Cost per wash, and why every other laundry price misleads you

Nine of these ten products publish a price. All nine matched the figures recorded for our laundry detergent comparison on 14/08/2026, to the cent, so nothing here contradicts that page. The tenth publishes neither a price nor a pack size on the brand’s own site 12.

The spread from top to bottom is close to threefold, and it is worth being precise about what that means: it is the spread in what the brands charge for the wash they describe, on the doses they recommend. It is not a spread in how clean the clothes come out. Nothing on this site is ranked on that, because no laundry has been washed.

Price per pack is the one shoppers actually see, and it inverts the answer at both ends of this table. Kind Laundry’s pack is $15.50 and Molly’s Suds is $22.99, so the sheets look like the thrifty buy. Per wash the sheets are $0.484 and the powder is $0.192, which is a different purchase decision made from the same two numbers 1 7.

Price per pound and price per litre are worse, because they measure the format rather than the product. Dirty Labs sells 32 washes in an 8.6 fl oz bottle at a stated 8 ml dose 8. Priced by the litre it is the most expensive thing in this table by a wide margin; priced by the wash it is $0.500 and sits mid-table. The litre figure is measuring how much water the brand declined to ship.

Then there is the unit trap, where the pack and the brand count in different things. Tru Earth sells its detergent in strips, and the size selector on the product page labels the 32-strip pack as 64 loads 9. The brand’s own FAQ says one strip does a standard load of 3 to 5 kg of lightly soiled clothing, with the option of tearing a strip in half for very small loads or hand washing 10. We count strips, at $0.531 each, because the strip is the thing that leaves the box. On the load count printed beside the size, the same pack is $0.265 a wash. Both figures come from the same website on the same day.

Cost per wash has one soft number in it, and the brand owns that number. A pack does not contain washes, it contains detergent, and the load count is the brand’s own view of how far that detergent goes. Recommend a larger dose and the cost per wash rises; count small loads and it falls.

Kind Laundry publishes the ladder in full: one sheet for a small load, two sheets for a medium load, three sheets for a large load 7. The pack is sold as 32 loads. Those two statements can both hold only if a load means a small load, so a medium wash from that pack is two doses and a large one is three. The $0.484 in the table is the cheapest wash the page describes rather than a typical one.

Blueland does the same thing with a shorter ladder and a bigger consequence, telling the buyer to use one tablet and to double to two for large loads 4. That takes the tin from $0.417 a wash to $0.833 on the brand’s own instruction. The ladder is not a flaw in the disclosure. It is the disclosure: a reader can compute the worse figure because the page published the dose that produces it.

Our own page does not publish a ladder at all. The Vove FAQ tells the buyer to put one tablet in the drum before the clothes and says nothing about large or heavily soiled loads 3. That keeps $0.350 looking steady in a table Vove owns, and it is the weaker disclosure of the two: Blueland’s higher number can be checked against its page and ours cannot. Give Vove a published dose ladder and our figure might move the same way Blueland’s does, which is worth printing here rather than leaving for a reader to notice.

Earth Breeze sits at the other end of the same problem. The pack is sold as 60 loads, and the usage guidance publishes its dosing chart as an image, with the page telling the buyer they have complete control over how much they use for each load and encouraging them to find the right amount themselves 11. A load count that rests on a dose the buyer picks is a unit of marketing rather than a unit of measurement, and $0.333 should be read as the best case.

Most of these brands quote two prices for the same pack. Earth Breeze is $20.00 as a one-off and $16.95 on subscription, which is $0.333 a wash against $0.283 2. Kind Laundry is $15.50 against $13.18, or $0.484 against $0.412 7. Tru Earth’s 64-strip pack is $29.99 one-off and $25.90 on subscription 9. Molly’s Suds offers 5% to subscribers 1, and Blueland advertises up to 20% off, on the initial purchase 4.

The figure to use is the one-off price, and there are three reasons rather than one. A subscription price is conditional on staying subscribed, so it is a price for a future you have not lived yet. Some of these discounts attach to the first order rather than to every order, which the Blueland wording states plainly. And subscriptions frequently bundle the shipping, so the headline saving and the delivery saving are not separable from the outside. Our category page records the one-off price for the same reason, and where a brand shows both, the source note says which one was taken.

The formats in this table ask the buyer to move very different amounts of matter. A wash from the Dirty Labs bottle arrives as 8 ml of liquid: 8.6 fl oz is roughly 254 ml, which at that dose comes out close to the 32 washes the page claims 8. A wash from a carton arrives as a pressed tablet or a sheet, with no water in it at all. Whatever else separates these products, one of them is paying a courier to carry water and the others are not.

Pack size does the same work inside a single product. The Dirty Labs 80-load refill is $28.00, which is $0.350 a wash for the identical formula that costs $0.500 in the 32-load bottle 8. That is a larger swing than most of the gaps between brands in this table, and it comes from nothing but the size of the container.

None of the figures above include delivery, and delivery is part of what a wash costs. Kind Laundry gives free shipping above $60 7, Tru Earth gives it on every subscription 9, and Earth Breeze gives it on every order to subscribers 2. A buyer who clears a threshold pays a different cost per wash from one who does not, and we do not model that, because it depends on the basket rather than on the product.

Cost per wash says nothing about whether the wash worked. A cheap dose that needs a second run is not cheap, and we have no way of telling you which of these that applies to, because no laundry test has been run for this site and none of these products has been used to wash anything. The figure is an arithmetic comparison of published claims, and it is worth exactly what those claims are worth.

So use the cost per wash to compare, and use the dosing instruction as the check on it. Where a brand publishes both, the figure is as good as the brand’s own arithmetic. Where a brand publishes a load count and no dose, the figure belongs to the brand rather than to the buyer, and the ones that come out cheapest are frequently the ones with the least on the page about how much to use.