Cost per wear

Cost per wear is a simple idea: what a thing costs you, divided by the number of times you use it. A $200 pair of boots worn 400 times costs 50 cents a wear. A $40 top worn twice costs $20 a wear. Seen that way, the cheap top is the expensive one.

The arithmetic is easy. What makes cost per wear useful, or useless, is the honesty of the inputs, and the moment you do the sum. Our Cost per Wear Calculator handles the arithmetic and the side-by-side comparison. This page is about the inputs.

The formula

Cost per wear = (price + care + repairs - resale) ÷ wears

• Price is what you pay, including tax and shipping.
• Care is everything it takes to keep the item wearable over its life: dry cleaning, special detergent, polish, pressing.
• Repairs are the ones you can foresee: resoling boots, a new zipper, tailoring.
• Resale is what you could realistically get when you are done with it. For most clothes, call it zero.
• Wears is the number of times you will actually put it on before it stops being used, which is the hard part.

Estimating wears honestly

Most of us overestimate how often we will use a new thing. The broader trend is not encouraging either. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimated in 2017 that the number of times a garment is worn before it stops being used had fallen by 36 percent worldwide in 15 years, and that in the US clothes are worn around a quarter as often as the global average.

So start from evidence, not hope:

1. Find the closest thing you own. For a new pair of jeans, your current jeans. For a blazer, your current blazer, or nothing, which is its own answer.
2. Count how often you wore it in the last month, or over the last two weeks of laundry, and multiply up to a year. Adjust for seasons: a winter coat in a mild climate might get 40 days.
3. Estimate years honestly. How long did the last one last before it wore out or you stopped liking it?
4. Cut the figure for anything new to you. A color, cut or style you have never worn before tends to get worn less than the things you already reach for.

Decision rule: use the lower of your guess and your closet count. If the item has no equivalent in your closet, halve your guess.

Cost per use for objects

The same sum works for anything you own. Swap care for running costs: filters, pods, refills, batteries, subscriptions, and the space it takes up if storage costs you money.

An example, with illustrative figures: a $300 kitchen mixer used six times a year for ten years gives 60 uses, or $5 a use, before power and before the cupboard it fills. If a $30 hand mixer does those six jobs, the gap is $270 for slightly faster cake. Decision rule: if your cost per use is higher than the price of renting or borrowing one for a day, rent or borrow.

Comparing two options

This is where the formula earns its keep. We ran the numbers on two winter coats, both worn about 70 days a winter. The figures are illustrations, not prices for any real coat.

• Coat A: $240, dry-cleaned once a winter at $20.
• Coat B: $70, machine-washable, no care cost.

If coat A lasts six winters and coat B lasts two, coat A costs $360 over 420 wears, about 86 cents a wear, and coat B costs $70 over 140 wears, 50 cents a wear. The cheap coat wins.

If coat A lasts ten winters and coat B pills so badly you stop wearing it after one, coat A costs $440 over 700 wears, about 63 cents, and coat B costs $70 over 70 wears, a dollar a wear. Now the expensive coat wins.

Same coats, opposite answers. The formula does not tell you which coat to buy. It tells you which assumption matters, here how long each one will really last. Test that claim before paying for it; our buy it for life playbook has a repair test for doing so.

Decision rule: if the two results are within about 20 percent of each other, cost per wear does not decide it. Choose the one that fits best with what you already own, so it does not start a chain.

The trap: cost per wear as an excuse

Cost per wear is at its most dangerous after you have already fallen for something. Then it stops being a test and becomes a justification. “It’s an investment piece.” “It works out at a dollar a wear.” In a series of experiments and field studies, the marketing researcher Erica Mina Okada found that people want a justification before they buy something for pleasure, and buy more readily when the situation supplies one. A low cost per wear is a ready-made justification.

Watch for the signs:

• You did the sum after you decided.
• The wear estimate went up until the number looked good.
• You compared it with a cheap thing you would never buy rather than with nothing at all.
• The sum covers one item, while the item will pull in others: the shoes to go with it, the bag that suits it. Our Chain Cost Calculator adds those up.

The cheapest cost per wear in your home almost always belongs to something you already own. Every wear you add to it lowers it further.

Variations

• On a tight budget. Cash today matters more than cost per wear over years. A lower price can be the right choice even at a higher cost per wear, especially if the alternative is borrowing at interest.
• For children. Growth sets the lifespan, not wear. Count the months until the next size, and add resale or hand-me-down value back in.
• For a capsule or uniform. Repeated outfits push wears up fast. A personal uniform is cost per wear in practice.

What goes wrong, and the fix

• Forgetting care. A dry-clean-only shirt can cost more to keep than to buy. Fix: read the care label before the price tag.
• Counting the future you. “I will wear it once I lose weight, start running, get the job.” Fix: count wears for the life you have now.
• Forgetting the third option. You compare two new coats and never price the one in the closet. Fix: add “keep wearing what I have” to every comparison. Its price is already paid, so each extra wear costs almost nothing. And what you once paid for it should not push you either way: keeping it only because it was expensive is the sunk cost fallacy.