Should You Buy a Home Warranty?
Estimate your annual repair costs and compare against the cost of a home warranty plan. Results are based on national averages and your selections.
Your Estimate
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Est. Annual Repair Cost
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Avg Warranty Plan Cost
Estimates are based on national averages for failure probability and repair costs by system type and home age. Actual costs vary by location, home condition, and specific equipment. This calculator is for informational purposes only.
How the PlainWarranty Calculator Works
This calculator is an educational tool. It takes the inputs you provide, applies a documented formula, and shows the result along with the intermediate steps where those steps are useful for understanding. The formula is published on the methodology page so you can verify it, reproduce it on paper, or implement it yourself. We do not use the calculator to collect personal data — inputs are processed client-side or, when server-side, are not associated with any account or profile.
When the Calculator Is Reliable
The calculator is most accurate when the inputs you enter reflect your actual situation and when the formula we use matches the regulatory or industry standard you are trying to approximate. It is less reliable when your situation contains a non-standard factor — an exception, a waiver, a grandfathered term, or a jurisdiction-specific variant — that the public formula does not express. When in doubt, treat the calculator's output as an order-of-magnitude estimate, not a binding number. For legal, medical, financial, tax, or safety decisions, verify with a licensed professional.
What We Do Not Do
We do not tune calculator outputs for commercial reasons, do not shade them upward or downward to flatter a sponsor, and do not run A/B tests on the formula to improve engagement at the cost of accuracy. When we update the formula — for example, to reflect a new regulatory threshold or a new reference rate — we publish the change on the methodology page along with the effective date, so that anyone citing an earlier calculation can still find the prior formula.
Privacy and Your Inputs
By default, calculator inputs are processed in your browser and never leave the device. A small number of calculators require a server round-trip (for example, to look up a rate from a public dataset); those requests are logged only in the same aggregate fashion as any other page view. We do not build a profile from calculator usage, do not share inputs with advertisers, and do not retain inputs across sessions. If you would like your interaction logs disregarded entirely, browse privately or use a tracker-blocker — we respect both.