What a house clearance costs in 2026
The short answer
Why we are not printing a price range
Every other guide to this opens with a table of prices by property size. We are not going to, and the reason is the same reason this site exists.
We have not gathered our own quote data. We could repeat somebody else’s figures, but then this page would be a summary of their research rather than anything we can stand behind, and if their numbers are wrong ours would be too. Publishing a confident range we cannot evidence is exactly the habit that makes most of the internet’s advice worthless.
What we can do, using published official figures, is explain how a quote is built. That is more useful anyway. A range tells you whether a number sounds normal; understanding the components tells you whether a particular number makes sense for your particular house.
We are gathering real quote data from the firms we list. When there is enough of it to mean something, it will appear here with its method attached.
The three things you are paying for
Labour. Two people for half a day, or four for two days. This scales with volume and with access, not with the number of bedrooms. Stairs with no lift, a shared entrance, no parking within twenty metres, a loft with a drop-down ladder: each of these adds hours.
Disposal. Charged by weight at a transfer station, and this is the component that varies most between jobs and between firms. See below.
Vehicle time. How far the property is from the firm’s yard and from the transfer station, and how many trips the job takes. A second load is the most common reason a job costs more than the quote.
Against those three sits one credit: resale value. Some firms offset what they can sell against the bill, some pay separately, some do neither. This is the largest single reason two honest quotes for the same house can differ by hundreds of pounds.
What the disposal actually costs
Here is the figure that explains most of a clearance price.
From 1 April 2026, Landfill Tax is £130.75 per tonne at the standard rate, and £8.65 per tonne at the lower rate for inert waste like rubble and soil. That is tax alone, before the site’s own gate fee.
A transfer station passes that on. So the arithmetic a firm is doing is roughly: how many tonnes will come out of this house, at what rate, plus the gate fee, plus the labour to load it, plus the diesel.
Two things follow, and both are useful when you are reading a quote.
Weight matters far more than room count. A sparsely furnished four-bedroom house genuinely can cost less than a full two-bedroom flat. If a firm quotes from the number of bedrooms without asking what is in them, they are guessing.
Sorting is worth money. Rubble and soil are charged at the lower rate. Metals and cardboard are worth something rather than costing something. Furniture that can be resold or donated does not go through the weighbridge at all. A firm that sorts properly has a genuinely lower disposal bill than one that does not, and can quote accordingly.
Some items carry their own charges on top: fridges and freezers, because the refrigerant has to be recovered, mattresses at most sites, tyres, paint, and anything containing asbestos, which needs a licensed contractor and is not a clearance job at all.
What your council will take free
Worth knowing before you pay anybody, particularly for a small job.
Charges for disposing of household DIY waste at recycling centres in England have been abolished. Around a third of councils used to charge; none may now, within limits. The free allowance is:
- Up to two 50-litre rubble bags per visit, or
- one bulky or fitted item no larger than roughly 2,000mm by 750mm by 700mm, about the size of a bath or a shower screen
- Up to four visits in any four-week period
Beyond that a council may charge to cover handling, and some do at a few pounds per bag or item. Many also run two free bulky collections a year from the kerbside.
For a garage or a single room, that allowance plus a couple of trips may be the whole job. For a full house it will not be, but it is the sort of thing worth checking before assuming you need a firm at all.
How to sanity-check a quote
You do not need a price range if you can do this instead.
- Ask what the quote assumes. How many loads, how many people, how many hours. A firm that has quoted properly can tell you.
- Ask whether disposal is included or passed on. Both are legitimate. Passed-on tip fees on a heavy house can add a lot.
- Ask what happens if the van fills. The answer should be a number, not a shrug.
- Ask what they expect to resell, and whether that is reflected in the price.
- Get the registration number and check it. Not a price question, but it is the one that decides whether the £600 duty-of-care penalty can ever land on you.
Three quotes will tell you what your particular house costs far better than any national average would, and the differences between them will be explained by the answers to questions 1 to 4.
When a very low quote is fine, and when it is not
A quote well below the others is not automatically suspicious. There is a good version and a bad version, and they are distinguishable.
The good version: the house has real resale value in it and the firm expects to make its money on the contents. This is a genuine deal and occasionally the clearance is free. Two things make it safe: somebody has established what the contents are worth before they leave, especially if an estate is being valued, and the arrangement is in writing before work starts.
The bad version: the saving has come out of the disposal. The waste still has to go somewhere, and if the price does not cover a weighbridge then it is going into a lay-by, a field gate or somebody’s alley. Then it is traced back to you, and the duty of care means the fine follows the person who produced the waste rather than the person who dumped it.
The way to tell them apart is not the price. It is asking where it goes, and checking the registration number before you agree to anything.
Where this comes from
Every figure and rule on this page is from the source beside it. Where the law is quoted, it is quoted from the statute rather than summarised from somebody else's summary.
Next
Every firm named on this site is checked against the Environment Agency's public register, and you can check any other firm against the same data in about ten seconds.