What cleaning and laundry have actually cost

Between January 2016 and August 2026 the price of laundry and dry cleaning rose 60.6%. General inflation over the same 127 months was 41.4%, and services as a whole rose 46.7%.

So laundry outran the basket by 19.2 percentage points. In real terms, once inflation is taken out, it costs 13.6% more than it did a decade ago. That is the part a budget cannot absorb by pointing at the economy.

Average hourly earnings in the industry went from $12.18 to $21.08, a rise of 73.1%. The prices the industry charges rose 60.6%.

That is a gap of 12.4 percentage points between what the work costs to do and what it can be sold for, sustained over a decade. It has to have gone somewhere: thinner margins, harder automation, or operators leaving. The next section suggests which.

Employment in drycleaning and laundry services fell 41.8%, from 137.3 thousand to 79.9 thousand. Roughly 57,400 jobs, in an industry that still had to wash the same hotels and hospitals at the end of it.

A sector losing four workers in ten while its wages rise faster than its prices is not a sector with spare capacity. It is one consolidating into fewer, larger operations, because that is the only place the volume can go.

Two things follow for anyone buying laundry as a service. The first is that price pressure here is structural rather than cyclical, so waiting it out is not a strategy. The second is that scale is doing the absorbing, which is why the cost of an individual site has moved differently from the cost of a contract.

These are national figures. A commercial contract in one city is not the CPI, and a laundry serving hospitals does not price like one serving households. Read this as the direction and the size of the movement, not as a quotation.

The Consumer Price Index measures what households pay. The employment and earnings figures come from a survey of employers. They are different instruments pointed at the same industry, which is why they are shown together rather than combined into a single number.