Ironing Time Calculator

Minutes per garment, by type

Ironing time depends on how much fabric there is and how many seams and curves the iron has to work around. A dress shirt with a collar, cuffs and a placket takes several times longer than a t-shirt, even though both are cotton. Here are working estimates for a home iron at a normal pace.

Those are board times only. Add about 5 minutes at the start for heating the iron and setting up, and more if you have to hunt for hangers or clear a space to work.

Worked example: a 20-piece pile

Say the basket holds 8 t-shirts, 6 dress shirts, 4 pairs of trousers and 2 dresses. That is 20 pieces.

• 8 t-shirts x 1.5 min = 12 min
• 6 dress shirts x 4 min = 24 min
• 4 pairs of trousers x 3 min = 12 min
• 2 dresses x 4 min = 8 min
• Board time total = 56 min
• Plus 5 min to heat the iron and set up = 61 min

That is an hour for a pile that fits in one basket, and the dress shirts alone account for 24 minutes, about 43 percent of the board time. If you send the shirts to the cleaner and iron everything else, the job drops to 37 minutes. That trade is worth running the numbers on before you assume ironing everything is cheaper.

Steam changes the total. Ironing without steam on dry fabric is the slowest option, because you are fighting every crease. Steam softens the fibers and cuts the passes, and a light spray of starch keeps the result crisp longer, so the garment spends less time in the next pile. The calculator above applies a factor for each setting.

What changes the time

Four things move the number more than people expect. Fabric is the first. Cotton takes heat and holds a press, linen wrinkles as you look at it and needs the most work, and synthetics like polyester barely wrinkle but melt if the iron is too hot. A knit t-shirt that came out of the dryer promptly needs one quick pass.

The second is when you pull the clothes from the dryer. A shirt ironed while it is still slightly damp takes half the passes of one that dried bone-dry and sat in a basket for two days. If you can, pull the load while it is a little damp and iron the wrinkled items first.

The third is the board and the iron. A firm, well-padded board and a hot iron with a smooth soleplate cut time, while a wobbly board and a scratched soleplate add it. A 1200 watt steam iron recovers heat faster than a 1000 watt model, so you wait less between passes.

The fourth is organization. Ironing one garment from start to finish, then the next, is slower than doing all the collars, then all the sleeves, then all the bodies. Batching the same motion keeps the iron moving and your hands in one rhythm.

Batching to cut the total

The biggest saving is to stop treating ironing as one long job and break it into a short one. Sort the pile into three groups: quick items, shirts and blouses, and bulky items like sheets and dresses.

Do the quick items in one pass while the iron heats. Ten t-shirts take about 15 minutes, and by the time you finish, the iron is fully hot for the shirts. Iron the bulky items last, when you are ready to stop, because wrestling a king sheet onto a small board is the part that makes people quit.

Two more habits pay off. Hang each piece the moment it is done, so nothing goes back into the basket and gets re-ironed, and keep a spray bottle of water on the board so you never have to walk to the sink. Small moves add up: six trips to the closet in a 60 minute session is several minutes gone.

If you iron weekly, a standing time slot beats a catch-up marathon. Twenty minutes on a set day keeps the pile small enough that each item is easy, and it avoids the basket of 40 pieces that turns a chore into a project.

When not to iron: steaming and wrinkle release

Not everything needs the board. A handheld steamer handles most knits, dresses and anything with a drape, and it takes about 30 seconds per garment once it is hot. Steam relaxes fibers with heat and moisture, and it does not flatten texture the way an iron does, so it is the better tool for sweaters, velvet and anything with a print you do not want to shine.

A tumble in the dryer with a damp towel does a decent job on a small load. Ten minutes on medium with one wet towel creates the same steam effect in a machine, which is the fastest option when the pile is mostly casual clothes. It will not put a crease in a shirt or flatten a collar, so treat it as a wrinkle fix rather than a press.

Hanging a garment in the bathroom while you shower works for light wrinkles on a single shirt. It is slow and unreliable, but it costs nothing. For travel, a wrinkle-release spray does the same job in a minute. None of these replace ironing for a dress shirt you need crisp, so match the method to the garment and skip the board when you can.

What ironing costs in electricity

An iron is a high-wattage appliance, but it runs for a short time, so the cost per session stays small. A typical steam iron draws 1000 to 1800 watts. Running a 1200 watt iron for one hour uses 1.2 kilowatt-hours.

• 1200 W iron, 61 minutes: 1.22 kWh
• At the US average of about $0.17 per kWh: $0.21
• Same job at $0.30 per kWh (California and New England): about $0.37
• Twice a month for a year: about $5 to $9

The iron itself is not the expense. The dryer that ran before it uses far more, and the cleaner you might use instead of ironing costs more per shirt than a year of electricity. The real cost of ironing is the hour, not the 20 cents.

Two ways to trim the bill: turn the iron off during the sorting and hanging steps, and iron a full batch in one session rather than heating the iron three times for three small jobs. The US Department of Energy publishes average electricity prices by state if you want your own rate, and the FTC explains the care labels on your clothes, which tell you what an item needs.