Everything else in your house prices by how much truck it fills. Renovation debris doesn't — it's priced per cubic yard, because a yard of tile and subfloor weighs several times a yard of sofa. Once you know why, the rest of the budget stops being a surprise.
Construction debris $120 per cubic yard · $75 minimum · staged pickups at no surcharge
Upload Photos & Get Quote →It won't tell you what Colorado or El Paso County requires of your project — permits, inspections, contractor licensing, or how anything must be disposed of. Those answers come from the city or county and from your contractor, and they change.
It also won't tell you who owes what under your contract. That's between you and whoever is doing the work, and it's the single most common source of friction on this — which is why there's a section below about settling it early rather than an opinion about how it settles.
And it won't name a facility, quote a tipping fee, or claim a recycling percentage. We've seen those numbers stated confidently on other people's pages and they're usually stale or invented.
Ordinary junk removal quotes a fraction of a truck. That model works because household contents behave predictably: they're bulky and comparatively light, so the space runs out at roughly the same time the crew's capacity does.
Renovation debris inverts that. Tile, mortar, plaster, subfloor, roofing and concrete are compact and extremely heavy. A pile that looks modest in a driveway is a genuinely different job to lift, carry and dispose of than a pile of the same size made of furniture.
So it carries its own rate — $120 per cubic yard — instead of riding the household ladder. That isn't a surcharge bolted on afterwards; it's a separate line in the catalogue, quoted the same way everything else is, from photographs, before anyone starts.
Worth seeing plainly, because it explains the whole page.
A full 16-cubic-yard truck of household contents is $732 — about $46 a cubic yard. That's the ladder every other job on this site uses.
Construction debris is $120 a cubic yard — roughly two and a half times that.
The gap isn't margin. It's that the same cubic yard holds several times the weight, takes longer to load by hand, and costs more to dispose of at the other end. A yard of broken tile and mortar is a very different object from a yard of empty cardboard boxes, even though a photograph can make them look similar.
Which is also why a mixed pile is worth separating if you can. Household items pulled out of a renovation — an old vanity, a fridge, carpet — price on the ordinary rates, not the debris rate.
The one part of this page we'd ask you not to skip, and the only part that's genuinely about safety rather than money.
In older housing, materials in flooring, insulation, ceiling texture, pipe wrap and paint may need testing before they're touched. Anything built before 1978, or anything you simply don't know the history of, is worth having a licensed assessor look at first.
The time for that is before anything is cut, sanded or broken up — not after. Disturbing those materials is the step that creates the hazard; leaving them undisturbed generally doesn't.
We don't test, we don't remove anything of that kind, and it won't go on our truck. That isn't us being awkward — it's licensed specialist work, and a hauling company treating it casually is a hauling company creating a problem for a client.
This causes more arguments than the price does.
Some contracts include haul-away. Some explicitly exclude it. Plenty say nothing at all, and that silence is where the dispute lives — usually discovered on the day the job finishes and a pile is sitting in the driveway.
Ask three questions in writing before work starts: who removes the debris, when, and is it inside the quoted price. Thirty seconds of clarity in advance replaces an entire conversation later.
We can't tell you what you agreed to or who's responsible — that's your contract, and anyone offering an opinion on it is guessing. What we can do is quote the removal from a photo, so at least the number is known.
A specifically Colorado Springs problem, and it catches people who've renovated elsewhere.
Most housing here has no basement, so there's no out-of-sight staging area. Debris goes in the garage or on the driveway, which means it's in the way of the car and visible from the street for the duration.
In a covenant-controlled neighbourhood — and much of the newer east-side stock is — a driveway pile tends to get noticed. What your covenant actually permits is a question for the covenant itself, and worth reading before rather than after.
The practical answer is usually to stage toward the truck rather than toward the back of the garage. A garage full of debris is a garage you can't park in, and Front Range winters make that cost real.
Doing it once sounds cheaper. It generally isn't.
Weather gets into it. Debris left outside collects rain and snow, and wet material is heavier and messier to load — with no benefit to anyone.
Clean material stops being clean. A separated stack of timber or metal that gets walked through, rained on and topped with plaster becomes general waste, and loses whatever separate route it had.
The staging area is occupied the whole time — garage, driveway or both, for the length of the project rather than for a day.
And staged pickups don't cost more, because each is priced by what actually leaves. Two visits or three costs the same as one, so there's no financial reason to let it accumulate.
Some of what comes out of a renovation shouldn't go on the debris rate at all.
Metal has value. Old ductwork, radiators, cast-iron pipe, steel framing and appliances can often go to a scrap yard instead — free at worst, paid at best.
Appliances price as appliances, not as debris. A refrigerator is $164 whether it came out of a kitchen remodel or a garage.
Carpet prices separately — rolled and tied it's $68 a roll, which usually beats treating it as bulk debris.
Paint, solvents and adhesives need household hazardous waste handling. Ask El Paso County what the current arrangement is rather than trusting anything written down a year ago, including this.
Cabinets and fixtures in good condition may be worth offering to a reuse organisation before they become debris at all. The donation guide covers who takes what, and a whole kitchen of sound cabinets is exactly the sort of thing that gets accepted.
Quoted flat from photographs before anyone arrives.
| What leaves | Price |
|---|---|
| Minimum job | $75 |
| Construction debris | $120 per cubic yard |
| Clean yard waste | $88 per cubic yard |
| Rolled carpet | $68 |
| Refrigerator | $164 |
| Household items — quarter truck (4 cu yd) | $241 |
| Household items — half truck (8 cu yd) | $431 |
| Household items — full truck (16 cu yd) | $732 |
Mixed loads are quoted as what they are — the debris priced per yard, the household items on the ordinary rates. You don't have to work out the split; send photographs and the quote does it.
A single full bathroom, stripped to the studs: tub, tiled surround, floor tile and backer, vanity, toilet, and the drywall that came off with them.
That's about four cubic yards of genuine debris once it's broken down — dense, heavy, and far smaller in volume than people expect from a room that size.
Four yards at $120 is $480, quoted before the first tile came off.
Note how little space it occupies: four cubic yards is a quarter of our truck. Priced on the household ladder that same quarter-truck would be $241 — but it would be a fiction, because the weight is nothing like a quarter truck of furniture.
A standard kitchen remodel: cabinets out, countertops off, flooring up, some drywall, plus the old fridge.
Nine yards at $120 is $1,080, plus $164 for the fridge — $1,244 in total.
Split across two visits, one mid-demolition and one at the end, for the same money. And if the cabinets are sound, offering them to a reuse organisation first can take a meaningful slice out of the nine yards before it's ever quoted.
Both are right sometimes, and the fuller comparison is on its own page, but for renovation specifically it comes down to one thing.
A container is for time. It earns its place on a job running weeks, where debris appears continuously and you want somewhere to put it at 6pm on a Tuesday. You load it yourself, and it occupies the driveway until you're finished.
We're for labour. When the pile already exists, when it arrives in bursts, when nobody wants to hand-load it, or when the driveway can't be surrendered for a fortnight.
If the debris is already sitting there and you want it gone, that's not a container decision — it's a pickup.
The densest thing you'll generate. Small volume, large weight, $120 a cubic yard. Keep it separate from light material if you can — mixing makes the whole load debris.
Bulkier and lighter than masonry but still debris. Breaks down small, so the yardage is usually less than it looks stacked.
Offer sound ones to a reuse organisation first. What's left is debris. Broken particle board is not worth anyone's collection trip.
Try a scrap yard before us. This is the category most likely to cost you nothing.
Rolled and tied, $68 a roll. Loose and wet, it becomes bulk — so roll it as it comes up.
Licensed assessor before it's disturbed. Not us, not your contractor's judgement, not a page on the internet.
Price the material, not the pile — and decide who owns it before the first day.
Debris is the one part of a renovation where the intuition built from ordinary junk removal actively misleads: it takes less room and costs more, and a photograph of it understates the job. Knowing that up front turns it into a line in the budget instead of a surprise at the end.
And the single cheapest thing you can do is ask your contractor, in writing, before anything starts, whether removal is in the price. That question costs nothing and settles the only part of this that ever becomes an argument.
Flat price back · staged pickups at no extra cost · mixed loads split automatically
Upload Photos & Get Quote →