Most guest house owners and holiday let hosts start out doing their own laundry. It feels like the obvious choice. You’ve got a washing machine, you know how to use it, and paying someone else to do it seems like an unnecessary expense when you’re already watching the margins.
But “free” is rarely actually free, and laundry is a good example of that. Here’s an honest look at what doing it in-house actually costs, what a commercial laundry service actually costs, and how to decide which makes sense for your situation.
The Visible Costs of Doing It Yourself
These are the ones people tend to factor in, even if they underestimate them.
Electricity and water. A standard domestic washing machine uses roughly 1 to 1.5 kWh per cycle, and a tumble dryer adds another 2 to 3 kWh on top of that. At current UK energy prices, a single full wash-and-dry cycle costs somewhere between 60p and £1.20. That might not sound like much, but a two-bedroom holiday let doing five changeovers a week during peak season could easily be running eight to ten cycles a week. Over a twelve-week summer, that’s real money.
Water costs are harder to pin down because they depend on your tariff and whether you’re metered, but they’re not zero.
Detergent and consumables. Commercial-quality detergent, fabric softener, stain treatment products, dryer sheets. If you’re doing laundry at any volume, you’re buying these constantly. Budget roughly £10 to £20 a month depending on how much you’re washing.
Machine wear and depreciation. This one is almost always ignored. A domestic washing machine has a typical lifespan of around 1,500 to 2,000 cycles. If you’re running it daily through the summer, you’re burning through its useful life far faster than a household would. Repairs and replacements cost money. A new mid-range machine is £400 to £700. Running it hard shortens the gap between purchases.
The Hidden Costs
These are the ones that don’t show up on any bill but are just as real.
- Your time. This is the big one. Loading, unloading, sorting, re-washing things that didn’t come out right, ironing duvet covers, folding, storing. If you’re honest about how long this actually takes per changeover, it adds up. For a two-bedroom property with a Saturday checkout, you could easily be spending two to three hours on laundry alone. Over a season, that’s a substantial amount of time you could be spending on other parts of the business, or not working at all.
- Staff time, if applicable. If you employ a cleaner or housekeeper, laundry often falls to them. That time has a direct labour cost. Every hour they spend managing the wash is an hour not spent on cleaning, maintenance, or inspection.
- Slower turnaround. A domestic machine washes one load at a time. If you’ve got four sets of bedding to turn around before a 3pm check-in, and your machine takes 90 minutes a cycle plus drying time, the maths gets tight fast. Commercial machines process much larger loads in less time, which matters on busy changeover days.
- Quality inconsistency. Home washing gets things clean, but it doesn’t always deliver the consistent, pressed, hotel-quality finish that guests notice. Duvet covers that come out creased, towels that feel rough from repeated domestic washing, pillowcases with faint marks that didn’t quite shift. Over time, this affects your reviews and the perceived standard of your property.
What a Commercial Laundry Service Actually Costs
This varies by provider and volume, so it’s worth asking for a proper quote based on your specific situation rather than assuming it’s out of reach.
As a general guide, commercial laundry pricing for B&Bs and holiday lets is typically charged per kg or per item. For a two-bedroom property doing regular changeovers, the weekly cost tends to be manageable when set against what you’re already spending in time, energy, and consumables.
What you get for that cost is worth spelling out. Professionally cleaned linen, processed in commercial-grade equipment that gets things consistently clean. Pressed and folded. Collected from your door and delivered back before your next check-in. No broken machines, no ironing, no re-washing things that came out wrong.
At Shaun’s Laundry Service, we’ve been handling commercial laundry for guest houses and holiday lets in Scarborough and Filey for over 21 years. We work around your changeover schedule, not the other way round.
A Simple Framework for Deciding
In-house laundry probably still makes sense if you have a single property, very low occupancy, and genuinely spare time. If you’re doing it yourself with no time pressure and no staff costs, the numbers can work.
A commercial laundry service starts to make more sense when you have more than one property, when you’re turning over multiple times a week in peak season, when you’re spending time on laundry that you’d rather spend elsewhere, or when you’re finding that consistency and quality are slipping.
The honest answer is that most hosts who switch to a commercial service wonder why they waited. The cost is usually lower than expected once you account for everything properly, and the time and stress savings are significant.
If you’re running a guest house or holiday let in Scarborough or Filey and you want to know what the numbers would actually look like for your operation, get in touch. We’re happy to have a straight conversation about it.
For more information on what we offer, visit our holiday let and B&B laundry service page.