Do people repair or replace? What 51,435 service visits show

Every published figure on how often Americans repair rather than replace an appliance comes from a survey: somebody was asked what they would do. This page reports something else, taken from a repair company that publishes figures from its own job records — what households actually did, at the moment a technician diagnosed the fault and quoted a price. Across 51,435 completed service visits, a technician named the failed component, gave a number, and the household decided with that number in front of them.

Most of them repaired. Of 31,336 quoted decisions, 19,761 were approved — 63.1%. The more interesting finding is what did not predict the answer.

Price does not predict the decision

The obvious hypothesis is that people approve cheap repairs and decline expensive ones. The source tested it across nine appliance categories, comparing each category's median finished ticket with how often that repair was approved: the two move independently. Every category median sits inside a narrow $335–$426 band, while approval rates spread across more than twenty percentage points.

Two categories make the point on their own. A washing machine repair and a dryer repair cost within three dollars of each other at the median, $358 and $355. Dryer repairs are approved at 79.5%, washer repairs at 59.0%. Same price, twenty points apart.

Sorted by approval rate. Cooktop, microwave and ice maker carry samples an order of magnitude below the main categories, so the source flags their rates as less stable; the median tickets include the part, the labour and the service call together, which is why they run above published parts prices.

Sorted by price instead of approval rate, the pattern runs against the budget story: the three cheapest categories to repair are the dishwasher at $335, the cooktop at $338 and the washing machine at $358 — and their approval rates are three of the four lowest. The two most expensive, the ice maker at $426 and the refrigerator at $394, are approved above the average. The source is careful not to claim that a higher price causes an approval; what the figures do close off is the intuition that the quote alone decides it.

The one diagnosis that moves the number

Across the normal band, price does not matter. At one point it does. When the diagnosis on a refrigerator or freezer is a failed compressor, approval falls to 49.6% across 458 such visits, at a $511 median ticket — against a 64.8% baseline for refrigerators overall, whose median is $394. A sealed-system diagnosis moves the answer about fifteen points and still leaves the outcome close to a coin flip, which reads as a threshold rather than a price: past a certain repair, some households stop treating the appliance as repairable at all.

That is the paragraph worth remembering when a sealed system is on the table — and the reason the compressor section of a refrigerator guide matters more than its price. The test that separates a $372 relay from a $956 compressor, and the age rule for that call, are in refrigerator compressor failure; the wider cooling diagnosis is in refrigerator not cooling, and the age side of it is in how long appliances last.

What actually breaks, and what it costs

The second half of the same data set is the diagnosis itself: the most-replaced component in each high-volume category, as a share of every repair completed on that appliance.

Two patterns fall out of that table. The gas oven igniter is the most-replaced single component in the set, at 9.0% of all oven and range repairs. And control boards are consistently the most expensive routine repair and consistently not the most common one: on refrigerators 2.5% of repairs at a $516 median, against 5.4% for a defrost heater at $378; on dryers 1.8% against 6.4% for the heating element. That is a useful thing to have in mind when a quote arrives naming a board — the component is real, but it is the rare finding, not the default one. The symptom it usually hides behind is in oven not heating and dryer not heating.

What the visit buys either way

The diagnostic is priced once and has the same outcome whichever way the decision goes. When the repair is approved — which happens in 63.1% of quoted decisions — the fee comes off the repair, so approving costs less than the quoted figure. When the household puts the money toward a new machine instead, they still leave with a named component, a firm number and an answer on whether the appliance had life left. The fee every guide on this site quotes is that same first number, and it is the one line on a repair bill that is genuinely the same for everybody: see what appliance repairs cost for the diagnostic band and the completed-repair bands by symptom.

How to use this page

Not as a prediction of your household. The data says two things worth acting on. First, the number on a quote is a weak predictor of what people do and a weak guide to what you should do — the decision that holds up is the one made about the machine: how old it is, how much life the planning figure leaves it, and whether the failed part is a wear item or a system. Second, at the top of the range the answer gets genuinely close to even, so the honest way to approach a sealed-system repair is with the arithmetic written down rather than with a feeling. The repair or replace calculator does that arithmetic on your own quote and the age of the machine.

Where these numbers come from

The approvals, medians and component shares are from a repair company that publishes first-party figures from its own completed work orders (51,435 visits across six US states through August 2026, appliance-level medians of finished tickets). A visit counts as approved when a repair was completed with a part fitted, and as diagnostic-only when the customer paid the fee and no part was replaced; visits between those bands are excluded from the approval calculation, which is why the two figures do not sum to the total. Component figures are reported only where at least fifteen replacements support the median. The source states explicitly that it has no confirmed explanation for the dryer outlier and publishes it as an anomaly rather than inventing a reason — the same standard applies here, so there is no guess on this page about why dryers are approved so much more often. Prices are US market figures and will differ by market, brand and how accessible the appliance is. Nothing here is a quote or a diagnosis for your machine.