Two things set the price, and only one of them is the furniture
Every estate cleanout quote in New York City comes down to volume and access. Volume is the obvious half: how much is leaving, measured either item by item or as a share of the truck. Access is the half that surprises executors. A fourth-floor walk-up in the East Village and a doorman building on Riverside Drive can hold identical apartments, and the work of emptying them is not remotely the same.
JunkRabbit publishes flat prices for both halves. You can price an apartment from a list before anyone rings the buzzer, and the number does not move because the crew found five flights instead of an elevator. There is no stair charge and no walk-up surcharge in our pricing, which is deliberate: in this city, charging by the flight would mean charging most of Manhattan and most of Brooklyn extra for existing.
Item list or truck fill, whichever is lower
There are two ways to price the same apartment.
By the item. Each piece has a published price. A sofa is $170. A queen mattress is $139. A box spring is $124. A standard dresser is $169. A two-to-four seat dining table is $138. You add up what is leaving and that is the job.
By the truck. If the contents are mixed, boxed, or simply too numerous to list, we price by how much of the truck they fill: $325 for a quarter, $455 for three-eighths, $580 for a half, $690 for five-eighths, $790 for three-quarters, $890 for seven-eighths and $985 for a full truck. Everything is included in those figures, disposal and recycling as well as labor.
The minimum for any visit is $75. That matters for the tail end of an estate, when the apartment is nearly bare and one last wardrobe is standing in the bedroom.
Worked example: a one-bedroom walk-up
A typical fourth-floor one-bedroom that has been lived in for thirty years. The family has taken the photographs, the jewellery and two chairs. What is left is the furniture nobody has room for.
| Item | Flat price |
|---|---|
| Sofa / couch | $170 |
| Mattress, queen | $139 |
| Box spring | $124 |
| Dresser, standard | $169 |
| Dining table, 2–4 seat | $138 |
Priced as a list, that is $170 + $139 + $124 + $169 + $138 = $740.
Priced by volume, that load fits comfortably in half a truck, which is $580. We bill whichever is lower, so this apartment is a $580 job. Executors routinely assume the opposite — that a hauler quotes the higher of the two — and it is worth knowing before you compare quotes.
Worked example: a three-bedroom co-op
A prewar three-bedroom on the Upper West Side, fully furnished, forty years of paper in the closets and a den that became storage. Nothing is going to family.
An apartment like this does not fit on one truck. A realistic estimate is a full truck at $985 plus a second load at five-eighths, which is $690. That comes to $985 + $690 = $1,675 for the apartment.
The paper is worth pricing separately if you want the crew to make a single trip: fifteen bags of debris is $264, and twenty-five is $525. Bagged closets and filing move far faster than loose ones, and on a job priced by truck share, faster and tighter is directly cheaper.
The paperwork nobody warns the executor about
In a doorman or managed building, the crew does not get upstairs without a certificate of insurance naming the correct parties. That is usually the building entity, the managing agent, and sometimes the co-op board as separate named holders. The managing agent will tell you the exact wording; it is almost never just the building's street address.
Ask for the requirement the day you take on the estate, not the morning of the pickup. We issue COIs and can name multiple holders on a single certificate, but a certificate issued to the wrong entity is the single most common reason an estate cleanout gets turned away at the service entrance.
The second piece is the freight elevator. Most buildings release the freight car in fixed windows on weekdays, and those windows book out. The elevator reservation, not the crew's calendar, usually decides your date.
Sort before you schedule, not during
The cheapest estate cleanout is the one where the sorting already happened. Once a crew is in the apartment, every unopened drawer is a decision someone has to stand there and make.
Work room by room and put things in four piles: family keeps, donate, sell, remove. Books are worth flagging early — a box of books is $60 to remove, and a full wall of them adds up fast, so if a dealer or library will take them, that is real money. Clothing is $47 a bag. Anything a relative might want should physically leave the apartment before the cleanout date, because a bag set aside in a corner is a bag that gets loaded by accident.
Street level: parking, stoops and arrival windows
On most residential blocks, alternate-side rules mean one side of the street is legally clear for a stretch of the morning or afternoon and the other is a wall of parked cars. Crews who know the block will aim for the window that puts the truck within carrying distance of your door, and that is often the real reason an arrival time is a range rather than a promise.
Brownstone estates add a stoop. Carrying a marble-top table down a stoop is slower than wheeling it out of a lobby, but it does not change our price — a marble or stone-top table is $250 wherever it happens to be standing. Garden and basement apartments are the reverse problem: everything goes up a short flight and out through a gate that a sectional was never designed to pass.
Get the number before anyone shows up
Send a list or a few photographs of each room and we will price it from our published catalogue, so you can put a real figure into the estate accounting rather than a guess. If the apartment is too full to list, we quote a truck share from the photographs and confirm it on arrival before any work starts.
What you will never get from us is a price that changes at the door. The prices above are the prices, disposal is inside them, and the crew carries from whatever floor the apartment happens to be on.
Frequently asked questions
Do you charge extra for a fifth-floor walk-up?
No. There is no stair charge and no walk-up fee in our pricing. A sofa is $170 on the ground floor and $170 on the fifth. Access affects how long we are there, not what you pay.
Can you provide a certificate of insurance for the building?
Yes, and we can name more than one holder on the same certificate, which matters when the managing agent and the co-op both need to appear. Send us the exact wording the building requires as early as you can, because a COI naming the wrong entity is the usual reason a crew gets stopped at the service door.
What if the apartment is only half empty by the time you arrive?
You pay for what actually leaves. If the family cleared more than expected, the job reprices down to the smaller item list or the smaller truck share, subject to the $75 minimum for the visit.
Is disposal included, or billed afterwards?
Included. The published item prices and the truck-fill prices cover labor, transport and disposal or recycling. There is no separate dump ticket added later.
How much of an estate can you take in one day?
For a furnished two- or three-bedroom, plan on a full truck at $985 and often a second load. Whether that happens the same day usually depends on the building's freight elevator window rather than on us.