Which appliances break most, and what a typical repair costs

Sorted by median job cost. The average and the median are both the source's own published figures; the gap column is this site's subtraction of one from the other, not a number the source publishes. Every total is a whole invoice — part, labour and the service call together — which is why these medians run above the parts prices quoted on the individual fault pages.

The two most expensive jobs are not major appliances

At the median, the costliest work in the set is a garbage disposal at $360 and a standalone ice maker at $325, ahead of every refrigerator, oven and washer in the table. The source's explanation is the one worth keeping: their parts are expensive relative to the unit. A disposal and a standalone ice maker are small machines whose failure is almost always a motor, a switch or a sealed component, so the part is a large share of what the machine cost new and there is no cheaper repair to fall back on. The same logic explains the other end: the three cheapest medians belong to the cooktop at $203, the microwave at $210 and the freezer at $229, and among the appliances that hold water the dishwasher at $234 and the washing machine at $265 are the least expensive to service.

An average and a median answer two different questions

A table with both columns in it is worth reading as two separate facts. Where the two sit close together the spread of real invoices is tight and the median is a fair expectation for any one job: the washing machine is the extreme case at $265 both ways, and the dryer is the only appliance in the set whose median sits above its average ($325 against $324), which means the typical dryer repair is at the upper end of a narrow band. Where the gap is wide, a small number of expensive jobs is pulling the average up and the median is the better guide to a normal invoice — the microwave at a $210 median against a $288 average is a 37% gap, the freezer 29% and the cooktop 30%. An appliance whose median sits far below its average is one whose failure is usually cheap and occasionally catastrophic, and the honest way to plan for that is with the median and a margin rather than with either figure alone.

The same company publishes a second median, and it does not match

The publisher of this table also publishes a median repair ticket per appliance from its approval dataset, and the two figures do not agree: a washing machine repair is $358 there against $265 here, a refrigerator $394 against $302, a dishwasher $335 against $234, a microwave $376 against $210. The tables come from different samples over different periods and the source does not reconcile them. What is visible in the numbers is that for the four highest-volume categories the two sit $84 to $101 apart — within a few dollars of the $99 diagnostic the same company charges. That is what you would expect if one median covers every completed job with a recorded total, including visits that ended at the diagnosis, and the other covers repairs where a part was fitted. The reading is ours rather than the source's, and it is the reason every figure on this site is published with the sample it came from: a median is only as precise as its definition.

Which fault actually brings the calls

An appliance median hides the complaint underneath it. Where the same publisher logs visits per complaint, one fault usually dominates the appliance it belongs to, and the pattern is worth knowing before a quote arrives: a repair that is common is also a repair a technician has done many times.

Visits logged for that complaint, each counted inside its own appliance dataset, so the numbers are not comparable between appliances — a 2,683-visit refrigerator figure and a 246-visit ice maker figure rest on different sets of completed work. What is comparable is the ranking within each appliance.

Three things fall out of it. Not cooling is the largest single complaint group in the whole set, at 2,683 visits against the refrigerator's own median of $302 — the appliance-level figure most likely to be needed. Leaking appears in the top three for four of the six appliances, which is why the water faults have their own urgency: the repair is ordinary and the floor underneath it is not. And the two laundry appliances invert each other, with the dryer's no-heat fault at 969 visits against the washer's drain fault at 508 — the counts track how many of each machine are in service as much as how often they fail, which is the same caveat the source attaches to its own brand tables.

How to use a number like this

As a first filter, not a verdict. An appliance-level median is the right thing to hold against a quote that arrives without a diagnosis attached — if a refrigerator job is quoted far above $302, the question to ask is which component is being replaced — and which components actually fail on that brand, because the appliance-level figure hides a wide spread inside it. The fault pages on this site carry the narrower band: a washing machine median of $265 sits across everything from a $351 lid switch to a no-spin repair, and a refrigerator median of $302 sits across a $430 door gasket and a $956 compressor. Read the appliance median to know whether a quote is in the neighbourhood, then read the fault page to know whether the number matches the part — and read how long appliances last to know whether the machine is worth the money at all. The repair or replace calculator does that arithmetic on your own quote and the age of your machine.