Get Paid to Do Laundry? The Real Hourly Rate Math

A laundry app will happily tell you that a bag of laundry pays about $20. It will not tell you that the bag takes a 10-mile round trip, half an hour of folding, and roughly three hours of machine time you are stuck babysitting, and that after mileage the bag can net out below minimum wage for every committed hour. That gap between the advertised payout and your real hourly rate is the whole story for anyone hoping to get paid to do laundry through an app. What follows is the unit economics of Sudshare, Poplin, and Hampr, a suburban-versus-urban verdict you can check against your own ZIP code, and a formula that audits any per-bag offer in about five minutes.

Why Get Paid to Do Laundry Ads Mislead

Sudshare, Poplin, and Hampr all quote pay per bag, per order, or per load. None of the three separately compensates the sorting, folding, and customer messaging built into every order, and none of them pays for the driving. The payout number is real, but it is quoted per unit, not per hour, and every unpaid minute hides inside the unit.

Most coverage of laundry pickup and delivery gigs is a directory: eight companies, a payout table, a signup link, zero cost math. That is why the question "is doing laundry for money worth it after gas" goes unanswered. The honest answer depends far less on which app you pick and far more on two things the directories never mention: how dense your route is, and what you can do with your time while the machines run.

The Effective Hourly Rate Formula

Every per-bag offer reduces to the same arithmetic:

net pay = payout - (round-trip miles x $0.70) - supplies
effective hourly rate = net pay / hours

The trick is the denominator, because a laundry order contains two different kinds of time.

• Active minutes: driving, hauling bags, sorting clothes, transferring loads, folding, messaging the customer, bagging the finished order. This is labor. You cannot do anything else with it.
• Dwell minutes: the wash and dry cycles, which run unattended. A cycle is 90 to 150 minutes of committed clock, but almost none of it is work. You can overlap it with your own laundry, dinner prep, a remote job, or a kid's nap.

Laundry is the rare gig where part of the committed clock is semi-recoverable, and that wrinkle changes everything. Divide net pay by active minutes and you get the optimistic bound, what the order pays if your overlap is perfect. Divide by the full committed span, pickup to drop-off, and you get the pessimistic floor, what it pays if the order chains you to the house. Your laundry gig effective hourly rate after mileage lands somewhere between the two, positioned by how well you actually use the dwell. Both numbers, not just the payout, belong in any comparison.

The Unpaid Work Inside Every Laundry Order

Time one complete order and you will find the app is paying for the outcome while you supply the process. A typical single-bag loop breaks down like this:

Step	Typical minutes	Paid by the app?
Drive to pickup	10-30	No
Carry in, photograph, sort	5-15	No
Customer messages and preferences	2-10	No
Machine loads and transfers	5-10	No
Wash and dry dwell	90-150	No, but semi-recoverable
Fold 15 to 20 pounds of clothes	20-40	No
Bag, label, stage for delivery	2-5	No
Drive to drop-off	10-30	No

Add up only the active rows and a single order consumes roughly 55 to 140 minutes of genuine labor, none of it separately priced. Folding alone, at careful speed, can run half the payout clock. When a payout table says "$20 a bag," it is silently dividing by none of this, which is exactly how a decent-sounding offer becomes a $6 hour.

Mileage and Supply Costs at IRS Rates

What the drive really costs

At the 2025 IRS standard business mileage rate of 70 cents per mile, matched to the current IRS mileage rate, a 10-mile round-trip pickup and drop-off costs about $7 in vehicle expense before you have worked a single minute. On a $20 bag, that is 35 percent of the payout gone at the curb.

The IRS figure covers fuel, maintenance, and depreciation, but AAA's driving cost study puts all-in ownership costs around 74 cents per mile, so your true cost can run slightly higher. Whichever number you plan with, IRS Publication 463 governs how gig drivers document miles and choose between the standard rate and actual expenses, so log every trip from day one.

What each load costs to wash

Supplies come out of your payout too:

• Detergent and additives: roughly 25 to 50 cents per load for mainstream products.
• Dryer electricity: the biggest utility line. Electric dryers commonly draw 3 to 4 kWh per cycle, which at typical residential electricity prices in the mid-teens of cents per kWh means roughly 50 to 80 cents a load.
• Washer energy: smaller, and shrinking fast if you own an efficient machine, as ENERGY STAR washer data makes clear.
• Water and sewer: a few dimes per load at typical municipal rates, with commercial-scale consumption benchmarks in EPA's WaterSense laundry specs.

Combined, supplies and utilities typically run on the order of one to a few dollars per load depending on your machines and local rates. Call it $1.50 a load for planning, and remember it repeats for every bag you wash.

Sudshare vs Poplin vs Hampr Economics

The get paid to do laundry from home requirements are nearly identical across platforms: a working washer and dryer at your address, a smartphone, a vehicle, a license and insurance, and a background check. A raw Sudshare vs Poplin vs Hampr pay comparison matters less than the structural differences underneath, because structure decides how the costs above get amortized.

	Sudshare	Poplin	Hampr
Paid unit	Per bag	Per order	Per hampr (one load)
Order tendency	Single or few bags	Larger, multi-load orders	Repeated small loads
Scheduling	Flexible pickup windows	Scheduled orders	Recurring weekly routes
Stacking friendliness	Moderate, demand-dependent	High per order (size)	High (route density)
Tips	In-app	In-app	In-app plus order incentives

Sudshare washer pay, bag by bag

Sudshare advertises per-bag payouts with a commonly cited ceiling around $20, and one washer's $5,000 months show the top end exists. The catch is volume: $20 for one bag on a 10-mile loop nets $11.50 after mileage and supplies, before your folding minutes even start. The ceiling is real for washers who run dense, stacked evenings, and mostly theoretical for everyone else.

Poplin washer earnings, order by order

Poplin pays per order, and orders tend to run larger, which is the quiet advantage in SideHusl's Poplin breakdown. A $45 three-load order on an 8-mile loop costs $5.60 in mileage and about $4.50 in supplies, netting roughly $34.90. With about two active hours, that order pays around $17 an hour of labor, because one drive carries three loads of revenue.

Hampr washee pay, load by load

Hampr pays per hampr, its branded strap-basket unit, commonly reported in the $10 to $15 range per load with monthly incentives, and Hampr's own washee walkthrough describes the model directly. Four hamprs on a 12-mile loop gross $48, lose $8.40 to mileage and $6 to supplies, and net $33.60 across roughly 2.2 active hours, about $15 an hour. The structural hook is recurrence: weekly scheduled routes make stacking the default rather than luck.

Suburban Versus Urban Routes Flip the Ranking

Same apps, same folding speed, radically different results. Geometry decides.

The suburban single-order loop

Input	Value
Payout	$20 (one bag)
Round-trip miles	10
Mileage at 70 cents	$7.00
Supplies and utilities	$1.50
Net pay	$11.50
Active minutes	~59 (24 driving, 35 handling)
Committed span	~3 hours

Divided by active time, the order pays about $11.70 an hour. Divided by the committed span, it pays about $3.80 an hour. In dispersed suburbs, unpaid drive time dominates the order, single orders are the norm because customers are far apart, and the fully loaded rate can land near or below your local minimum wage. The active rate beats the federal floor but trails the $15-plus floors in high-wage states.

The urban stacked route

Input	Value
Payout	$72 (three customers, four bags, modest tips)
Loop miles	12
Mileage at 70 cents	$8.40
Supplies and utilities	$6.00 (four loads)
Net pay	$57.60
Active minutes	~120 (45 driving, 75 handling)
Committed span	~4.5 hours

Stacked, the route pays about $28.80 an hour of active labor and about $12.80 an hour on the fully loaded basis, clearing the federal floor either way and holding up against high state floors if your dwell overlap is honest. Notice the ranking flip: in the suburbs, Poplin-style large orders win because they amortize one drive across many loads. In dense zones, Sudshare and Hampr stacking wins because short legs multiply revenue per mile. Demand density, not the app's payout table, picks your winner.

How to Audit Any Per-Bag Offer Before Accepting

You need a stopwatch, your odometer, and the IRS rate. Nothing else.

1. Time one complete loop for a real order. Split the total into active minutes and dwell minutes, and be honest about how much dwell you can genuinely overlap with paid or useful activity.
2. Log the round-trip miles, pickup to drop-off, door to door.
3. Multiply miles by $0.70 to get your vehicle cost.
4. Add supplies at roughly $1.50 per load washed.
5. Compute net pay (payout minus mileage minus supplies) and divide by your hours on both denominators, active and committed.
6. Solve for your minimum acceptable offer: target hourly rate times hours, plus mileage, plus supplies. Want $20 an hour for one active hour on a 10-mile, one-load bag? You need $20 + $7.00 + $1.50, or $28.50, an offer single suburban bags rarely reach.
7. Benchmark it twice: against the $7.25 federal minimum wage floor from the FLSA, against your own state's number in the state minimum wage tables, and against your next-best gig floor, the hourly rate you already know you can earn elsewhere.

If the offer clears your break-even under the denominator that matches your real overlap, take it. If it only clears on the optimistic bound and your day has no gaps, decline and wait for a stackable route.

When a Laundry Side Hustle Is Actually Worth It

One last haircut: gig laundry income is 1099 self-employment income, subject to the 15.3 percent self-employment tax plus income tax under IRS self-employment tax rules. Deductions for mileage and supplies soften it, but net hourly pay lands meaningfully below the gross rate your formula produced, so build a 20 to 30 percent total tax reserve into your break-even target.

With that priced in, the verdict is conditional, and the conditions are checkable:

• Say yes when wash and dry dwell overlaps your remote job, your own family laundry, or a kid's naptime, when orders stack into a dense loop, when pickup chains onto a drive you were making anyway, or when a Poplin-style multi-load order spreads one trip across several loads of pay.
• Say no when single, dispersed orders leave you driving 20 minutes per bag, when payouts sit close to the mileage cost, or when your state floor is high and the fully loaded rate cannot clear it.

Ranking the platforms by real hourly pay, dense urban zones favor Sudshare and Hampr for stacking, suburbs favor Poplin for order size, and none of them beats the audit you run yourself. Get paid to do laundry only on orders where your own stopwatch says the math works, and let everyone else fight over the payout tables.