Mattress Removal in Austin

How much does mattress removal cost in Austin?

Flat, by size, quoted from a photo. The stair carry, the drive and the disposal are already inside the number, and there is no extra charge because the bed is upstairs or because it is a walk-up.

Does Austin pick up mattresses?

For most of the people who search this, no. The City of Austin, through Austin Resource Recovery, handles residential bulk as an on-demand request at austintexas.gov/service/ondemand. You get a limited number of free pickups a year, each with a volume cap, it is curbside only, and it is open only to city-of-Austin residential curbside-trash customers.

That last condition is the one that decides it. The mattresses in this metro are overwhelmingly in apartments — the student high-rises and chopped-up houses of West Campus (78705) and the dense garden-apartment belt along Riverside Drive in 78741 and 78742. Those properties are on private hauling, which means their residents are not in the city program at all. The place with the highest mattress turnover in Austin is precisely the place the city's bulk service does not reach.

And when the program does apply to you, it still asks the hard part of you: get a queen or a king down the stairs of a slab-built two-story, out the front door, and leave it lying on the grass until the truck comes. In Round Rock, Cedar Park, Leander, Georgetown, Circle C and Mueller, leaving it lying on the grass is what earns the HOA violation. We come to the bedroom instead, carry the mattress and the box spring down ourselves, and it is gone the same day.

What happens to your mattress after pickup

Here is the part most Austin haulers won't spell out: Texas has no statewide mattress-recycling mandate. California, Connecticut and Rhode Island fund take-back programs with a fee collected at the point of sale; Texas does not. So there is no free municipal drop, no recycling credit, and nothing built into what you paid for the bed. Recyclers do exist in the region — Spring Back Texas among them — and they will break a mattress into steel, foam, fiber and wood, but somebody has to get it to their door, and that somebody is normally you.

Donation is usually a dead end too, which surprises people who have donated furniture without a problem. Goodwill Central Texas, ARC Resale and Habitat for Humanity ReStore all decline used mattresses on health and hygiene grounds. That is why we treat mattresses differently from the rest of a furniture haul: we route to a recycler where one will take the load, break out the metal for scrap where we can, and dispose of the rest responsibly at the landfill. It is included in the flat price, and if the rest of the bedroom is going, the frame, headboard and dressers are the parts we do push toward donation.

When Austin calls us for mattress removal

• UT move-out, the last week of July. Leases end July 31 and West Campus and Riverside empty at once. It is the single biggest bed-disposal event in the metro — the city runs MoveOutATX donation stations for the same reason.
• May graduation. A smaller version of the same wave, usually one bed and one futon at a time rather than a whole building.
• The new mattress is being delivered. The delivery crew often won't take the old one, or charges to, and the old one has to be out of the room before they arrive.
• Rental turnover. Landlords and property managers in South Austin, Pflugerville and Riverside clearing beds between tenants, several units at a time.
• Guest room to office. The steady tech-relocation remodel — the bed goes, the desk arrives.
• Downsizing and estates. Georgetown's Sun City belt and Tarrytown's generational homes, where the beds go out with the rest of the house.
• Bed bugs or water damage. When it has to leave today, wrapped, without touching anything else on the way out.

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