Maytag vs Samsung refrigerators: an incident-report comparison

What this Maytag vs Samsung comparison is based on#

Two federal complaint records of very unequal size are counted here: 76 CPSC SaferProducts incident reports naming a component on a Maytag refrigerator between 2011 and 2026, and 1,556 doing the same for a Samsung refrigerator across the same window. Each share belongs to its own column, and neither total counts refrigerators sold or in service.

One Maytag filing is worth a little over a percentage point. One Samsung filing is worth a fraction of one. That difference in resolution governs how far down each column can be read.

Both records rank the ice maker near the top#

The agreement is easy to miss behind the size of the gap. The ice maker takes 46% of the Samsung record, 715 filings, and 24% of the Maytag one, eighteen filings. Twenty-two points apart — and yet it is the leading row on the Samsung side and the second row on the Maytag side, and Maytag's 24% is well above anything in the Samsung column except its first place.

So both records treat the ice maker as a major subject of complaint. They differ about how major, and the difference is large, but it is a difference of degree on a component both agree about.

The compressor is what inverts them#

Maytag's leading row is the compressor at 25%, nineteen filings — a single report ahead of its ice maker, which means the ordering between Maytag's top two carries no information at all. Samsung's compressor row is 4%, 66 filings, and sits third in that column.

Twenty-one points, running the opposite way to the ice maker. And here the counts are worth reading carefully: Samsung's much smaller share rests on 66 filings against Maytag's nineteen. A percentage compares emphasis within a record; it never compares quantities across two records with different denominators.

Two wide gaps pointing opposite ways is a genuinely mixed result, and it rules out the simplest explanation for either — neither record is uniformly higher than the other.

What each column can carry#

Samsung's column is a profile that can be read to its smallest entries: the ice maker at 46%, the control board at 5% on 72 filings, the compressor at 4% on 66, the evaporator at 4% on 58 and the thermostat or sensor at 3% on 39. Nothing there rests on fewer than 39 reports.

Maytag's column has two rows worth reading and then a tail: the compressor at nineteen filings, the ice maker at eighteen, and after that a control board and a wiring row at three filings each, a motor at two, and a condenser and a defrost system at one apiece.

That means the middle of this comparison is asymmetric. The control board reads 4% against 5%, three Maytag filings against 72 Samsung ones. The evaporator and the thermostat rows exist in the Samsung column on 58 and 39 filings and are absent from the Maytag one entirely — which, in a 76-report record, is what a share of a few percent looks like when it rounds to nothing.

The absences in the Maytag column#

Three components appear in the Samsung record with real weight and do not appear in the Maytag one at all: the evaporator at 4% on 58 filings, the thermostat or sensor at 3% on 39, and a water valve or line row at 1% on eighteen.

It would be easy to present those as findings, and they are not. At the shares Samsung's record shows, a 76-report record would be expected to hold two or three evaporator filings, one or two thermostat ones, and fewer than one for the water valve. Containing none of them is ordinary variation, not evidence that Maytag refrigerators lack those failure modes.

The general rule this illustrates is worth stating once: absence in a small record is almost always arithmetic. A component has to be reasonably common before a 76-report sample will reliably contain it, and most components in a refrigerator complaint profile are not that common.

The reverse holds too. Maytag's column carries a defrost system at 1% on one filing where Samsung's carries three out of 1,556 — the same component, present in both, and meaningfully measured in neither.

The rows that mean least#

Two rows are marked as noise: the motor, 3% against 1%, two Maytag filings against 23 Samsung ones, and the condenser at 1% on both, one filing against eighteen. In both cases the Maytag share is at or above the Samsung one while resting on a small fraction of the reports.

Rows like those are the clearest illustration of why counts belong beside shares. Two reports out of 76 will always outrank 23 out of 1,556 as a percentage, and that ordering says nothing about either appliance.

Reading the pair together#

For a technician the ice maker is a first or second stop on either brand. The Maytag record adds the compressor as an equal partner at the top; the Samsung record puts the compressor third and offers the control board and the evaporator alongside it, all on real counts. Neither column is a failure rate, because neither counts refrigerators, and one of them is too small to describe below its top two rows.

Maytag vs Samsung refrigerators: what the reports mention#

Both columns are shares of their own corpus, and the corpora differ in size. Maytag: CPSC SaferProducts incident reports for Maytag refrigerators, 2011-2026, n=76. Samsung: CPSC SaferProducts incident reports for Samsung refrigerators, 2011-2026, n=1556. A difference no larger than one report on either side is marked "within one-report noise".

About the corpus: these are CPSC SaferProducts reports — incidents someone chose to report, not units sold — so the shares on this page are shares of the reports and never a failure rate. The corpus is weighted toward safety events: 12,007 of its 20,581 records (58%) are fire, smoke, burn or melt reports, which over-represents the components that burn and under-represents the ones that merely stop working.

Maytag refrigerators: the reported component split#

Maytag refrigerators — every share in this table is a share of: CPSC SaferProducts incident reports for Maytag refrigerators, 2011-2026, n=76.

Shares of reports, not failure rates — see the corpus note above.

Samsung refrigerators: the reported component split#

Samsung refrigerators — every share in this table is a share of: CPSC SaferProducts incident reports for Samsung refrigerators, 2011-2026, n=1556.

Shares of reports, not failure rates — see the corpus note above.

How to use these numbers#

What this comparison can settle: which components the reported incidents of each brand actually concentrate on, for this appliance. What it cannot settle: which brand fails more often. That would need units sold, and no public source states it. Use the component split to plan for the repair each brand is most reported for, not to rank the two.