How much is a laundromat worth?

Short answer: laundromats are the premium of this set — 3.70× SDE in realized sales — because the revenue is semi-absentee, verifiable through water bills, and hard to move. But the multiple is a lease-and-equipment bet: old machines and a short lease turn a premium business into a used-equipment sale. Run your numbers in the valuation calculator and see the laundromats page.

The number

BizBuySell's trailing-five-year closed sales (through Q2 2026) put Laundromats and Coin Laundry at 3.70× SDE and 1.33× revenue, median sale price $250,000 — the highest SDE multiple and revenue multiple in this group of trades, earned by low labor and semi-absentee operation. The size ladder still frames the top end — IBBA Market Pulse, Q2 2026: 2.0× SDE under a $500K price; 2.8× at $500K–$1M; 3.1× at $1M–$2M; 4.8× EBITDA at $2–5M; 5.8× EBITDA at $5–50M.

Public comparison: Damodaran Online's Business & Consumer Services bucket (a proxy, January 2026) trades at 14.26× EV/EBITDA. Public service roll-ups have contracted recurring revenue; you have quarters, cards and a water bill — priced accordingly.

Worked example — shown math, assumptions labeled:

• Revenue (assumption, a solid mid-size store): $300,000
• SDE margin (assumption): 30% → SDE = $300,000 × 0.30 = $90,000
• Multiple (BizBuySell realized, laundromats): 3.70×
• $90,000 × 3.70 = $333,000

How buyers actually value a laundromat

Laundromat buyers verify revenue instead of believing it. The classic check is the water bill: gallons consumed, divided by gallons per cycle for your machine mix, reconstructs how many washes actually happened — and it is compared against claimed revenue to the dollar. Card and app payment records have made this easier, which is one reason card-heavy stores now command better prices than coin-opaque ones.

The operating metric is turns per day — average daily cycles per machine. A store at 4–5 turns with room in the trade area is a business; a store at 2 turns is a utility bill with equipment attached. Then the two contracts that decide everything: the lease — buyers and their lenders want a long runway, commonly 10+ years including options, because the plumbing is in the concrete and the store cannot move — and the equipment schedule: age, capacity mix and cycle counts of every washer and dryer, with replacement cost priced in. Utilities close the review: water, sewer and gas as a share of revenue, and any coming rate or capacity changes from the city.

What raises the price — and what kills it

Raises it: card and app payment on most machines, with the turns data to prove revenue; equipment under ~7 years old with cycle counts documented; a long lease with options and capped increases; wash-dry-fold and pickup-and-delivery services adding attendant-run revenue on top of self-serve; utility share stable and explained, with newer high-extraction washers cutting gallons per cycle.

Kills it: a lease under five years with no options — the SBA lender walks first, then the buyers; a wall of 15-year-old machines whose replacement cost eats the multiple; revenue claimed well above what the water bill supports; a shiny new competitor permitted two blocks away; deferred plumbing, roof or boiler work that the inspection will find anyway.

Move your number

Payments: in this trade the card mix is valuation. Moving from coins-only to card/app payment raises vend prices (customers spend more per visit), produces the revenue record buyers trust, and cuts collection labor and vandalism — modernizing payments with the Finix payments team's rails underneath is the single cleanest multiple-builder here. Recurring revenue: wash-dry-fold subscriptions, commercial accounts (gyms, salons, short-term rentals) and pickup routes turn turns-per-day into contracted volume — ClaroPro's AI and ops tools can run the reminders, route messages and rebooking that keep those accounts ordering. Systems: machine-level monitoring — turns, downtime, payment mix — presented as a clean report is a Nova engineering team's kind of build, and it is exactly the diligence file a buyer wants.

Bring your turns and your lease to the math: run the calculator for laundromats.

This is an educational framework with shown math, not an appraisal; a real price is set by a real buyer on a specific day, water bills spread out next to the lease. Read the caveats as protection for you, the owner — they stop you overpaying for turns the water bill cannot prove, and they stop you underselling a long lease and a young machine wall that are genuinely scarce. Never invent. Show the math. We're on the side of the business owner.