Guide

What a broken garage door spring costs to fix (and why 'repair' means replace)

Updated August 23, 2026

Start with the part nobody tells you: a broken torsion spring is not repaired. There’s no weld, no patch, no shortening the coil. The spring is a wear part, like brake pads, and when it breaks it gets replaced. So “spring repair” pricing is really replacement pricing, and the honest version of it has three moving pieces.

The base number

In our shop a single torsion spring runs $180 to $350 installed, sized to your door and balance-tested before we leave. The range is real, not a teaser. Spring size is set by the door’s weight and height, and a heavy insulated double-car door needs a much bigger spring than a light steel single. Anyone quoting one flat price for every door hasn’t weighed yours.

Why the second spring ends up on the quote

Two-spring doors nearly always get quoted as a pair, $250 to $450, and this is the line item people push back on. It isn’t padding. Both springs were installed the same day and have cycled the exact same number of times, so the survivor has the same mileage as the one that just let go. Replace only the broken side and there’s a good chance you’re paying a second service call within the year, plus the springs will age unevenly from then on. The pair price exists because it’s cheaper than two singles, which is the honest way to price a job we’d otherwise be back for.

Single-spring doors skip this question entirely. One spring, one number.

Cycle ratings: the per-year price

A cycle is one open and one close. Standard springs are rated around 10,000 cycles, which sounds like forever until you do the math: a household that opens the door six times a day burns through 10,000 cycles in under five years. For a garage that works as the front door, the upgrade to 25,000-cycle springs costs more on the day and noticeably less per year, and it triples the time until you hear that bang again.

If your garage mostly stores things and the car lives in the driveway, standard springs are the right buy. Pay for cycles you’ll actually use.

What moves the number up

A spring that breaks and gets parked wears nothing else. A spring that breaks while the opener keeps dragging a 200-pound door can take the opener’s drive gear with it, and now one job is two. Around here the calls cluster on the first hard-freeze mornings of the year, when cold steel and a summer’s worth of cycles meet, so if your door is screeching into fall on original springs, the cheap moment to act is before the bang. A tune-up visit can tell you how close you’re running.

The quote you get before work starts is the number on the invoice. Tell us the door’s size and roughly how old the springs are, and we can give you the range over the phone before you commit to anything.