Nobody can tell you a number without knowing four things about your pile. This page is those four things, the published disposal fees underneath them, and the free routes that make the whole question moot.
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Published · last checked · written by the crew at Los Angeles Junk Removal & Hauling
Junk removal in Los Angeles is priced by the volume your load takes in the truck, adjusted for weight, access and material type, and quoted flat before work starts. Check the free routes first: your city's bulky pickup, S.A.F.E. centers, mattress drop-offs and retailer take-back all cost nothing.
We do not publish figures for our own work, and we are not going to start on a page you found by searching for one. A number written here in advance of seeing your pile would be a guess, and a guess is exactly what gets corrected upward in a driveway. What we can publish, and what almost nobody assembles in one place, is the set of fees a Los Angeles hauler is actually paying downstream: the landfill gate rate, the state recycling charges, the city handling fees and the statutory penalties. Those sit under every quote in this county, including the ones that look cheap.
Read the free options first. If your item is already at the curb and your city will take it, the right price is zero and a hauler who does not say so is not being straight with you. How our own pricing works is a separate page and it is short.
Los Angeles is an unusually hard place to price a haul, and the reasons are structural rather than commercial. Refuse is a municipal service here, so the free route changes at the city line. Disposal is a private gate charging by the ton, so a pickup bed of broken tile and a pickup bed of pillows cost completely different amounts to get rid of. And the county lost landfill capacity in the north when Chiquita Canyon stopped accepting waste, which is why anyone telling you disposal costs are fixed is telling you something they cannot know.
So rather than a rate card, here is the machinery. Six things move a price, three of them are yours to control, and every published fee on this page is linked to the body that charges it.
Start here, because a large share of the calls we get are for work a public program would have done for nothing. LA Sanitation describes bulky-item collection in the City of Los Angeles as “an unlimited curbside service at no additional charge to you.” There is no annual cap and no per-item charge. The city's own page asks you to try donating first, before you even book the free truck.
The free routes have one shape in common: they are drop-off or curbside, they run on somebody else's calendar, and they are item-by-item. That is where they stop working, and it is the honest boundary between them and us. Nobody from a city yard will come up a staircase in Silver Lake, empty a garage in Van Nuys, or clear a unit before a Friday walkthrough. If none of those apply to you, use the table below and keep your money.
| City of Los Angeles bulky pickup | Free and unlimited from LA Sanitation, collected on your regular trash day. Request at least one business day ahead online, through MyLA311, or on the 24-hour Customer Care Center, 1-800-773-2489. Furniture, mattresses and box springs, toilets and sinks, rolled and tied carpet, large wood and doors, and e-waste including TVs, computers and monitors. |
|---|---|
| LA Sanitation monthly drop-off events | Free, no appointment, one Saturday a month, 8:00am to 4:30pm, at five city yards: Sun Valley, Northridge, San Pedro, West LA and Central LA. Remaining 2026 Saturdays are Sept 19, Oct 10, Nov 21 and Dec 12. |
| Household hazardous waste | Free for City and County of Los Angeles residents at LA Sanitation's S.A.F.E. Centers, open every weekend, plus mobile collection events typically held Saturdays 9:00am to 3:00pm with no appointment. Paint, solvents, automotive fluids, cleaners, pool chemicals, household batteries, aerosols, sharps and medications. The Washington Blvd. center is listed as temporarily closed. |
| Electronics | Electronic waste is on LA Sanitation's accepted curbside bulky list and is also taken free at S.A.F.E. Centers, where the city recovers valuable metals from it rather than burying it. |
| Mattresses | The Mattress Recycling Council runs California's mattress program free to residents. It reports more than 240 permanent drop-off locations statewide and says 99 percent of Californians live within 15 miles of a collection site or event. |
| Retailer take-back | The City of Burbank states on its own bulky-item page that a retailer is required by law to pick up your old mattress free when it delivers the new one. Ask before delivery day, not after. |
| Burbank Recycle Center | Burbank residents may drop off one mattress and one box spring per household free, Monday through Saturday, with no special handling fee charged. |
| Donation | LA Sanitation asks residents to consider a thrift store, a charity or a community exchange app before scheduling a pickup at all. Usable furniture leaves the waste stream entirely and costs nothing to move if the charity collects. |
Sources: LA Sanitation, Schedule a Bulky Item Pickup; LA Sanitation, S.A.F.E. Centers and Household Hazardous Waste; Mattress Recycling Council, California; City of Burbank, Bulky Item Pick-Up. Read September 11, 2026.
Volume is the base of nearly every residential quote in this city, and it is the variable people misjudge most. A load is measured as the fraction of the truck bed it fills once it is stacked, not as a count of items and not as hours worked. That is why two photographs from a doorway produce a firmer number than ten minutes of description.
The mental picture that helps: a quarter of a truck is roughly what comes out of one room, not one house. A bedroom set. A dozen moving boxes and a chair. The contents of a hall closet plus a desk. People describing “a few things in the garage” are describing a half truck about as often as a quarter, because a garage stores things vertically and the eye stops counting at the front row.
Volume pricing exists for a reason that has nothing to do with sales. The truck, the fuel, the crew and the gate fee are consumed by space and by trips, not by minutes. An hourly rate transfers the cost of the 405 from the company to you, and it pays a crew to be slow. A volume price is knowable before anyone touches anything, which is the only reason it can honestly be quoted flat in advance. If a number is given to you before the work and it does not move, the risk of a bad estimate sits with the company. That is the whole point of quoting it that way.
The corollary is that volume alone is never the whole answer, and anyone quoting from volume alone is about to surprise you. The next three variables are where the surprises live.
Rather not deal with any of it? Tell us what is there and we will price it.
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Our own crews on Los Angeles County jobs. Side yards, narrow walkways and the back of the property is where most of the work actually happens.
Inert material is priced separately from household junk everywhere in Los Angeles, and the reason is at the scale house rather than in the truck. Concrete, tile, dirt, plaster, brick, stucco and roofing are charged by the ton when the truck is weighed in, so a half-full bed of demolition debris can cost more to dispose of than a completely full bed of furniture. A cubic yard of wet soil outweighs a living room.
These are not secret numbers. Sunshine Canyon Landfill in Sylmar, the closest large landfill to most of our service area, publishes its gate rates openly, and they are the clearest single window into what disposal in this county actually costs. Read the table and several things about hauling pricing stop being mysterious at once: the one-ton minimum on every load means a small heavy load is not a cheap load; the per-load environmental fee applies whatever you bring; and the untarped-load penalty is why a competent crew spends five minutes strapping a tarp before leaving your street.
None of the figures below are our prices. They are what the landfill charges whoever drives in, including a homeowner with a rented pickup, which is worth knowing before you decide to do it yourself. See construction debris removal and yard waste removal for how those two loads differ.
| Municipal solid waste | $120 per ton |
|---|---|
| Green waste, clean | $125 per ton |
| Asphalt | $150 per load |
| Contaminated soil | $200 per load, prior approval required |
| Appliances, recycle only | $115 each |
| Computers and monitors | $85 each |
| Hard-to-handle or bulky waste | $275 each, plus disposal |
| Environmental fee | $19.71 per load |
| Certificate of disposal | $225 per load |
| Untarped load penalty | $175 per load, cited to California Vehicle Code section 23115, which requires loads of refuse or recyclables to be covered |
| Safety vest or hard hat | $12.50 each, required for anyone arriving without one |
| Minimum charge | Every material is charged a one-ton minimum |
| Scale cut-off | Cash and card customers must be at the scales by 5:00pm Monday to Friday and by 11:00am Saturday |
| Rates dated | The landfill states these rates are as of July 1, 2024 and are subject to change without notice |
Source: Sunshine Canyon Landfill, Disposal & Material Costs, read September 11, 2026. These are the landfill’s published gate charges, not ours.
Access is the variable that separates an accurate quote from an argument. Volume tells a crew how much there is. Access tells them how far each piece has to travel by hand, and hand-carrying is the slowest part of any job in this city.
Vertical distance. A third-story walk-up in Koreatown, a hillside staircase in Echo Park, a basement in a 1920s bungalow. Every item goes down on shoulders. A sectional that takes ninety seconds from a Torrance garage can take fifteen minutes from a third floor, and it may need to come apart first.
Horizontal distance. Street-only parking with no loading zone, a long driveway the truck cannot back down, a rear unit behind three other units, a narrow side gate that a mattress will not turn through. The load has not changed. The number of round trips has doubled.
Buildings with rules. Most large apartment complexes, HOAs and commercial buildings require a certificate of insurance naming the management before a crew may enter, and a booked freight elevator with a set window. Neither is expensive. Both are scheduling, and an elevator booked for two hours is a hard stop regardless of how much is left.
Two access factors together matter more than volume does. A small load on the third floor with street-only parking is a longer job than a big load in an open driveway, and any company that prices the first like the second is either going to re-price on arrival or lose money and take it out of the next customer.
Timing. Same-day, weekend and after-hours work costs more than a scheduled midweek slot for the obvious reason that it displaces other work. The disposal side has its own clock too: Sunshine Canyon requires cash and card customers to be at the scales by 5:00pm on weekdays and 11:00am on Saturday, so a late pickup is often collected today and weighed tomorrow. Same-day junk removal covers how that works in practice, and areas we serve lists the local rules by neighborhood.
Some items carry a charge or a legal route that travels with them no matter who does the hauling. These are the “surcharges” people feel ambushed by, and most of them are not the hauler's invention at all. Every one in the table is published by the body that charges it.
Two of them deserve particular attention. Mixed construction and demolition debris generated inside the City of Los Angeles must be carried by a permitted hauler to a City-certified processing facility, and LA Sanitation states that non-compliance penalties of up to $5,000 are assessed for every load not taken to a certified processor. That obligation is the contractor's and the hauler's, and it dictates where the truck can legally go after it leaves your driveway. And waste tires are a registration matter: CalRecycle requires anyone transporting ten or more used or waste tires to hold a valid waste tire hauler registration and to carry a Comprehensive Trip Log. Most general junk removal companies in this city quietly do not hold one.
Related reading on our own side: mattress removal, appliance removal and e-waste disposal.
| Mattresses, futons and box springs | California charges an $18.00 recycling fee per unit at the point of purchase. The Mattress Recycling Council, which runs the state program, states the fee changed to $18.00 on April 1, 2026. It is collected once, when the new mattress is bought, and it funds the free recycling of the old one. |
|---|---|
| New tires | The California Department of Tax and Fee Administration collects a California Tire Fee of $1.75 per new tire from the purchaser, a rate unchanged since January 1, 2005. CalRecycle separately requires a waste tire hauler registration, backed by a $10,000 surety bond, for anyone transporting ten or more used or waste tires. |
| Refrigerant appliances | Sunshine Canyon Landfill accepts appliances for recycling only and charges $115 each, noting that they are placed in the hazardous waste storage area and taken off-site by a licensed contractor. LA Sanitation excludes commercial appliances from free curbside bulky pickup. |
| Electronics | Sunshine Canyon Landfill charges $85 each for computers and monitors at the gate. The same items go free to a LA Sanitation S.A.F.E. Center or out on the city's curbside bulky pickup. |
| Mixed construction and demolition debris | LA Sanitation assesses non-compliance penalties of up to $5,000 for every load of mixed C&D generated in the City of Los Angeles that is not taken to a City-certified processor, under the citywide ordinance the City Council approved on March 5, 2010 as Council File 09-3029. |
| Bulky items in Burbank | The City of Burbank charges a special handling fee of $12.14 per item, in force since July 1, 2025, on air conditioners, dishwashers, freezers, refrigerators, stoves, washers and dryers, water heaters, mattresses and box springs, and up to four tires. It is billed to your Burbank Water and Power account. |
| Bulky items in Beverly Hills | The City of Beverly Hills charges $91.86 when bulky items are picked up from the curb or the parkway rather than the alley. Requests are limited to two items and collected within three business days. |
| Inert loads anywhere | Charged by the ton at the gate rather than by the space they occupy, with a one-ton minimum applied by Sunshine Canyon Landfill to every load regardless of how little is on the truck. |
Sources: Mattress Recycling Council, California; CDTFA, California Tire Fee tax rates; CalRecycle, Used and Waste Tire Haulers; Sunshine Canyon Landfill; LA Sanitation, Construction and Demolition Recycling Program; City of Burbank; City of Beverly Hills. Read September 11, 2026.
It is tempting to treat the gate rate as a fixed cost of living, like the price of a gallon of milk. It is not. Landfill capacity in Los Angeles County is a small number of very large sites, and when one of them stops taking waste, everything it used to take has to travel further to a facility that is still open.
That happened recently and close by. Chiquita Canyon Landfill, a 639-acre site in Castaic serving the Santa Clarita Valley and the northern county, states on its own website that as of January 1, 2025 it is closed for the acceptance of waste while the operator manages an elevated temperature event, closure and post-closure work. Material that used to end its journey at Castaic now goes somewhere else, and every mile of that detour is fuel, hours and a different gate rate.
Sunshine Canyon's own rate card carries the line “all rates subject to change without notice” and dates its published figures. Its rates also already include a stack of pass-through charges: a Los Angeles County business tax, the County solid waste management fee, the state AB 939 integrated waste management fee, a City of Los Angeles franchise fee and local permit fees. When any of those move, the gate rate moves, and so does the floor under every quote in the region.
This is the honest answer to why no hauler in Los Angeles should publish a rate card and call it permanent, and why we would rather price your specific load on the day than defend a number we wrote last year.
Sources: Chiquita Canyon, closure notice and Sunshine Canyon Landfill, included fees and rate notice.
A firm quote is a five-minute conversation if you arrive with the right four facts, and a twenty-minute one that still ends in a range if you do not. This works with any company, not just us. Do it in this order.
One wide shot per room or per pile, taken from the doorway with the whole heap in frame. Close-ups of individual items are almost useless for volume. If a pile is stacked, take a second shot from the side so the depth is visible. Photos are the single biggest accuracy gain available to you.
“Second floor, no elevator, stairs come out onto the street, no driveway.” That one sentence moves a quote from a range to a number. Mention side gates, long carries, alley access, gate codes and whether there is anywhere legal to park a truck.
Concrete, tile, dirt, plaster and roofing are weighed at the gate, so they are priced separately. Mattresses, refrigerant appliances, electronics and tires each have their own downstream route. Paint, solvents, fuel, pool chemicals, car batteries, propane cylinders and fluorescent tubes cannot legally ride on a general hauler's truck at all and go free to a S.A.F.E. Center.
Use those words. A firm flat price agreed before work starts is a different product from an estimate, and companies that give estimates will say so if asked directly. Ask specifically whether disposal and dump fees are inside the number or added afterwards.
A text or an email stating the flat number and what it covers. Thirty seconds, and it is the only thing that protects you when a second crew member arrives with a different opinion. Ours goes out by text: (323) 230-0777.
These are not hypotheticals. They are the four patterns behind most complaints about junk removal in this city, and each has a tell you can catch on the phone.
The price that arrives after the truck is loaded. A crew that will not commit to a number until your things are on their vehicle has moved all the leverage to their side of the driveway. Unloading is not a realistic option for you and everybody in the transaction knows it. The tell is a refusal to name any number before starting, even after seeing photographs. A firm number in advance is not a favor; it is the normal way this service is sold.
The per-item price that multiplies on arrival. A quote of one figure “per item” sounds transparent and is the easiest number in the industry to inflate, because a sectional becomes three items, a bed becomes a frame and a mattress and a box spring, and a dresser with drawers out becomes whatever the crew says it is. If you are quoted per item, get the item count agreed in writing before the crew arrives.
The disposal surcharge that appears at the end. Gate fees, environmental fees and recycling charges are real and this page documents them. What is not legitimate is quoting a price with those excluded and adding them once the work is done. Ask the direct question: is the dump fee inside this number. There are only two possible answers and both are useful.
Cash only, no business name. Nobody is obliged to take cards, but a hauler with no company name, no written quote and no insurance is a hauler with nothing at stake if a wall gets scraped or a load ends up on a fire road instead of at a scale. It also tends to be the profile behind illegally dumped loads, which stay traceable to the address they came from. Cheap stops being cheap at that point.
One more that is less a trick than a habit: hourly pricing on a residential haul. It rewards slow work and hands you the traffic risk in a county where traffic is the main variable. Ask what happens if the job runs long, and listen to how quickly the answer comes. Our approach is on the pricing page, and garage cleanouts are where these games show up most, because the volume is genuinely hard to eyeball.
Every rule, fee, limit and deadline on this page is from the body that sets it. Checked on the date above; if a city changes its program we change the page.
Same crew, one visit, one number agreed before anything is lifted.
The whole garage in one visit. We sort, donate what is usable and sweep the slab.
Drywall, lumber, tile and concrete, hauled to a certified C&D processor.
Couches, sectionals, mattresses in the same trip, beds, desks and wardrobes carried down rather than dragged.
Booked and cleared the same day, most days, across LA County.
The rest of the LA disposal manual.
Thirteen Los Angeles-area programs in one table: how many free pickups a year, how many items, who to call and what each one refuses.
A dumpster on an LA street needs a permit and a hauler permit behind it. Which one is right depends on four things, not on price alone.
Seven checks that take ten minutes, and why the fine for illegally dumped junk follows the property it came from.
The follow-up questions people ask after this one.
It depends on four things, which is why no honest company publishes a single number. The volume your load takes in the truck sets the base. Weight changes it for inert material, because landfills charge by the ton. Access changes it for stairs, long carries and street-only parking. And specific items carry their own state or city fees. Get a firm flat number before work starts.
Usually because it has not been told enough to give one. Volume, floor, access and material are the four inputs, and most callers supply one of them. Send two wide photographs and say which floor it is on, and a firm number becomes possible in minutes. A company that still refuses after seeing photos is holding the price back deliberately.
Household loads are priced by volume, the fraction of the truck bed they fill. Inert material is effectively priced by weight, because that is how the gate charges for it. Sunshine Canyon Landfill publishes $120 per ton for municipal solid waste and $125 per ton for clean green waste, and applies a one-ton minimum to every single load.
Published ones. Sunshine Canyon Landfill charges $115 per appliance and $85 per computer or monitor at the gate, plus a $19.71 environmental fee per load and a $175 penalty on an untarped load. California charges an $18.00 mattress recycling fee per unit at purchase and, through the CDTFA, $1.75 per new tire. Those sit under every quote in the county.
Yes, and it should be in the quote before the crew arrives rather than after. Stairs, hillside staircases, long carries from a rear unit, narrow side gates and street-only parking all multiply the number of trips a crew makes on foot. Two of those together often matter more than the size of the pile does.
Often, yes. LA Sanitation collects bulky items free and unlimited from the curb in the City of Los Angeles, and opens five yards one Saturday a month for free drop-off. Household hazardous waste and electronics go free to S.A.F.E. Centers. Mattresses have free drop-off sites statewide, and retailers must take the old one when they deliver a new one.
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