What 668 Real Appliance Repairs Actually Cost

Almost every appliance repair price you find online is an estimate, a national average, or a range assembled from other people’s ranges. This page is different: it is what we actually charged on 668 completed repairs between February 2024 and September 2026, across Florida, Texas and Georgia. The headline number is that the median completed repair came to $355, and that half of all repairs landed between $255 and $427. Refrigerators are both the most common call and the most expensive, at a median of $375. Dishwashers are the cheapest at $308. The full breakdown, the sample size behind every number, and what the spread actually means are below.

What This Data Is, and What It Is Not

Appliance repair pricing online is unusually poor quality. Most published figures are one of three things: a manufacturer’s suggested cost for a part with no labor attached, a national average assembled by a comparison site from other comparison sites, or a range so wide it tells you nothing. Almost none of it comes from invoices.

This page is our own service record. Every figure below comes from completed jobs in our system between 27 February 2024 and 2 September 2026, in Florida, Texas and Georgia. We have published the sample size next to every number, because a median from 244 repairs and a median from 26 are not the same kind of fact and you should be able to tell them apart.

Three things to understand before reading the table.

These are completed repairs, not visits. Our diagnostic fee is $99 and it is waived when the customer approves the repair. A completed job counts as a repair here when the invoice came to more than that fee with sales tax on it, which in our record means more than $108.90, and the tables report the 668 repairs that clear it. Visits that ended at diagnosis are excluded, so every figure describes actual repair work and the diagnostic does not pull the medians downward.

Every figure is parts and labor together, as the customer paid it, including any trip or service charge. It is the number on the invoice rather than a component price.

We are not publishing seasonality, and it is worth saying why rather than quietly omitting it. Our job volume varies by month for reasons that have to do with how our own business grew across those years, not with when appliances fail. Presenting that curve as “the months appliances break” would be a straightforward misreading of our own data, so we have left it out. If you see a repair company publishing a seasonality chart from a few thousand jobs, it is worth asking the same question of theirs.

Median Repair Cost by Appliance

The middle column is the median: half of repairs cost less than that figure, half cost more. The median is the honest number for this kind of data, because a handful of very large jobs pull an average upward and make it useless as a benchmark. The typical range is the middle half of jobs, from the 25th to the 75th percentile.

The cooking-appliance half of this table is broken out on its own page, with price bands, part ranges and the built-in against freestanding split: oven repair cost in 2026.

Cooktops, ice makers and commercial refrigeration appear in our records too, but together they carry fewer than twenty priced repairs, and we have not published medians for them. A median from six jobs is a number, not a fact.

What the Spread Tells You

The interesting part of this data is not the medians, which are fairly close together. It is how differently each appliance’s prices are spread, because that is what tells you how predictable a repair is before anybody looks at it.

Dryers are the most predictable appliance we work on. The middle half of dryer repairs falls between $284 and $390, a spread of only $106. That is because the common dryer faults are a short and cheap list: belts, rollers, thermostats, thermal fuses and heating elements are all in a narrow band, and there is no equivalent of a sealed system to blow the price up. If somebody quotes you well outside that range for a dryer, it is fair to ask what specifically is being replaced.

Refrigerators are the least predictable. The middle half runs from $254 to $460, and the top of the range goes far beyond that: our largest single refrigerator job was $3,140. That is the sealed system effect. Almost everything outside the sealed refrigeration circuit is an ordinary part at an ordinary price, but compressor and sealed system work is in a different category, and built-in and professional-grade appliances raise both the parts cost and the labor. A refrigerator quote is the one most worth understanding in detail before approving.

Dishwashers are cheapest, and that is structural. A dishwasher has no compressor, no heating drum and no suspension system. Its expensive parts, the wash motor and the control board, are the ceiling rather than the middle, so the median lands lower than every other appliance we publish at $308.

Ovens and ranges look similar in the middle and differ at the top. Ovens sit at a $367 median, but ovens have the wider upper spread, because a control board on a modern oven is expensive and because a self-clean cycle failure often takes more than one component with it.

What Pushes a Repair to the Top of Its Range

Since the useful question on any quote is why it sits where it does, here is what actually separates a job at the bottom of a range from one at the top, drawn from the same records.

Sealed system work on refrigeration. This is the single largest driver in the entire dataset and it is why refrigerators have both the highest median and the widest spread. Anything requiring the refrigerant circuit to be opened involves recovery, evacuation, charging and a compressor or component that costs several times what an ordinary part does. It is the difference between a $250 job and a four-figure one on the same appliance.

Control boards. Every appliance category has one, and it is the expensive component in each. Boards are model-specific, aftermarket manufacturers rarely produce them for older models, and when original stock runs out the only route is a refurbished unit. On ovens in particular a board failure frequently arrives alongside a thermal fuse and a door lock, because all three were damaged by the same event.

Built-in and professional-grade appliances. A built-in refrigerator or a wall oven is fixed into cabinetry, serviced from the front, and takes longer to reach. The parts cost more and the labor is genuinely greater, not as a premium but because the work takes longer. Jobs on these appliances cluster in the upper half of every range.

Drum bearings on front-load washing machines. The one job on a washing machine that is not an ordinary part. It requires the outer tub to come apart, and on many machines the tub is sealed, which turns a bearing into a tub assembly. That is what the top of the washing machine range is made of.

Parts that have to be ordered. Not a price increase in itself, but it usually indicates a less common component, and less common components cost more. A job finished on the first visit from van stock is almost always in the lower half of its range.

Conversely, the jobs at the bottom of every range are the same short list across all appliances: a heating element, a thermostat, a thermal fuse, a drain pump, an inlet valve, a door switch or interlock, a belt, a set of rollers, a gasket. Those are the ordinary failures, they are stocked, and they are what most appliance repair actually is.

Which Appliances Break Most

Across all 668 priced repairs, the split by appliance was consistent enough to be worth publishing on its own.

Refrigeration accounts for more than a third of everything we are called to, and the reason is not that refrigerators are badly made. It is that a refrigerator is the only appliance in a house that runs continuously, every hour of every day, for its entire life. A washing machine that does eight loads a week is working for perhaps four hours out of 168. A refrigerator never stops. Add that its failure is the only appliance failure that spoils food within hours, and it becomes both the most worn and the most urgently reported.

Laundry together, washers and dryers, comes to 44.2% of repairs, which is more than refrigeration. That is worth knowing if you are budgeting for a rental property or a building: the laundry pair generates more service events than anything else in the unit.

Where This Data Comes From

These jobs were completed across three states. Florida is the largest share of the record at 542 priced repairs, Texas accounts for 102, and Georgia for 14, with a small number of records where the state field was not filled in.

Regional pricing differences exist in appliance repair, mostly through labor rates rather than parts, and a national figure hides them. We have not broken the medians down by state here, because once you split 668 repairs across three states and six appliance categories, several of the cells fall below the twenty-job threshold we set for publishing a median. Publishing them anyway would look more precise and be less true.

What we can say plainly is that the figures above are weighted toward Florida, and that anybody using them as a benchmark in a higher labor cost market should expect to sit toward the upper half of each range rather than the lower.

How This Compares With Published Estimates

Our own cost guides on this site are built from component prices and national figures, and it is a fair test of both to put them side by side with what we actually charged.

They agree, which is the useful result. Our per-appliance guides for refrigerator repair cost, washing machine repair cost, dryer repair cost and dishwasher repair cost quote component-level ranges that bracket the medians on this page. That is what you would want to see: an estimate built from parts should land in the same territory as an invoice, and where it does not, one of the two is wrong.

The place they differ is at the top end. Published estimates tend to understate how far a refrigerator repair can go, because they are usually built around the common faults rather than the sealed system. Our record has a $3,140 refrigerator job in it. That is rare, and rare is not the same as impossible.

Repair or Replace, Using Real Numbers

The usual rule of thumb is that a repair is worth doing if it costs less than half the price of replacing the appliance. That rule is sound, and these medians make it concrete.

At a median of $355, the typical repair on this list is comfortably below half the cost of almost any new appliance of equivalent specification. That is the plain reading, and it holds for the middle of the distribution.

Where it stops holding is at the top of the refrigerator range and on any appliance near the end of its service life. Federal appliance data puts a refrigerator’s typical service life at around fourteen years, a dryer’s at about fourteen, a washing machine’s at roughly thirteen and a dishwasher’s at about fifteen. A $460 repair on a four-year-old refrigerator is straightforward value. The same repair on a thirteen-year-old one is buying a season, and it should be presented to you that way rather than as a fix.

Our repair or replace calculator works through that arithmetic, and our appliance repair statistics page puts these figures in the context of national industry data.

Method, Stated Plainly

So that these numbers can be checked, argued with or reused, here is exactly how they were produced.

Source. Our field service management system, covering every job created between 27 February 2024 and 2 September 2026.

Population. 1,145 job records in total. Jobs that were cancelled, still open or awaiting approval are excluded, and so are completed visits that ended at diagnosis.

Pricing sample. 668 completed repairs, each one billed above the diagnostic fee with sales tax on it. The fee was $78 through 2024 and $99 from 2025, and the largest invoice in the record that is diagnosis and nothing else comes to $108.90, which is where the line sits.

Figures. Median is the middle value. The typical range is the 25th to 75th percentile, so it contains the middle half of jobs. Every price is the invoice total, parts and labor together, as paid.

Threshold. No median is published for any category with fewer than twenty priced repairs.

What is not here. No customer information of any kind, no addresses, no individual job records. Seasonality is excluded for the reason given above. State-level medians are excluded because the sample does not support them.

Figures are only half of judging a quote. The other half is judging who gave it to you, which is what our guide on how to find a reliable appliance repair service covers: what a written quote should name, which questions separate a diagnosis from a guess, and what a licence does and does not tell you.

We have not broken these medians down by state, for the reason given above, but there is one market where our own sample is deep enough to stand on its own: Texas. The city-level figures are on our appliance repair cost in Houston page, and they are a fairer benchmark than a national average if that is where you are.

Frequently Asked Questions

Last updated: July 2026, Neighborville Appliance Repair, Call (863) 474-2970