How to Get Rid of a Refrigerator in New York City

Why it cannot just go downstairs

A refrigerator is a sealed refrigeration system. The refrigerant has to be recovered by someone equipped to do it before the steel gets recycled, which is why refrigerant-containing appliances are handled separately from ordinary bulk waste everywhere, New York included. The city sets and updates those requirements on its sanitation pages, and that is where to check the current version before anything is moved to a curb.

If we are taking it, none of that falls to you. Recovery and recycling are inside the published price. There is no refrigerant fee, no environmental charge and nothing added afterwards.

The published prices

So the range across household refrigeration runs from $155 for the mini fridge in a studio to $320 for a built-in Sub-Zero in a renovated co-op. All of those clear the $75 visit minimum on their own. Carry-out from any floor is included; there is no stair charge and no walk-up fee.

Prepare it the night before

Three things, and none of them take long.

Empty it. Food, shelves, the drawers at the bottom. A loaded fridge is dramatically heavier and glass shelves shift and break on a stair.

Unplug it and let it defrost. Twelve hours ahead if you can. A freezer compartment that is still iced will drip down five flights of stairs and across a lobby floor, which is exactly the sort of thing that gets a hauler barred from a building.

Tape the doors or plan to take them off. Most New York apartment doorways are narrower than a full-size refrigerator with its doors attached. We take doors off where the width demands it, and that is included.

Water lines to an ice maker should be shut off at the valve before we arrive. Disconnecting plumbing is not our work.

The galley kitchen and the twenty-eight-inch doorway

The physical problem in most of this city is not the stairs. It is the first three meters. Prewar apartments put the refrigerator in a galley kitchen with a doorway that predates full-size appliances, and getting the unit out means tipping it, walking it, and turning it through a doorway with a couple of centimeters to spare.

What helps: clear the counter run beside it, move the kitchen table out of the hallway, and unlatch any door that opens into the route. What helps most is telling us at booking that it is a galley, because a crew that expects it arrives with the straps and the door tools already on the truck.

Built-in and Sub-Zero units are a different exercise again. They are usually panelled to match cabinetry and fastened into a surround, and at $320 the price reflects unfastening and extracting the unit from the joinery rather than wheeling it off a floor.

Five flights, and why the price does not move

A refrigerator down five flights of a Washington Heights walk-up is the hardest version of this job in the city, and it is still $221. There is no stair charge in our pricing and no walk-up fee. That is a deliberate decision: in a city where most of the housing stock has no lift, charging by the flight would mean charging most residents extra for where they happen to live.

What the building changes is scheduling, not price. Narrow prewar stair turns and a landing that doubles back are genuinely slow, so the visit is booked with an arrival window rather than a fixed minute.

Doorman buildings, COIs and freight windows

In a managed building the refrigerator goes out through the service entrance and down the freight elevator, and neither is available on the day unless it has been arranged.

Ask the managing agent for two things as soon as you book. The exact certificate-of-insurance wording — which usually names the building entity and the managing agent, and sometimes the co-op as a separate holder — and the freight elevator windows, which in most buildings are fixed weekday hours that fill up. We issue COIs and can name more than one holder on a single certificate, but only against the wording the building actually wants.

A certificate made out to the wrong entity is the most common reason a crew gets turned away at a service door, and it is entirely avoidable with one email a week early.

The landlord swap that leaves the old one behind

A recurring New York situation: the building replaces the refrigerator, the delivery crew brings the new one in, and the old one ends up in the hallway, the basement, or standing in the corner of your kitchen because the delivery contract did not include haul-away.

If that has happened, the old unit is now somebody's responsibility and it is worth establishing whose in writing before you pay for it. If it is yours, it is a straightforward $221 and it clears the minimum on its own. If several units have accumulated in a basement over a few turnovers, a building-wide visit is far cheaper per unit, and once it is a pile rather than a list the truck ladder applies: $325 for a quarter truck, $455 for three-eighths and $580 for a half.

Doing the whole kitchen in one visit

Refrigerator removals frequently come attached to a renovation or a full appliance swap, and it is cheaper to do it as one job.

A worked case: refrigerator, gas range and dishwasher going out together comes to $221 + $185 + $147 = $553. Add a stacked washer/dryer combo at $255 and you are into the territory where the truck share is worth checking against the list. We calculate both and charge the lower one, before the crew is dispatched.

Frequently asked questions