I Washed My Clothes in a Laundromat in Chiang Mai for 60 Baht
There are three ways to wash clothes in Thailand and one of them costs a quarter of what the hotel charges. The other two take fifteen minutes of your life each.
A girl on a motorbike outside my hostel in Chiang Mai was holding a plastic bag of clothes and shouting, laundry, laundry, twenty baht. Twenty baht, for a whole load, same day.
I did the arithmetic on what my hotel was charging, looked at the bag again, and then spent the next two hours finding out that twenty baht was not the real price and that the real price was a laundromat, and that the laundromat was sixty baht, and that it was going to save me an embarrassing amount of money over a month.
Last verified 1 September 2026.
There are exactly three options
Your hotel or guesthouse. Almost every one of them has a laundry service and almost none of them are honest about how the price works. It is usually quoted as a rate per kilogram, and it is usually somewhere between forty and a hundred and fifty baht a kilo, which sounds reasonable until you work out that a kilo of wet cotton t-shirts is three or four shirts.
Some guesthouses quote per item instead, and for a traveller with one week's clothing on a two-week trip, per item is frequently the better deal. Ask which one it is before you hand anything over, and ask whether there is a minimum. A hotel with a hundred-baht minimum is not going to wash one shirt for forty baht.
A self-service laundromat. These are everywhere in the tourist cities and they are a genuinely different product: big front-loading machines, card or coin operated, forty to sixty baht for a six-kilo wash, and a dryer on a timer. This is the answer for anyone staying more than a week.
A laundry shop. A small shop on the soi with a counter and a rack, you hand over a bag, you get a ticket, you come back. Forty to sixty baht a kilo, same day or next morning, usually cash only, and it is the right answer when your load is small or when you would rather not spend twenty minutes inside a machine room.
How to use a laundromat without ruining anything
Six kilos is the capacity and the machine will refuse to start above it. This is a dry weight estimate and the machine is not clever about it. A basket of towels is over six kilos when it looks like half a basket.
Push the door all the way in. The latch on the front of a Thai laundromat machine is heavy and mechanical, and a door that is not fully seated will simply not lock, and the machine will sit there doing nothing while you wait for it. Lift the handle, push the door, let it click, then start the cycle.
The detergent is usually included or dispensed automatically. Some machines ask you to add it from a drawer, most modern ones dose it for you. Do not also add your own unless you have asked, because a double dose of detergent leaves a residue that takes three cycles to remove.
The dryer is a trap for exactly two things: printed t-shirts and anything synthetic. The heat plus the rubber of a screen print is a reliable way to crack a print into flakes, and a polyester shirt goes from fine to unwearable in one cycle on high. If you have a t-shirt you care about, hang it. It will be dry in two hours, because it is Thailand.
The actual optimum, which is not what you think
Wash every four to six days, not every day. You do not need to run a machine every evening. Thai ambient heat means a shirt hung on a balcony or a motorbike seat is dry well before morning, and the number of loads is what costs you money.
The sun is a free dryer and it is better than the machine. A proper clothes horse costs almost nothing in any Thai town, and the combination of breeze and heat in the dry season is genuinely more effective than a 200-baht tumble dryer.
Buy detergent at the 7-Eleven for a single small load. The bottle is about forty or fifty baht and goes a very long way, which makes it dramatically cheaper than the sixty-baht machine when you are washing four shirts.
What never works
Putting leather boots in a top loader. Locals do this and it works, and it also destroys the shape of a decent boot. Top loaders have a central agitator that a boot will not survive.
A wet swimsuit. One wet swimsuit unbalances a front loader badly enough that the drum walks out of position and the machine starts banging. Dry it first. This is a real and extremely common way to end up with a machine that will not close.
Anything you would be upset to lose. A laundromat left unattended for forty minutes is a laundromat where your bag is being watched by a stranger who is bored. Small valuables in your pocket. A loaded bank card in a denim pocket is a common and expensive mistake.
The honest calculation
On a two-week trip, the hotel service is fine and you should not think about it. On a month or more, a laundromat membership of sorts, or just a shop on your soi, will cost you a third to a tenth of what the hotel charges, and the only cost is carrying a basket down a corridor.
And if you are on a long stay, buy a second set of clothes and a bottle of cheap laundry liquid before you buy anything else. The whole problem dissolves at that point, and the twenty-baht motorbike girl outside my hostel was not wrong, just optimistic about the contents of your bag.
