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Some well pump repairs cost more than a new pump
Irrigation, sprinkler and well pump repair (US), covering sprinkler system repair and well pump repair and replacement
An independent guide to well pump and sprinkler system repair in the United States. What each repair costs, when repairing stops making sense, and how to tell which part has actually failed before you call anyone.
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Repair averages $450. Replacement averages $1,800. It is not that simple.
Those two published averages make the decision look obvious, and for most single failures it is. A pressure switch or a check valve is a $150 to $200 part and there is no argument to be had.
The trouble is that some individual repairs are priced close to a whole new system. A pressure tank replacement is published at $800 to $1,500 or more on the repair side. A shallow-well jet pump, installed, is published at $400 to $1,000. At that point you are spending more to keep an old system running than a new one would cost.
The other half of the decision is what a pump replacement actually involves. On a submersible pump the labour is pulling several hundred feet of pipe out of a borehole, and that labour is the same whether you go down for one repair or two. If a pump is near the end of its life and it has to come up anyway, doing one job rather than two is usually the cheaper path even when the individual repair is small.
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The repair or replace crossover
Well pump repair averages $450 and replacement averages $1,800, so repairing always looks like the right answer. Set the published part-by-part repair costs against the published replacement costs and several common repairs cross over. We worked out which ones.