People say "I need to get rid of a mattress" and picture one object. There are three — the mattress, the box spring and the frame — they're made of completely different things, and they have three different answers. One of them may even be worth money.
Mattress and box spring as a set $192 — versus $263 booked separately
Upload Photos & Get Quote →Pull a bed apart and you're holding three unrelated problems.
The mattress — foam, fibre, springs and fabric bonded together, and the hardest household item in the country to pass on.
The box spring — mostly a timber frame with fabric over it. Structurally more like furniture than like a mattress.
The frame — usually metal, sometimes wood, and the only one of the three with real material value.
Treating them as one thing is what costs people money, in two directions: they pay separately for things that price better together, and they throw away the one part somebody would have taken.
Start with the hard one.
A mattress is bonded — foam laminated to fibre laminated to fabric, often over a spring unit, assembled to be permanent. There's no practical way to separate those layers at the scale a household disposal chain operates at.
It's also bulky rather than heavy, which sounds like good news and isn't: it means it occupies a lot of space in any vehicle, and it's awkward to carry — a genuinely two-person item through a doorway or down stairs, more because it bends than because it weighs much.
By size: twin $111, full $126, queen $139, king $154.
The real reason, and it isn't squeamishness.
Nobody receiving a mattress can verify what has been in it. Not by looking, not by asking. A charity accepting one is accepting an item whose history is unknowable and whose problems, if any, would spread to everything stored near it.
That single fact is enough for most organisations to decline the whole category outright — not case by case, but as a policy. It's a risk decision, not a judgement of your mattress, and no amount of "it's practically new" changes the arithmetic on their side. Why charities refuse what they refuse.
So plan for a no. If you happen to get a yes, treat it as a bonus rather than the plan.
Handled plainly because it governs everything else.
If you have any reason to suspect bed bugs, that's a question for a licensed pest-control professional — before the mattress moves anywhere, and before anyone else is asked to handle it. It isn't a hauling question and we're not qualified to assess it.
What we can say practically: anything suspected should be wrapped and sealed before it travels through hallways, a lift or any shared part of a building. Moving an unwrapped item through shared space is how something contained in one unit stops being contained.
Tell us in advance if this applies. It changes how a job is handled and it's much better known beforehand than discovered.
The one people assume is the same problem and isn't.
A box spring is largely a timber frame with fabric stretched over it — closer to a piece of furniture than to a mattress. Some are genuinely wood-framed; newer ones may be lighter metal or engineered board.
It's still not a donation item, and it still fails the same verification test by association. But it's a different disposal proposition, and if you're taking things to a facility yourself it may be treated differently from the mattress. Worth asking rather than assuming.
$124 on its own — and that's exactly where the next section matters.
The most common overpayment we see on this category, and it's caused by a wording habit.
A queen mattress booked as one item and a box spring booked as another comes to $139 + $124 = $263.
The same two things booked as a set are $192.
That's $71 for using the word "set" — for identical work, on the same visit. There's nothing clever about it; the set rate exists because two pieces of one bed going together is a single handling job rather than two.
If both are going, say so when you book. And this is the reason we quote from photographs rather than a list you type: a photograph of a bed shows both pieces, so the set rate gets applied whether or not you knew to ask for it. Full price list.
The genuinely good news, and the part most often thrown away without a thought.
A metal bed frame is a single clean material. Not bonded, not contaminated, not laminated — just steel. That makes it the one component of a bed with a real scrap market, and the one somebody may actually want.
Set it aside separately rather than burying it in a load. Clean metal presented on its own gets recovered; the same metal in a mixed pile frequently doesn't.
If you'd rather it just went: bed frame $92, headboard $77. But it's worth one call first. How metal recovery works here.
The instinct, and it works badly here for a structural reason.
Colorado Springs has no municipal collection — every household contracts its own private hauler — so there's no city answer about what may be left out. Whatever applies to you is in your own service agreement, and a mattress is outside ordinary cart service in every plan there is. How subscription service actually works here.
Check with your provider before putting one out. Left on hope, it's usually still there afterwards — and a mattress that has spent a night outdoors in weather has lost whatever slim options it had left.
Workable, with two conditions.
Call the facility first and confirm two things: that they accept mattresses at all, and how they charge for them. Acceptance varies, and arriving with one that's turned away means driving home with it still strapped down.
And bring a second person. A mattress isn't heavy but it folds, catches wind and won't hold its shape — it's a two-person load and a two-person strap-down. Wind on the open stretches around this region is not theoretical, and an unsecured mattress leaving a truck bed is a serious hazard to whoever is behind you. The full self-haul arithmetic.
One local pattern worth planning around.
The PCS moving window concentrates a great many household moves into a few summer weeks, and beds are among the most commonly abandoned items in a military move — they're bulky, they're rarely worth shipping, and they surface at the very end of a pack-out when time has run out.
Two consequences. Any charity capacity that might have existed is at its tightest exactly then, and removal calendars are busiest. If your move falls in that window, book earlier than feels necessary. The PCS move-out guide · military move-out.
The cheapest route on this entire page, and it's frequently overlooked because it has to be arranged at the wrong moment — when you're thinking about the new bed, not the old one.
Many retailers will take the old mattress away when they deliver the new one. Sometimes it's included, sometimes it's a modest add-on, and it varies by retailer and by delivery service — so ask rather than assume, and ask at the point of purchase, because it usually can't be added later.
When it's available it's hard to beat: the old bed leaves as the new one arrives, nobody makes a second trip, and there's no window where a mattress is propped in a hallway waiting for a plan. If that option exists for your purchase, take it and don't call us. We'd rather tell you that than quote you for something you could have folded into a delivery you were already paying for.
Two things to confirm when you ask: whether they'll take the box spring as well as the mattress, and whether they'll collect from the bedroom or only from the door.
Worth being straight about, since the bonded-material problem runs all the way down the chain.
Most mattresses are disposed of. The same lamination that makes one comfortable makes it impractical to separate into recoverable materials at household scale — foam bonded to fibre bonded to fabric, over a spring unit, assembled to stay assembled.
Where mattress recycling operations do exist, they work by breaking units down into their component streams — steel from the springs, foam, fibre, timber from a box spring frame. Whether that route is available for a given load depends on the facilities in reach and what they're accepting, which changes, so we're not going to promise you an outcome we can't verify for your specific mattress.
What we can say without hedging: the steel in a bed frame recovers cleanly and reliably, which is the strongest argument on this page for keeping the frame separate. How other material streams are routed.
| Item | Flat price |
|---|---|
| Minimum | $75 |
| Twin mattress | $111 |
| Full mattress | $126 |
| Queen mattress | $139 |
| King mattress | $154 |
| Box spring | $124 |
| Mattress and box spring as a set | $192 |
| Bed frame / headboard | $92 / $77 |
| Bunk bed | $165 |
| Crib | $90 |
| Futon | $150 |
| A whole bedroom — quarter truck | $325 |
| Stairs, long carry, no lift | No charge |
No sales tax on the service in Colorado. Quoted from photographs before anyone travels. Mattress removal · disposal options.
If the bed is going because the room is, the arithmetic changes.
A bed set at $192 plus a frame at $92 plus a dresser at $169 is $453 itemised. By volume that's around a three-eighths truck at $455 — so close it makes no difference, and we'd quote whichever came out lower.
Add much more than that — a wardrobe, boxes, a chair — and the volume tier pulls ahead. The crossover sits right about at "one full bedroom", which is a useful thing to know before you start pricing piece by piece. Furniture removal.
Book them as a set — $192. Saves $71 over booking separately.
$111–$154 by size. Twin to king.
$124, and ask the facility separately if self-hauling.
Try scrap first. Otherwise $92.
Ask anyway — but expect no. Verification, not appearance.
Pest professional first, then wrap before it moves. Tell us in advance.
No remaining options. Moisture ends it.
$165, and they come apart — expect disassembly.
$90, and commonly declined for donation on safety grounds.
$150 — mattress and frame in one awkward object.
Around a three-eighths truck, $455. Crossover point.
Volume pricing. Quarter truck $325 upward. Move-out clears.
Say "set", and keep the frame separate. Those two habits are worth more than any other advice on this page. Booking a mattress and box spring as a set rather than as two items saves $71 for identical work, and it's missed constantly because people list what they have rather than describing the bed. And the frame — the one part of a bed made of a single clean material — is the one component somebody may genuinely want, so it deserves better than being buried under the two things nobody can take. Everything else about a mattress is genuinely hard: it can't be verified, so it can't be donated; it's bonded, so it can't be separated. Accept that quickly and you'll spend your effort on the parts where effort still changes the outcome.
The set rate gets applied whether or not you knew to ask
Upload Photos & Get Quote →