Cost Per Wear Calculator
What a garment actually costs each time you wear it.
Calculate cost per wear from a garment's price and how often you wear it, including upkeep and what it will resell for.
A £12 clean every five wears is £2.40 a wear — it changes the answer more than people expect.
Only count this if you actually sell things. A hypothetical resale flatters the number.
Cost per wear
$4.00
$200.00 over 50 wears
Cost per wear is the metric that reverses intuition about clothing: a £300 coat worn 200 times costs £1.50 a wear, while a £30 top worn twice costs £15. The cheap purchase is frequently the expensive one.
How the Cost Per Wear Calculator works
Cost per wear is the only clothing metric that reflects what you actually spend. A £300 coat worn twice a week for three winters costs about £1.30 a wear; a £30 top worn twice costs £15. The cheap purchase is the expensive one, and it stays counterintuitive until the arithmetic is in front of you.
Also known as: price per wear calculator · wardrobe value calculator
Why the cheap purchase is usually the expensive one
Cost per wear is the price divided by the number of times an item is worn, adjusted for what it costs to keep and what comes back when it is sold. It is the only clothing metric that measures what you actually spend rather than what you handed over at the till.
The arithmetic reverses most intuitions. A £300 coat worn twice a week through three winters is about 150 wears, or £2 each. A £30 top worn twice is £15 a wear. The item that felt like a splurge costs an eighth of what the bargain did.
Upkeep enters per wear, so it compounds with use rather than being a one-off. A garment needing a £12 clean every fifth wear carries £2.40 on every wear — which can double the cost per wear of something that looked cheap to own.
A worked example
A £200 wool coat, expected to be worn 50 times, dry cleaned twice a season at £12 — call it £1 a wear — and likely to resell for £60.
Gross cost is £200 plus £50 of cleaning, so £250, or £5 a wear. Net of the £60 resale it is £190 over 50 wears, £3.80 a wear. To reach a £2 cost per wear it would need about 70 wears, which is a reasonable target for a coat and an impossible one for an occasion dress.
Where the answer misleads
The wear count is a forecast and forecasts about clothing are optimistic. The honest way to use this is on items you already own, where the wear count is known, and to apply what you learn to future purchases rather than justifying them in advance.
Counting resale value only helps if you actually sell things. A wardrobe of items with theoretical resale value that never get listed is a wardrobe of sunk cost, and including it in the arithmetic flatters every purchase.
Finally, cost per wear says nothing about whether an item should exist. A very low cost per wear on something you dislike wearing is not a good outcome, and the metric cannot see that. It is a check on value, not on judgement.
Frequently asked questions
How do I calculate cost per wear?
Divide the price by the number of times you will wear it. A £200 coat worn 50 times is £4 a wear. Subtract what you expect to resell it for first, and add any dry cleaning, to get the honest figure.
What is a good cost per wear?
It depends entirely on the category. Under £1 is excellent for anything worn regularly; £5 is reasonable for occasion wear; above £20 usually means the item was bought for a single event and should have been rented or borrowed.
Should I include dry cleaning?
Yes, and it changes the answer more than people expect. A garment needing a £12 clean every five wears adds £2.40 to every wear, which can double the cost per wear of something that looked cheap to own.
Does resale value really count?
If you actually sell things, yes — it is money back against the purchase. If items sit in a wardrobe until they are donated, counting a hypothetical resale value flatters the number. Be honest about which sort of person you are.