Appliance Care

Repair or Replace an Old Appliance? A Simple Cost Rule

Standing in front of a broken appliance trying to decide whether it's worth fixing is a familiar spot, and there's a simple rule that makes the decision a lot less guessy.

The 50% Rule

If the repair cost is less than half the price of a new equivalent appliance, and the appliance is under about 8 years old, repair usually makes financial sense. It's a widely used rule of thumb for exactly this situation, and it works because it weighs the repair against what you'd actually spend to start over, not just against the repair bill on its own.

Age Changes the Math

Past the 10 to 12 year mark, replacement often makes more sense even for a moderate repair cost, since older appliances tend to have more failures follow the first one. The same goes if the same appliance has already needed more than one paid repair — at that point you're not just paying for this fix, you're likely paying for the next one too.

Two Other Things Worth Weighing

How essential is speed matters more than people expect — a fridge failure is urgent and needs a same-week answer, while a second freezer sitting in the garage can wait without much cost either way. It also helps to know whether the specific failure is a common, well-understood one, which tends to be cheaper and more predictable to fix, versus something unusual, where the final cost is harder to pin down in advance.

The Most Useful Step

Whichever way you're leaning, get the technician's diagnosis and exact price before deciding. An actual number and a clear explanation of what's wrong is a much better basis for this decision than guessing at repair costs from memory or comparing to a friend's experience with a different appliance.

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