Introducing the Car Wash Membership Price Index
WashIndex already tells you how a car wash performs and what it charges today. With this launch it tells you something no one in the industry has had a clean answer to: how fast have car wash membership prices actually risen over time?
Today we’re publishing the Car Wash Membership Pricing Index — a back-cast index of US car-wash unlimited-monthly-membership list prices, reconstructed all the way to 2015 and anchored to 2020 = 100.
The headline
- National membership list prices are up about 16% since 2020 — and roughly 31% since 2015.
- Express tunnels ran hotter: up about 23% since 2020. Express memberships were actually priced below their 2020 level during the late-2010s land-grab, then climbed steadily as operators turned cheap introductory unlimited plans into a pricing engine.
- The express cut matches ground truth. Mister Car Wash, a publicly traded pure-play express operator, disclosed revenue per member rising about 10% from 2021 to 2025. Our express index rose about 11% over the same window — an apples-to-apples validation.
Why this is hard, and why no one had it
Anyone can pull a few chains’ current prices. The hard part is measuring change over a decade without fooling yourself. The car wash membership market has roughly doubled the number of chains offering unlimited plans since 2015, and a lot of those entrants priced low. If you just average every chain’s price each year and compare, a wave of cheap new entrants drags the average down — even in a year when every existing chain raised prices. That’s composition bias, and it’s why a naive “average price over time” chart is worse than useless.
The index solves this with a matched-model, same-store construction: every year-over-year change is measured only across the chains we have prices for in both years, weighted by how many locations each operated that year. Entrants and exits never move the level on their own. We reconstruct historical prices from archived pricing pages (the Internet Archive Wayback Machine), include acquired and defunct chains during the years they operated to avoid survivorship bias, and add data-quality guards that drop partial archive captures before they can bias the number.
The result is a panel of ~195 priced chains and ~3,100 price points, post-stratified to the industry’s size mix and validated against SEC filings.
What launched
- A new Price Index page — linked right at the top of the site next to Intelligence Reports — showing the current index values, the full 2015–2026 series for both the all-format and express-tunnel cuts, a regional breakdown, and an executive summary of how pricing has moved.
- A full research report on the methodology — the matched-model links, weighting, post-stratification, winsorisation, the partial-capture guards, the regional and express cuts, and the SEC-ARPU validation, end to end.
How to read it
Two cautions worth repeating. First, this is a list-price index — advertised membership prices, not realised revenue per member after promotions, free months, and tier mix. Read it as an upper bound on what members actually paid, especially in the most recent years. Second, use the index for the trend, not the raw dollar averages we publish alongside it: the dollar levels move whenever the mix of chains changes, while the matched-model index isolates genuine price changes.
For operators, investors, and lenders underwriting membership-driven car wash businesses, this is the first public, methodology-transparent answer to “how much pricing power has this industry actually had.” Explore the Car Wash Membership Pricing Index, or read the full methodology.