What Baltimore residents actually pay for junk removal

The short answer

Most Baltimore jobs fall into one of three bands.

• One or two items. $75 to about $250. A sofa at $126, a mattress set at $143, a fridge at $164.
• A room or a cellar. $241 to $513, on the truck-fill ladder.
• A whole rowhouse. $587 to $732, sometimes more than one load.

The visit minimum is $75, disposal is included in every figure, and there is no stair charge, walk-up fee or long-carry fee.

Single items, the most common calls

Every one of those is the full price out of a third-floor rowhouse bedroom, not a curbside price.

Two-item and three-item jobs

The combinations that come up week after week, with the addition:

• Couch and loveseat: $126 + $119 = $245
• Washer and dryer out of a cellar: $133 + $128 = $261
• Living room in Hampden: sofa, recliner, coffee table. $126 + $98 + $67 = $291
• Student room in Charles Village: futon, mini fridge, desk. $111 + $115 + $83 = $309
• Bedroom in Waverly: dresser, queen mattress and box spring set, bed frame. $126 + $143 + $68 = $337
• Kitchen swap in Locust Point: fridge, electric range, dishwasher. $164 + $134 + $109 = $407

Volume jobs: where most rowhouses land

Rough guide by job, based on what these spaces actually hold in this city:

• A single-bay alley garage in Brewers Hill. Quarter to half truck, $241 to $431.
• A Canton or Federal Hill cellar. Half truck, $431, is the most common landing spot.
• A one-bedroom apartment cleared at end of lease. Quarter to half truck.
• A two-bedroom rowhouse after a sale. Three quarters to full, $587 to $732.
• An estate rowhouse lived in for decades. A full truck at $732 and usually a second load.

Why Baltimore jobs skew to volume more than most cities

Because of the cellar. Almost every rowhouse in Canton, Highlandtown, Patterson Park, Pigtown and Federal Hill has one, most were never finished as living space, and all of them have been accumulating since whenever the house was last emptied.

That is why the half-truck tier at $431 shows up so often here. It is not a room of furniture, it is thirty years of paint cans, holiday boxes, bikes, a dead dehumidifier and a chest freezer that stopped working in 2014.

The other Baltimore-specific driver is the stair. A lot of furniture in this city physically cannot leave intact, so people who were planning to handle it themselves end up booking after a weekend of trying. Those calls are single-item jobs, which is why the $126 sofa is the most common ticket in the city.

What nobody pays extra for

Worth listing because these are exactly the things that get added on site under other pricing models:

• Stairs. Three floors of a Bolton Hill rowhouse, no charge.
• Walk-ups and no elevator.
• Long carries when the truck cannot get near the door, which on permit-parking blocks is normal.
• Breaking down furniture in the room.
• Taking doors off hinges.
• Refrigerant handling on a fridge, freezer or AC unit.
• Disposal and tipping.
• Same-day scheduling.

None of those exist as line items. What you saw before booking is what the card is charged.

How to land at the lower end

• One visit, everything. The $75 minimum is per visit. Adding a $52 end table to a booked job is cheap; a second visit for it is not.
• Compare both models. Once you are past four pieces, check your item total against the quarter truck at $241 and the half at $431 and take the lower.
• Bag loose material. Ten bags of debris is $132 and twenty is $259, which is often cheaper than the volume tier it would otherwise occupy.
• Avoid the last week of May. Not a price difference, but availability across Charles Village, Remington, Waverly and Mount Vernon collapses when student leases end.

The summary

One couch: $126. A cellar: $431. A whole rowhouse: $732. A $75 floor under everything and nothing added at the end.

Those are the numbers Baltimore actually pays, and you can check every one of them before you book.

Frequently asked questions