Why House Clearance Costs More Than It Used To

People contact me expecting to pay what they paid last time. Or what their neighbour paid a few years ago. Or what they found on a website that has not updated its prices since before the pandemic.

I understand the frustration. But I also have to explain, on an almost daily basis, why the number we come back with is higher than they were expecting. The short version: disposal costs have risen by around 63 per cent since 2020. The longer version is what this article is about.

When you book a house clearance, you are paying for several things at once. The team. The transport. The time. And the disposal.

Of those four, disposal is the one that has changed most dramatically over the past five years. It is also the one that customers are least aware of, because it happens after the van leaves your property. You do not see it. But it is on every invoice.

Gate fees at licensed transfer stations have risen significantly. Fuel costs more. So do the vehicles, the maintenance, the insurance. Even the consumables, the bags we use, the gloves, the equipment, have all gone up in price. Every part of the supply chain that moves waste from a property to its legal endpoint has become more expensive, and that cost has to land somewhere.

For a business like ours, which does 350 to 450 clearances a year across London, Surrey and Kent, these are not marginal changes. They accumulate into a meaningfully different cost base.

The single biggest regulatory change to hit the clearance industry in recent years is the treatment of POPs waste.

POPs stands for Persistent Organic Pollutants. It covers chemical compounds found in certain flame retardants, many of which were widely used in UK furniture manufacturing for decades. The practical upshot is that most upholstered furniture, sofas, armchairs, cushioned dining chairs, anything with foam padding produced before the regulations changed, now falls under specialist waste handling requirements. It cannot go to a standard transfer station. It has to be processed in a specific way, at a specific cost.

Before these rules, a sofa was just a sofa. Bulky, awkward to move, but straightforward to dispose of. Since the rules came in, that same sofa carries a surcharge that adds real money to the cost of any clearance that includes it. On a full house clearance, the POPs waste surcharge alone adds an average of around £180 plus VAT to the job. Most properties we clear have at least some upholstered furniture.

That is a cost that did not exist a few years ago. It exists now, and it is not going anywhere.

POPs waste is the most significant new charge, but it is not the only one. Several categories of household item carry their own mandatory disposal requirements.

Mattresses require specialist processing and cannot be mixed with general waste. Fridges and freezers contain refrigerant gases that must be extracted by licensed handlers before the units can be recycled. Electronic items fall under WEEE regulations, which require separate collection and processing. Each of these categories attracts its own cost, and most properties contain several of them.

A family home going through probate will typically contain one or more mattresses, a fridge, a freezer, possibly an old chest freezer in the garage, and several sofas. The mandatory disposal costs on those items alone, before we have lifted anything else, add up to a figure most customers would not have anticipated when they first started thinking about what a clearance might cost.

This is the part I find most satisfying to explain, because it is the thing that makes the biggest practical difference to what customers actually pay.

Clear It Out started as a reuse business. I spent years buying from clearance companies and auctions before I started running a clearance company myself. I saw, from the buying side, how much was being sent to landfill that still had genuine value. That shaped how we operate.

On every job we carry out, we assess what can be resold, donated or reused before we start calculating disposal costs. Items that go back into circulation reduce the weight of what needs to be disposed of. And because disposal is priced by weight and type of material, reducing it reduces the cost of the job.

We pass that saving back in the price. A property full of items we can recover costs less to clear than one where everything has to go to a transfer station. The contents are doing part of the work.

That is not a marketing line. It is how the numbers work. And it is why, despite disposal costs rising substantially across the industry, we have been able to keep our pricing more competitive than operators who treat everything as a disposal cost from the start.

If you are getting quotes for a clearance and one company is coming in significantly lower than everyone else, it is worth asking a few questions before you decide.

Check the Environment Agency public register
Every legitimate waste carrier in England is listed there. Search by company name. If they do not appear, do not proceed. Our licence number is CBDU176999 and you can verify it yourself: Environment Agency public register. The search takes two minutes.

Ask for a waste transfer note
This is the document that records where your waste went after it left the property. Without it, you have no evidence that your waste was disposed of legally. A registered company produces one without prompting.

Ask how they handle upholstered furniture and mattresses
A company that is not accounting for POPs waste disposal costs is either absorbing a loss on every job, or those items are not being handled the way the law requires.

The price difference between a licensed, compliant operator and one that is cutting corners is not profit. It is the cost of doing the job properly.

If you are planning a clearance and you booked one a few years ago, the price you paid then is not the price you will pay now. Disposal costs have changed. Regulations have changed. The market has changed.

What has not changed is that a well-run clearance, carried out by a licensed team that recovers and resells what it can, will still come in at a fairer price than one that treats your belongings as nothing but a disposal problem.

Our house clearance London page covers what we do, how we price and how to get a quote. We operate seven days a week, including bank holidays, across London, Surrey and Kent.

For an idea of pricing before you get in touch, our prices page sets out our standard load-based rates. The price we quote is the price you pay.