash-and-dry against roughly 55 minutes of slack, before anything goes wrong. So the cleaner waits, comes back, or hangs it damp. At $22–32 an hour, 45–60 minutes of waiting is $16–32 per turnover, which is triple the entire service delta.

Buffer days. If laundry is why you keep a buffer day on the calendar, and the service removes that constraint, one recovered night a month at $110 covers most of the $126. Two recovered nights and the service is straightforwardly free.

So the crossover isn't a portfolio size. It's a pay structure.

• Cleaner paid per clean, machines in-unit, laundry runs during the clean: in-house, no argument, $3.50 a turnover and stop thinking about it.
• Cleaner paid hourly: you are buying their waiting time at $22–32/hour. Outsource, or buy a bigger dryer, or move laundry off the critical path with a fourth linen set.
• No in-unit machines: service, immediately. Never the laundromat drive.
• 5+ listings in one cluster: commercial route pickup, and negotiate — at 60+ turnovers a month you're a real account and per-piece pricing drops 15–25%.
• 10+ listings: run the numbers on a central laundry room with two semi-commercial pairs. A Speed Queen or Miele pair runs $2,500–4,000 but is rated for 10,000+ cycles instead of 3,000, and at that volume the domestic machines you'd otherwise buy are consumables.

The hybrid almost every multi-unit host ends up at

Nobody who runs five listings does one thing with all their laundry. The pattern that survives contact with a July weekend is split by item:

Towels and kitchen linen stay in-house. They're fast — 45 minutes to dry, no ironing anybody notices, no folding standard to meet. They're also the items most likely to come back stained, and you'd rather bin your own $9 towel than argue with a service about it.

Sheets and duvet covers go out. They're the slow-drying, high-weight, presentation-critical items where a commercial press genuinely beats what you can do, and where the per-piece price is lowest relative to the hassle.

That split cuts the outsourced weight roughly in half — a one-bed turnover drops from 6 kg to about 3.6 kg going out — which puts a single listing under the pickup minimum but makes three listings on one route work fine. It also means the dryer dying on a Friday afternoon costs you towels, not a bed.

What breaks, in each direction

In-house fails on hardware and heat. Dryers die more than washers, they die in summer, and they die on the day you have a same-day turnover. My first one went at 13:00 on a Friday with a 16:00 check-in and a wet duvet cover in the drum. The fix is not a better dryer; it's the spare linen set that means the dryer's death is an inconvenience and not a one-star review.

Services fail on calendar coupling. A late pickup in February is nothing. A late delivery on the first Saturday of August, when you have three turnovers and the linen is in a van somewhere, is a real outage — and you can't escalate it, because their peak is your peak. Hosts who outsource and keep one full spare rotation in the closet never notice this. Hosts who outsource to get rid of the closet find out the hard way.

Both models fail the same way when nobody tracks whose turn it is. If your cleaner, your service, and your calendar aren't looking at the same schedule, the failure isn't laundry — it's coordination, and it shows up as a bed that nobody made. That's the part RentTools handles for free: every turnover on one calendar, so the person doing the laundry knows which night it has to be back by.

One opinionated take

Every laundry debate hosts have online is about machines — capacity, heat pumps, stackables, which brand survives rental duty. The machine is the least important variable in the decision. Look at how you pay your cleaner instead: pay per clean and let the wash run during it, and in-house laundry is nearly free. Pay by the hour and every minute the dryer runs is billed to you at $28, which makes the service you thought was a luxury the cheaper option by a factor of two.