How the Dumpster Price Index is built
Everything below is how we work. If it changes, this page changes first.
Where the numbers come from
Every price in the Index is a price a company publishes on its own website. We read the site, extract the size and the listed price, and record the page we took it from. We do not call for quotes, and we do not estimate. A company with no published price contributes nothing to the Index.
What counts
Independently owned roll-off companies and locally owned franchises in the United States. National carriers and brokers are excluded, so the Index measures the independent local market rather than the whole industry. It is built from 3,536 prices across 1,395 companies.
Fake and duplicated map listings are excluded too. We counted them, and the count is its own piece of research: the ghost listings we found on Google Maps. The wider market numbers behind all of this are in the dumpster rental statistics.
How a price is validated
A published price is only used when the company's sizes form a consistent ladder, a 30-yard costing less than a 10-yard means we mis-read the page, and the whole company is excluded until a person checks it. Roughly 8% of companies get held back this way.
A price is also only used when something corroborates it: either the company lists several sizes that cross-check each other, or the figure came from a genuine pricing table. A lone number pulled from a sentence is not enough.
Prices too low to be real
A roll-off quote has to cover a round trip plus disposal of at least the tonnage it includes, and the median gate rate alone is around $76 a ton. Anything materially below that is not a cheap market, it is the crawler having picked up the wrong number: a per-ton disposal rate, a daily add-on, or a figure taken off a transfer-station page.
So prices below a floor are discarded before anything is computed: $140 at 10 yard, $150 at 15 yard, $165 at 20 yard, $190 at 30 yard and $210 at 40 yard. The floors are deliberately generous, low enough that a genuinely cheap rural rental survives. What settled it was size: sub-floor figures turned up at every size including 40-yard, and no 40-yard container rents for under $210 anywhere, so they cannot be real prices that happen to be low. This currently removes 142 of the priced rows we hold.
What the median means
We publish the median, not the average, because a handful of very high commercial rates would drag an average upward and misrepresent what a homeowner pays. The typical range shown is the 25th to 75th percentile. No median is published on a sample smaller than 8 companies.
Known limitations
- Published prices are usually starting prices. Delivery distance, placement and disposal of heavy material can all push the final invoice higher.
- Companies that publish prices may not be representative of those that don't. Roughly one in five publishes at all.
- Prices change and pages go stale. Every figure carries the date it was checked.
- Coverage is thinner in rural states, where fewer companies publish anything.
- Which towns a company appears on is a 25-mile radius from the address we hold, not a route map. Owners who claim a listing can name the towns they actually cover, and those are used instead of the estimate.
Corrections
If a price here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. claim the listing and say what it should be. Corrections are free and do not require anything in return.
Reuse
The Index is free to use and quote with attribution to the Dumpster Price Index. CSV and JSON are published alongside it.
Updated regularly.