“How much to haul all this away?” Junk removal is one of the few trades where the customer can point at the whole job from the driveway. The unit everybody understands is the truck: an eighth, a quarter, half, three-quarters, full. Many haulers price that way, and it works, as long as the price for each fraction is built from what that fraction actually costs you to load, drive and dump.
This article builds that price from three costs (the crew’s time, the truck, and the landfill’s fee), shows why weight breaks a volume price, and adds the surcharges that keep a mattress, a refrigerator or a flight of stairs from eating the margin.
Step 1: measure your truck in cubic yards
A “full truck” means nothing until you know how big your box is. Measure the inside length, width and the height you actually load to, in feet, multiply them, and divide by 27 to get cubic yards.
Say a hauler’s dump box is 12 feet long, 7 feet wide, and loaded 4.5 feet high. That is 378 cubic feet, or 14 cubic yards. An eighth of that truck is 1.75 yards, a quarter is 3.5, half is 7, three-quarters is 10.5. Write your own numbers on a card in the cab, so every crew member calls a half load the same thing.
For comparison, HomeAdvisor’s junk removal cost guide (updated June 2026) treats a full truckload as 13 to 17 cubic yards and an eighth as 2 to 3 yards. If your box is much smaller or larger, your fractions will not line up with what a homeowner reads online, and it is worth saying your load sizes in yards on your quote.
Step 2: put a weight on each fraction
You sell by volume, but landfills often charge by the ton, so you need a bridge between the two. The EPA publishes one: its Volume-to-Weight Conversion Factors memo (April 2016) lists standard weights for loose materials. A few that matter to a hauler:
| Material | Pounds per cubic yard |
|---|---|
| Mixed household and commercial waste, uncompacted | 250 to 300 |
| Clean dimensional lumber | 169 |
| Mixed yard waste, uncompacted | 250 |
| Mixed construction and demolition debris | 417 |
| Painted or demolition drywall | 467 |
| Concrete | 860 |
| Dirt and sand | 929 |
The same memo lists single items: a refrigerator at 250 pounds, a clothes washer and a stove at 150 each, a dryer and a dishwasher at 125 each, a passenger or light-truck tire at 22.5, and a mixed television at 67.3. These are averages for planning, not a scale ticket; your own tickets will tell you what your loads really weigh.
Step 3: price the dump from your landfill’s posted fee
The fee a landfill charges to accept a load is its tipping fee. The Environmental Research & Education Foundation (EREF) surveys them every year. As Waste Advantage Magazine reported in July 2025, EREF’s analysis of 2024 fees, drawn from 351 landfills, put the national average at $62.28 per ton, with large landfills charging over $70 and private landfills about 34% more than public ones. EREF published its analysis of 2025 fees in July 2026.
The national average is only a reference. Use the fee posted by the landfill or transfer station you actually use, and read its schedule for a minimum charge, a separate rate for construction debris or clean fill, and any per-item charges. Here is the example truck at the 2024 national average, loaded with mixed household junk:
| Load | Cubic yards | Weight at 250 to 300 lb/yd | Disposal at $62.28/ton |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1/8 | 1.75 | 438 to 525 lb | $14 to $16 |
| 1/4 | 3.5 | 875 to 1,050 lb | $27 to $33 |
| 1/2 | 7 | 1,750 to 2,100 lb | $54 to $65 |
| 3/4 | 10.5 | 2,625 to 3,150 lb | $82 to $98 |
| Full | 14 | 3,500 to 4,200 lb | $109 to $131 |
Why heavy loads need their own price
Volume pricing quietly assumes the load is light. Put a quarter truck of broken concrete in the same box: 3.5 yards at 860 pounds a yard is about 3,010 pounds, or 1.5 tons. At the same $62.28 a ton, that is about $94 to dump, about three times the quarter load of household junk in the table. A full box of concrete would weigh about six tons. Check your truck’s rated payload before you quote a fraction of anything dense.
So price dirt, concrete, roofing and demolition debris by the yard with a weight cap, or by the ton from the scale ticket, and say so on the quote. HomeAdvisor’s guide shows the same split from the homeowner’s side: construction debris, gravel or dirt at $100 to $800 per truckload, a separate line from household junk.
Step 4: add the crew and the truck
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a May 2025 median annual wage of $49,690 for refuse and recyclable material collectors and $40,240 for the occupation it lists as “laborers and freight, stock, and material movers, hand.” Divided by 2,080 hours, that is about $23.89 and $19.35 an hour before payroll taxes, insurance and paid time. Your loaded rate is higher; your real hourly cost shows how to work it out.
Time your jobs for a month: minutes on site per fraction, and the round trip to the dump. Then put a cost on each truck hour (fuel, payments, insurance, tires, repairs) from your own books.
A worked half load
Say the example hauler runs a crew of two at an illustrative loaded $32 an hour each, and a truck that costs an illustrative $25 an hour to run. A half load takes 75 minutes to load and 45 minutes to drive and dump: two hours.
| Crew: 2 people × 2 hours × $32 | $128 |
| Truck: 2 hours × $25 | $50 |
| Disposal: 7 yards of household junk, top of the range | $65 |
| Direct cost | $243 |
| Price for a 40% gross margin: $243 ÷ 0.60 | $405 |
The margin is a choice; dividing by 0.60 is how a 40% margin is reached, which is not the same as a 40% markup (markup vs. margin explains the difference). Now check it against the market. HomeAdvisor reports a half truckload at $200 to $400 and a full one at $600 to $800, an average job around $241 and most jobs between $60 and $700. A cost-built price at the top of a published range is a signal to look at your load times or your truck cost before you look at your price.
Step 5: surcharges that follow the item, not the volume
Some items cost you money that has nothing to do with the space they take. Price each one from your actual cost to get rid of it, plus the handling time:
The rules behind those surcharges are in junk removal and the law. Some items can lower your cost instead. EPA’s Facts and Figures report that in 2018 about 3.1 million tons of ferrous metal were recovered from shredded appliances, while furniture and furnishings, sofas, tables, chairs and mattresses among them, were mostly landfilled (80.1%). Metal that a scrap yard takes, or furniture a charity takes, is weight you do not pay to dump.
Step 6: the adders for access and timing
Stairs, a long carry from the back of the property, taking a swing set or shed apart, and same-day service all cost time. Price them as time: if a flight of stairs adds ten minutes per heavy item for a crew of two, that is twenty labor minutes at your loaded rate, every time. A same-day surcharge pays for the job you move to fit it in. Set your eighth-load price as your minimum charge, so a single-item pickup still covers the trip.
Put the ranges where the customer can see them
Once each fraction, each heavy-material rate and each surcharge has a number, a homeowner can get a fair range before you drive over. NapkinPrice™ shows that range on your own website from the load rates, item fees and access surcharges you set, and the junk removal page shows how it fits the trade.