Laundry as an employee benefit sounds like a gimmick until you run the utilisation numbers on the perks you're already paying for.

Checked out your benefits budget recently? Somewhere in there is a line item that no one touches because it just makes so much sense. Gym membership incentives are estimated to reach only 10 to 15% of employees. The Illinois Workplace Wellness Study put participation at 11.8% and found that the employees who signed up were already more likely to have run local 5Ks and were already using the campus gym more often than their colleagues.

HR departments may miss it, but most people do not think lifting heavy stuff for an hour is a good time.

Why the wellness budget goes unused

The research on this is unflattering. CoreHealth cites survey work showing that 68% of employees didn't take full advantage of their wellbeing benefits because the programs were too hard to navigate, took too much time, or were too complicated to bother with.

Read that list again. Every reason is time. A perk that requires an employee to find spare hours will always lose, because the people you most want to retain are precisely the ones with no spare hours. You cannot gift a working parent a spin class. You can gift them a Sunday.

The budget is already shrinking

If this were a stable situation you could ignore it, and most companies did for a decade. It stopped being stable. Reporting on Ramp's spending data shows wellness spend fell 19% per employee between 2023 and 2025, from $1,366 down to $1,103, with premium gym memberships among the first things cut.

So the question your finance team is going to ask at the next renewal already has a date on it. The perks that survive that meeting will be the ones with usage numbers attached. Good luck defending the 11.8%.

Run the numbers and see for yourself

Utilisation math takes one line, and almost no HR team has run it on their own perks. Take what you spent on a benefit last year and divide it by the number of employees who actually used it. The answer is what you paid per participating employee.

A 100-person company paying $600 a head for a fitness benefit spends $60,000 a year. At 15% uptake, fifteen people used it, so the real price was $4,000 per participating employee.

Nobody presents that slide. It exists anyway.

Where laundry lands on the same math

Laundry is a recurring household task rather than an activity employees have to schedule into their week. Nobody needs onboarding into owning dirty socks. That changes the denominator, and the denominator is the whole argument.

Run it as an illustration. Say a service costs $45 per employee per month, or $540 a year, and say most of the workforce uses it, because most of a workforce does laundry. Across 100 employees that's $54,000 reaching something close to 100 people, so roughly $540 to $600 per participating employee. The gym benefit in the previous section cost $4,000 per participating employee. Similar total spend. Nearly seven times the difference in what each participating employee costs you.

Those figures are illustrative and your provider's rate will differ. The mechanism holds regardless. A benefit that meets a need employees already have, delivered without asking them to find time for it, will reach far more of your workforce than one competing with their evenings.

Hasn't this been tried?

Yes, mostly south of the border and mostly by companies with beanbag budgets. Twitter famously gave staff free laundry and dry cleaning, a perk that did not survive the 2022 change of ownership. Evernote went further and cleaned employees' houses twice a month. Canadian companies have largely watched from a polite distance, which is normal for us and also means the differentiation is still sitting there unclaimed.

A Calgary firm offering a laundry benefit is remarkable in its labour market in a way that a San Francisco firm can never be.

What about taxes?

A laundry benefit can create a taxable benefit in Canada because employer-paid goods and services that are personal in nature are generally taxable unless a specific exception applies. The CRA says taxable benefits are generally included in employment income and reported on the employee's T4.

Gym memberships aren't automatically tax-free either. When an employer pays, reimburses or subsidizes an employee's recreational-facility or club membership, the benefit is generally taxable, although specific exceptions can apply.

So don't sell the laundry perk on the promise of avoiding tax. The useful comparison is utilization, convenience and perceived employee value. Your payroll provider or tax adviser should determine the treatment of the specific arrangement.

When you shouldn't do this

Some companies should close this tab. If your team is scattered across cities without pickup coverage, half your staff get a perk and half get an explanation, which is worse than neither. Under about fifteen employees, the admin may not be worth anyone's time; just pay people more. And if your retention problem is compensation, no perk on earth fixes that. A laundry benefit for underpaid staff is a very clean shirt on a person interviewing elsewhere.

What to ask a provider, us included

One question matters more than the rest: can they report utilization, per employee, per month?

Because next budget cycle you'll be the one defending this line, and “everyone loves it” is not a slide. After that, ask who handles employee onboarding, what happens to staff outside the delivery zone, whether employees pay anything themselves, and whether the rate is per-pound, per-order or per-head so finance can model it properly.

If the provider can't give you a clean answer to those questions, you're buying a perk before you know what the perk actually costs.

Since you should interrogate us too

WeDoLaundry started in Vancouver in 2018 and now runs pickup and delivery across Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, and Toronto, somewhere past 10,000 customers and 1.25 million pounds of laundry in. The operation is boring in the way you want a vendor to be boring. Your employee books a pickup in the app, a driver collects the bag, and it comes back washed and folded in 24 hours. Their Sunday stays theirs.

For the employer it's one agreement and one invoice. The benefit arrives at each person's own front door, which is why it removes one of the biggest friction points in workplace perks: employees don't have to find another block of time in their week to use it. Regular business pickups are also priced below standard rates, so the per-head figure you model should come from a quote rather than the public price list.

If WeDoLaundry can provide measured utilization data for your workforce, use that data in the proposal. Actual participation is much more persuasive than an industry-wide assumption.

If your headcount and cities fit, run the maths above on your own payroll first. If the perk you're funding now costs more per actual user than the alternatives you're considering, it's worth asking whether the benefit is delivering enough value.

Even better, with us, you don't have to make a choice right now. All you have to do is request a 90-day laundry benefit pilot for your team. Measure the utilization before you commit to anything longer.

Laundry as a perk • Business & commercial • Pricing

Common questions

Is a laundry benefit taxable in Canada?
It can be. CRA guidance generally treats employer-paid personal benefits as taxable unless a specific exception applies. The exact treatment depends on how the benefit is structured, so employers should confirm the arrangement with their payroll provider or tax adviser.

How much does laundry as an employee benefit cost?
There isn't one universal price. Laundry services may be priced per pound, per order, by subscription or through an employer-specific arrangement. For budgeting, employers should use the provider's actual rate and model expected employee participation rather than relying on a generic industry price.

How can employers structure a laundry benefit?
Four common ways: fully employer-paid up to a monthly cap; a split where the employer covers a percentage and the employee pays the rest; a fixed monthly stipend the employee spends on the service; or tiered caps by role, offered first to the staff who need it most. Tax treatment differs across the four, so run the chosen structure past your payroll provider.

How do you run a laundry benefit pilot?
Pick one team, ideally your most time-poor group, and set a success metric before you start. Give it 90 days: a couple of weeks to onboard, a stretch to reach steady use, and a final window to survey and pull the numbers. Ninety days is long enough to get past the novelty spike and see the real participation rate. Expand only if active use holds and the cost per user beats the perk it would replace.

How do you calculate cost per active user?
Divide total spend over the period by the number of employees who used the service more than once. The “more than once” filters out one-time triers who would otherwise flatter the figure. A $4,500 quarter with 75 active users is $60 per active user, which you compare directly against the same sum for whatever perk it replaces.

Do companies actually offer laundry as a perk?
Yes. Companies have offered laundry and other household services as employee perks, particularly in the technology sector. The more useful question for a Canadian employer is whether the service can be delivered consistently across the locations where its employees live.

Is a laundry benefit better than a gym membership?
It depends on what you're measuring. A gym benefit has an obvious health and wellness purpose, while laundry is a convenience benefit designed to give employees back time. If your goal is physical activity, a gym has the clearer connection. If your goal is a broadly useful employee perk, utilization and convenience are the more relevant measures.