An occupied room produces between 2.5 and 3.5 kilograms of linen a day under normal change conditions, rising to 5 on full-turnover days. A complete in-house laundry starts to make sense above 120 rooms, or sooner when the property is isolated and an outside service only calls every other day. Below 50 rooms, washing sheets and duvet covers in-house is almost always a mistake, but a small 8-12 m² service laundry room is useful to everyone regardless.
Contents
The sum nobody works through to the end
An outside service is billed by the kilogram or by the item, and in 2026 in Italy rental-and-wash contracts run roughly between 1.10 and 1.60 euros per kilo for flat linen, with per-item prices ranging from 50-90 cents for a sheet to 45-70 for a bath towel. These are market figures, with big swings between cities and outlying areas, and between rental contracts and contracts on your own linen stock.
The in-house cost gets underestimated because people only look at detergent, water and energy, which together run 45 to 75 cents a kilo. The figure that flips the calculation is labour: an operator handles between 25 and 40 kilos an hour including loading, unloading, ironing and folding, and at full company cost that’s 50-80 cents a kilo. Added together that’s 1.00-1.50 euros a kilo before amortising the machines, which for a 60-room setup run between 35,000 and 70,000 euros over eight years, and before counting the floor area taken from other uses.
On these numbers the position is clear-cut. Washing flat linen in-house below 60 rooms doesn’t pay off, because the full cost matches or exceeds the outside service and it also ties up space, capital and a member of staff. Towelling is a different matter: it doesn’t need ironing, so the labour cost drops sharply and the in-house advantage becomes real from around 40 rooms. Small bar table linen, cleaning cloths and uniforms always stay in-house, because nobody wants to wait for the weekly round to get fifteen napkins.
| Rooms | What’s worth keeping in-house | Room floor area | Typical equipment |
|---|---|---|---|
| up to 25 | cloths, uniforms, emergency towelling | 6-9 m² | 1 washer 8-10 kg, 1 dryer |
| 26-50 | some towelling, bar table linen, uniforms | 10-16 m² | 1-2 washers 10-14 kg, 1-2 dryers |
| 51-100 | all towelling, table linen, uniforms | 20-32 m² | 2 washers 14-20 kg, 2 dryers, short roller ironer |
| 101-160 | towelling and part of flat linen | 40-60 m² | 2-3 washers 20-30 kg, 3 dryers, 2 m roller |
| over 160 | full cycle | 80-120 m² | complete line with sorting and folding |
The daily output to start from is calculated like this: number of rooms times occupancy rate times 3 kilos, plus 0.3-0.6 kilos per cover served if there’s a restaurant. A ninety-room four-star at 80% occupancy with 60 covers an evening produces around 240 kilos a day, which at 20 kilos per washer means twelve cycles, more than a single machine can manage in one shift.
The soiled-to-clean flow
This is the constraint that shapes the floor plan, and it needs respecting even in a twelve-square-metre room. Soiled linen comes in on one side, gets weighed and sorted, goes into the machine, comes out clean and continues in a single direction to the trolley that returns to the floors. At no point should a trolley of soiled linen cross or pass over a surface holding clean linen.
In small properties, the realistic layout is an L-shape or a single line, with the soiled-linen entry at one end and the clean-linen exit at the other. If there’s only one door, which happens often, a time band is set for loading soiled linen and another for collecting clean linen, with the rule posted on the wall. In large properties, soiled linen gets its own door, with a separate 6-10 m² sorting room where linen is divided by type and degree of soiling.
Sorting is also when objects that ended up inside sheets get found. A rigid container for anything recovered, cut-resistant gloves for whoever handles it, and the rule of never putting a hand inside a closed bag: a syringe or a pocketknife in a bundle of linen isn’t a news story rarity, it happens. The housekeeping team needs training to close bags without compressing them and never to use the linen bag as a bin.
Soiled bags don’t stay in the laundry overnight. A load of damp towelling closed in a bag at twenty degrees grows mould within twelve hours, and the yellow stain that comes out of it never leaves.
Machines, power, drainage
An industrial washer is sized on a one-to-ten ratio: a hundred litres of drum for ten kilos of dry linen. A full cycle of hotel linen takes 45 to 60 minutes, so over eight hours a machine manages six or seven real cycles counting loading and unloading. A 20-kilo washer therefore handles 120-140 kilos a day, not the 160 the theoretical multiplication suggests.
Dryers need sizing above washer capacity, at roughly a 1.3 to 1 ratio, because the drying cycle runs longer than the wash cycle. A 20-kilo washer needs a 25-30 kilo dryer, or two at 14. Anyone matching dryer capacity to washer capacity ends up with damp linen sitting in a basket waiting, and the bottleneck shifts right there.
Electrical capacity is where projects stall. A 20-kilo washer with electric heating draws between 18 and 24 kW, an electric dryer of the same class between 18 and 27, a two-metre roller ironer between 12 and 18. Add it up and you easily pass 50 kW, while a mid-sized hotel’s supply is often contracted at 30 to 50 kW overall. Upgrading the meter, a new distribution board and dedicated circuits are worth several thousand euros and need budgeting before the machine order is signed, not after. Where an adequate boiler plant already exists, hot-water or steam-heated machines and gas dryers cut electrical draw considerably, but they add flues and permits.
On drainage, the classic mistake is connecting an industrial washer to a basin-sized outlet. A 20-kilo machine empties 150-200 litres in under a minute, with an instantaneous flow of four or five litres a second that no 40-millimetre trap can handle. What’s needed is a floor channel with a grate, or a dedicated 100-millimetre outlet with an inspectable trap, and a genuine fall. The floor needs waterproofing and tying into a drain, because sooner or later a seal fails and the laundry floods the floor.
The slab also needs checking. A high-spin 20-kilo washer weighs 500-600 kilos empty and transmits significant dynamic loads during the spin cycle. In a basement on a ground slab there’s no issue; on an upper floor slab, the structural engineer needs to calculate it, and the answer is sometimes an anti-vibration base or moving the room elsewhere.
Heat, humidity, air
A laundry with two dryers running produces heat and steam in quantities that surprise anyone who’s only seen it on a drawing. Air expelled from a 20-kilo dryer is measured at over a thousand cubic metres an hour, and that air needs replacing: without an outside air intake of adequate cross-section, the machine runs under negative pressure, dries worse and uses more energy. An undersized fresh-air grille is the most common flaw in laundries fitted into basements.
The exhaust duct needs to be short, with as few bends as possible, 200-250 millimetre diameter, and an inspection point for cleaning the lint filters. Those filters need cleaning every day, not every month: a clogged filter extends cycles by 30% and is the most common cause of laundry fires. It belongs in the planned maintenance schedule with the same rigour applied to building systems.
Room temperature needs controlling with extraction and air changes, because staff working eight hours at thirty-five degrees perform at half capacity. And moisture escaping the laundry rises into neighbouring rooms: if the clean linen store is next door, a real partition is needed, not a curtain.
Ironing, folding, trolleys
The roller ironer is the machine that decides whether flat linen can stay in-house. A 1,400-millimetre working width handles single sheets and pillowcases; for double sheets you need two metres or accept ironing in two passes, doubling the time. Real output from a two-metre roller with two operators sits between 60 and 90 kilos an hour; with just one it drops below 40 because the sheet has to be fed in taut.
The folding table needs 180 by 80 centimetres clear and should sit at 90 centimetres off the floor, not 75: folding at desk height wrecks your back. A shelf above the table for finished stacks, nothing below, because that space is needed for feet and for the trolley.
Trolleys take up more room than expected. A bag trolley measures 70 by 60 centimetres, a shelved linen trolley 80 by 50, and in a 30 m² laundry three or four are moving around at once. You need two or three square metres of parking space by the machines and 110-120 centimetre aisles. With 80-centimetre aisles, a loaded trolley won’t fit and staff end up carrying by hand.
Clean linen never touches the floor, not even for a minute. A transit shelf next to the dryers, a metre and a half wide, avoids that habit and costs little.
When in-house genuinely wins
There are three situations where an in-house laundry pays off even below a hundred rooms. An isolated property, where the outside service calls twice a week and transport costs more than the wash itself. Mountain refuges, farmhouse inns and mountain properties, where the cost of the round trip covers only a few kilos. And a property working with very frequent sheet changes and very short stays, where the rotation demands a responsiveness an outside service can’t give.
Outside these cases, the approach that works in Italy for the mid-market is mixed: flat linen outside, towelling and table linen in-house. It reduces the linen stock you need to buy, cuts dead time, and leaves emergency capacity for the Saturday evening when the tanker doesn’t turn up. Anyone adopting this model still needs to size the room around towelling, which has high volume and low weight, and plan for more generous drying capacity than usual.
In seasonal properties, a restart checklist needs adding: dried-out seals, stuck solenoid valves, filters clogged with winter dust, and the hot water circuit needing flushing through. These checks belong in the seasonal opening checklist, done at least a week before the first arrivals, not on the day itself.
Fitting out the room, not just the machines
Between the machines sits the technical furniture, and it’s usually the part bought as an afterthought: steel worktops, lockable detergent cabinets with a containment sump, perforated-shelf racking for transit, a quality-control table with 750 lux of light above it, because a stain on a sheet only shows under the right light. A sink with non-manual controls and a tool point round out the picture.
The environment is humid, hot and has alkaline detergents around, so melamine-faced chipboard is out: stainless steel, high-pressure laminate on water-resistant backing, powder coatings. It’s the same durability logic used when choosing mattresses and room protection, applied to a room where wear happens ten times faster.
A laundry room is almost never a convenient rectangle: it sits in the basement, with columns in the middle, dropped beams and the boiler in a corner. We design worktops and technical cabinets bespoke for these rooms in-house and build them through a supply chain of selected Italian workshops, with a single point of contact from survey to inspection, because the twenty centimetres left over between a machine and a column can only be recovered with a piece drawn on site.
Linen turnaround time affects work on the floors more than it seems: if clean linen comes out at two in the afternoon, the team managing the number of rooms assigned to each housekeeper works the first two hours on the previous day’s stock. Sizing the laundry is, in the end, a decision about how the floors are organised.
Frequently asked questions
Is an in-house laundry worth it in a hotel?
For flat linen, it pays off above 120 rooms, or sooner if the property is isolated and the outside service only calls every other day. The full in-house cost, including labour and machine amortisation, sits between 1.00 and 1.50 euros a kilo, against 1.10-1.60 for an outside service, so the margin is too thin to justify the capital and floor space. For towelling, which doesn’t need ironing, the in-house advantage already appears around 40 rooms.
How many kilos of linen does a room produce a day?
Between 2.5 and 3.5 kilos per occupied room under normal change conditions, rising to around 5 on departure days with a full bed and bathroom refresh. If there’s a restaurant, add 0.3-0.6 kilos per cover served. A ninety-room hotel at 80% occupancy with 60 covers an evening runs at around 240 kilos a day.
How much space does a hotel laundry need?
From 6 to 9 m² for a service laundry up to 25 rooms, 20-32 m² for a property between 51 and 100 rooms washing towelling and table linen, 40-60 m² above 100 rooms with some flat linen included. Add two or three square metres for trolley parking and 110-120 centimetre manoeuvring aisles.
What electrical capacity does an in-house laundry need?
A 20-kilo industrial washer with electric heating draws 18-24 kW, a dryer of the same class 18-27 kW, and a two-metre roller ironer 12-18 kW. A laundry with two washers, two dryers and a roller easily exceeds 50 kW, against the 30-50 kW total most mid-sized hotels are contracted for. Upgrading the meter needs budgeting before the machines are ordered.
How do you keep the soiled and clean routes separate?
Linen has to move in a single direction, from the soiled entry to sorting, to the washers, to the dryers, to ironing and finally to the clean exit, without a trolley of soiled linen ever crossing an area holding clean linen. In small rooms this is achieved with an L-shaped layout and a single door used in distinct time bands; in large properties, with two doors and a separate 6-10 m² sorting room.
