What a roll-off pull actually costs

Build the number from the bottom, not the top

A per-pull price built downward from a market rate tells you what competitors charge. It does not tell you whether the job pays, and it fails silently: the pull that loses money looks identical on the invoice to the pull that made money.

Built from the bottom, the number is auditable. Every line has a source, either a receipt or a published schedule, and when the number moves you can say which line moved it. That is the difference between pricing and hoping.

The stack below is a structure, not a set of figures. The figures are yours, with one exception: the permit and license line has published numbers in several metros, and those are quoted here with the agency that published them.

The five inputs

Everything a pull consumes falls into one of five buckets. Two are variable per pull, two are fixed and amortized, and one is a mixture that behaves differently in every city.

Keeping them separate matters more than it sounds like it should. Lines that vary with the load move when the job changes. Lines that are amortized move when your volume changes, which means they get worse in a slow quarter precisely when you are least likely to notice.

• Disposal: the gate charge at the landfill, transfer station or recycling facility, driven by tonnage and by material type.
• Truck cost: fuel, maintenance, tires, and the capital cost of the vehicle spread over the pulls it performs.
• Labor: the driver’s hour on the road plus the yard time the pull actually consumes, which is usually more than the drive time.
• Container capital: what each can cost, spread over its working life and over the pulls it will earn in that life.
• Permit and license cost: municipal and state instruments, some priced per placement, some per container per year, some per vehicle per year, and some as bonds that are capital rather than expense.

Disposal is the input we will not put a number on

Disposal is usually the largest variable line, and it is also the line most widely misquoted on the internet. National average figures circulate constantly, and the ones we traced all lead back to a single annual analysis that this research pass read only at second hand through trade coverage.

So no disposal figure appears here. A national average read through somebody else’s summary is exactly the uncited number this cluster exists to be an alternative to, and a national average would be the wrong input for your pricing even if it were sourced perfectly.

The number you need is local and obtainable in one call. Ask the facility you actually use for its current gate rate, how it charges, whether the rate differs by material, and whether there is a minimum. Ask about the categories you carry: mixed construction and demolition debris, clean fill, roofing, and anything with a separate rate. Then take the tonnage from your own scale tickets rather than from a table.

Ask your landfill or transfer station for its current gate rate and how it charges. That figure varies by facility and by material, and it belongs in your stack rather than any national average.

Truck, labor and container capital are your own arithmetic

These three lines are structurally simple and personally specific. The truck line is what the vehicle costs to own and run, divided by the pulls it performs in the period. The labor line is the loaded hourly cost of the driver multiplied by the hours the pull consumes door to door. The container line is the delivered cost of a can, divided by the pulls you expect it to earn over its life.

Two mistakes are common enough to be worth naming. The first is dividing fixed costs by an optimistic pull count, which quietly understates every line that is amortized. Use the pull count you actually achieved last quarter, not the one the schedule allows for. The second is counting drive time as labor and ignoring the rest: the yard, the scale queue, the tarping, the paperwork, the wait at a site that is not ready.

Equipment prices and insurance premiums are not published on this page. The figures circulating for both are inconsistent by wide margins and none of them was verified here. Quotes from dealers and brokers are both easy to obtain and correct for your operation, which is more than any published range can claim.

The permit and license line, which most cost stacks omit

This is the line that separates a real cost stack from a template. It is also the line with published figures, because the agencies that charge it publish schedules. Only some do, and only those are quoted here.

What matters as much as the amounts is the shape. Permit and license costs enter the stack in four different ways, and each one lands in a different place in the arithmetic.

• Per placement: San Diego publishes $176.57 per month for a dumpster, $87.68 per week for a temporary storage container with a one-week maximum, an $87.68 flat processing fee, and $20.00 per metered space per day. Boston publishes a $50 base, space at $10 per 500 square feet daily for the first 500 square feet then $0.05 per square foot daily, signs at $4 each, and metered spaces at $20 per meter per day.
• Per licensed object: Philadelphia’s private dumpster license runs $80 or $150 for trash and $40 or $75 for recycling by whether the container is under or at least 1 cubic yard, and its public right-of-way license runs $200 or $500 for trash and $100 or $250 for recycling on the same split.
• Per vehicle and per container, annually: Nashville’s Private Collection Permit is $60 per vehicle under 3 cubic yards or $120 over, plus $12 per container, on a July to June term. Miami-Dade’s General Hauler Permit is $630 for application and renewal plus $74 per vehicle.
• As capital rather than expense: Austin’s permit matrix requires insurance and a $10,000 bond for dumpster permits. Washington’s solid waste carrier certificate carries a $200 application fee, $25 for temporary authority, and an annual regulatory fee assessed as a percentage of gross intrastate operating revenue.

Turning the stack into a per-pull number

The per-placement lines are already per pull. The annual lines are not, and the arithmetic that makes them comparable is division by the pull count for the same period. A fleet of forty containers and two trucks working Nashville pays forty container fees and two vehicle fees every July, and that total divided by the year’s pulls is a real cent-per-pull line, not a rounding error.

The revenue-based lines behave differently again. A fee assessed as a percentage of gross operating revenue moves with your price rather than with your cost, which means raising the price raises that line too. It belongs in the model as a rate rather than as an amount.

The per-pull profit calculator on this site takes these inputs and does the division, so the stack stays a structure you fill rather than a number you inherit. Whatever you use to run it, keep every line traceable to either a receipt or a published schedule.

What to re-check, and how often

Gate rates change, fee schedules are revised on municipal budget cycles, and fuel moves on its own. A cost stack is a live document, and a quarterly re-check of the three largest lines is usually enough to keep a price honest.

Every figure quoted above was read on the named agency’s own page on the date at the top of this page. Confirm current amounts with that agency before you price against them, and treat a figure you found anywhere without a named source as a prompt to make a call rather than as an input.

What this guide does not settle

Each of these is a thing this page does not answer. They are listed rather than smoothed over, because a gap you can see is worth more than a sentence that reads as though there is none.

• Disposal gate rates, tipping fees and per-ton charges. No disposal figure is published here, because the analysis behind the circulating averages was not read directly. Ask the landfill or transfer station you actually use.
• Permit and license fees in most metros. Six metro fee schedules were confirmed on an agency page our pass could open, out of thirty rows surveyed. Ask the issuing office named on the metro page.
• Truck prices, insurance premiums and container costs. The figures circulating for these are inconsistent and none was verified here. Get written quotes from dealers, brokers and container fabricators.
• Whether Washington’s solid waste carrier regime exempts construction and demolition debris or recyclables. That exemption question was not resolved and it matters a great deal to a roll-off operator. Ask the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission at 360-664-1222.

Frequently asked questions

Sources, and what each one returned

Every claim above traces to one of these. Where a source is marked as one we could not open, nothing on this page rests on it: it is listed so you can try it yourself, and the note says what our request got back.

• City of San Diego — Information Bulletin 718, How to Obtain a Traffic Control Permit for a Storage Container or Dumpster sandiego.gov · primary source
• City of Boston — How to get a street occupancy, excavation, or driveway permit boston.gov · primary source
• City of Philadelphia — Get a Dumpster License (Private or Right-of-Way) phila.gov · primary source
• Metro Nashville — Private Collection Permits nashville.gov · primary source
• Miami-Dade County — General Hauler Permit miamidade.gov · primary source
• City of Austin — Right-of-Way Contractors austintexas.gov · primary source
• Washington ORIA — Solid Waste Carrier Certificate handbook entry oria.wa.gov · primary source (state-agency host, but not the utilities commission’s own page)

Where to go next

• Per-pull profit calculator

  Fill the five lines with your own figures and see the per-pull number the stack produces.

• Metro placement permits

  The permit and license input, metro by metro, with the fee published only where an agency page carried it.

• Nashville permits

  The one metro where an operator can compute an exact annual city cost, because the collection permit is priced per vehicle and per container.

• Washington solid waste carrier certificate

  A state fee assessed as a percentage of gross operating revenue behaves as a rate in your model rather than as an amount.