What Do I Charge · whatdoicharge.app
Seventeen real jobs posted publicly by working operators. What the room guessed, what the job actually went for, and what moved the number. Curbside piles up to hoarder houses.
Most published junk removal pricing is guesswork copied from other guesswork. You will find $75 to $150 for a minimum load, $250 to $400 for a half truck, $600 to $950 for a full one, sourced from a storage company blog and a Reddit thread from 2021.
This page is different in one way that matters: these are jobs real operators posted while they were pricing them, and where the outcome came back, the outcome is here. Including the ones that came in low.
How to read the charts. The gray bar is the spread of what other operators said the job was worth. The dark tick is a confirmed price, the job actually sold or got charged at that number. The amber tick is a quote given but not yet closed. No tick means the outcome never came back.
Pre-piled at the road. Under an hour of loading.
Sold$150 plus dump fees. Customer countered at $75 plus dump. Operator held, walked toward his truck, customer came running back. Ten commenters put it between $150 and $300, most saying $250. Operator said afterward he would normally be at $200 to $250 but had a trailer already headed to the transfer station. Thirty minutes to load solo.
Sold$480 charged, job completed. Roughly $70 to $90 in tipping fees, about an hour to load. The operator's line on it: the customer pays for it being gone, not for how hard you worked.
No outcome$150 to $175 with one flight and close parking. $200 to $250 for a third floor or a long carry. On jobs this small the stairs and the walk price the job, not the furniture.
Where the room stops agreeing.
Sold$1,700 accepted. Junk portion was about $350. Labor was about $1,350. The reason this one closed high is that the landscaping got priced as hours instead of getting folded in as a favor. Guesses ran $800 to $2,000.
Sold$1,300 accepted, and the operator said he regretted it. The room was at roughly $2,000. This is the one job on the page that closed clearly under the community number, and it closed under because the operator quoted before he was confident. Multi-load, crew, distance. Photos undercounted the volume.
Quoted$1,100 quoted. The customer balked. Guesses ran $800 to $2,200. The separation play on this one: clean framing lumber tips cheap, Massachusetts bans clean concrete from disposal so recyclers take it at low or no cost, and the shingles are where the whole tonnage bill lives. The operator priced it right and still lost the room, which is a sales problem, not a pricing one.
No outcomeGuesses ran $350 to $1,500 on the same photos, a four-times spread. Brush is the material that eats volume and weighs nothing, so the price hangs on the tip: green waste goes to a mulch or compost yard well under C&D rates, but one bag of trash, one treated fence board, or a root ball with dirt still on it gets the load reclassified at three to four times the rate.
No outcomeGuesses ran $200 to $3,500. Not a typo. Operators pricing by weight said $1,200 to $1,500 and up. Operators pricing by volume said a few hundred. The customer offered $200. This is the widest spread on the page and it is the clearest evidence that volume pricing breaks on dense material.
No outcome$50 to $1,250 guessed. Tiny volume, enormous weight. Clean masonry with no mortar chunks and no dirt can often go to a landscape supply or fill yard cheap or free, which is the whole margin on a job like this.
No outcomeOperator was at $625 to $659, the thread ran $600 to $1,250. Resellers in the thread priced it lower on the assumption they were keeping the good stuff. Two legitimate strategies, and they produce different numbers on the same photo.
No outcomeFrameworks offered: $50 trip charge plus $500 to $600 a load; $4 per mile plus $750 a load; flat $750 a load. Jacksonville operators put a full load at $750. Consensus advice was to get a video walkthrough before burning three hours of windshield time.
A separate tier. Roughly five to six times a normal cleanout.
Quoted$6,800 quoted. Buyers said the number was in line. Guesses ran $5,100 to $10,000, plus a $500-per-room rule of thumb. Sixty to a hundred-plus cubic yards, four to seven loads. Bagging loose debris is the slow part, and the mold means staying on the hauling side of the remediation line unless you are licensed for it.
Quoted$6,500, after a walkthrough. The operator did not photo-quote this one, and that was the right call. Appliances and carpet came out as separate line items.
No outcome$650 a trailer load at the low end, $7,000 for the job at the high end. Scrap value in the steel frame offsets some of the tonnage. Anything pre-1990s needs an asbestos survey before a machine touches it.
No outcomeEstimated 12 to 20 tons, $3,500 to $5,000, two days with equipment. Burned debris holds water and weighs far more than it looks. Fire jobs are usually insurance jobs, which means an itemized quote at real rates instead of a friendly round number.
Six patterns across the log
On both confirmed jobs that closed low, the operator said afterward he would have charged more. One held at $150 when ten commenters said $250. One took $1,300 on a whole house the room valued at $2,000, and called it thin. Nervous pricing is its own line item.
Flooring drew a 17x spread. Brick drew 25x. Brush drew 4x. Furniture and boxes barely spread at all. Volume pricing works until the load fills a fifth of the trailer and maxes the axle, and then it stops working entirely.
The $1,700 combo job was $350 of junk and $1,350 of hours. It closed because the hours were quoted as hours. The habit of throwing in the "easy" part is where the margin goes.
$6,500 and $6,800 on two houses, roughly five to six times a standard cleanout. Both were walked before a number was given. Any tool that hands you a firm number on a hoard from photos is lying to you.
At $75 a ton, a 500 lb load looks like $19 of disposal. Most transfer stations bill a minimum, commonly a half ton or a flat $25 to $40, so light loads get charged like heavy ones. This is what makes "I'll pay the dump fees" such a good-sounding, terrible offer.
Hidden volume behind the pile, flooring stacked at the back of the garage, root balls under the brush. Not one job in this log got smaller once somebody stood in front of it. This is the entire argument for quoting a range and asking questions instead of texting a single number you have to defend later.
What working operators said they charge, mid-2026
| Market | Rate | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Jacksonville, FL | $650–$750 per load | Three operators, separately |
| Silver Spring, MD | $480 per half trailer, ~1 ton, curbside | Confirmed charge |
| Florida, small curbside | $150–$300 | Ten-commenter thread |
| Distance jobs | $4/mile, or $50 trip charge | Two frameworks offered |
| Hoard houses | $6,500–$6,800 per house | Two quotes, both walked first |
| Common software default | $449 full load | Below market in every region here |
Every job here was posted publicly by an operator asking what to charge, in US junk removal groups between 10 July and 7 August 2026. Where the person came back and said what the job sold for, that is the confirmed number. Where they did not, the row says so instead of guessing.
Names are left out on purpose. These were people asking for help pricing a job, not writing a case study.
Four confirmed sale prices out of seventeen jobs is a small sample and worth treating like one. It grows every week. If you have a job with a real closed price and a scale ticket, send it and it goes in.
What Do I Charge is a free tool at whatdoicharge.app. You set your own load prices once. Drop in the customer's photos and it gives you a range instead of one number, the questions to ask before the price firms up, and a reply you can paste straight into the text thread. Three quotes a day, free, no signup.
It will not beat a walkthrough. Nothing does. That is exactly why it hands you a range and a list of questions instead of a number you have to defend in the driveway.
Run a quote