What does laundry really cost in Berlin?
Mid-trip laundry in Berlin is a real decision: sit next to a Waschsalon machine for 90 minutes or hand the bag over as a wash-and-fold service. Type your load in kilograms and the chart compares what each route costs at real posted Berlin tariffs.
Enter how many kilograms of dirty clothes you are carrying, or tap a preset from a carry-on top-up to a full family load. The chart draws the total cost of four real routes at posted Berlin prices: Eco-Express self-service, Freddy Leck self-service, and the wash-and-fold Service Light and Deluxe counters, each with the time it takes out of your day.
Berlin has self-service Waschsalons on every second residential corner, most open seven days a week from 06:00, and a service option many visitors never hear about: hand the bag over in the morning and collect it washed, dried and bagged a few hours later. At the posted tariffs the two routes cost almost the same, about 11 to 12 euro for a 6 kg load, so the real decision is about your time, your load size and where you are staying. This planner does the arithmetic for your actual bag before you carry it anywhere.
What this tool does
It turns your laundry bag into a cost chart. Type the kilograms and the planner draws what the load costs on four real Berlin routes: washing it yourself at Eco-Express or at Freddy Leck in Moabit, or handing it to the wash-and-fold counter as Service Light or the folded Service Deluxe. The lines are computed from the posted tariffs, wash price per machine size, dryer price per 10 minutes and detergent, so the crossover points are real: a small load is a coin toss, a family load rewards the 16 kg drum, and the service counter stays within about a euro of self-service for a single load.
The numbers behind the chart
Eco-Express, the biggest Berlin chain with 14 salons, posts 6.00 euro for a normal wash, 5.50 euro before 10:00, 12.00 euro for the XXL drum and 1.70 euro per 10 minutes of drying. Freddy Leck in Moabit posts 5.50 euro for the 6 kg machine, 12.80 euro for 16 kg, and a Service Light wash-and-fold at 11.90 euro per 6 kg load, detergent included. Prices checked on 31 August 2026; the machines have the final word.
My advice
For one normal load, hand it over. The service counter costs about the price of doing it yourself, and the 90 minutes you would spend next to the dryer become 90 minutes in the city. Self-service starts winning clearly past about 10 kg, and an early start before 10:00 at Eco-Express keeps even that cheap. Laundromats run seven days a week, so a quiet Sunday morning, when the shops are shut anyway, is the best-value laundry slot Berlin offers.