Start with the number that reframes the whole decision: South Wake Landfill charges about $15 to take a mattress or box spring. Fifteen dollars. Once you know that, every quote in the Triangle reads differently — you're not paying for disposal, you're paying for somebody to carry a queen down a bonus-room stair turn and drive it away. It also makes a published $40 mattress surcharge very hard to justify. Here's every option with its real cost, including the free ones and the ones that won't work.
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Upload a Photo & Get Quote →South Wake Landfill takes ordinary municipal solid waste at roughly $37 a ton — a figure that includes the $2 per ton North Carolina excise — and prices mattresses and box springs separately at about $15 each. That's the actual, local, verifiable cost of making a mattress disappear.
Sit with that for a second, because it changes what you're shopping for. A mattress is not hazardous. It is not on North Carolina's landfill ban list the way televisions, computers, appliances, whole tires, lead-acid batteries and used oil are. It needs no special handling, no refrigerant recovery, no certification. It's an awkward, bulky, fifteen-dollar object.
So when a company quotes you for a mattress, essentially none of that number is disposal. You're buying two people, a truck, and the fifteen minutes it takes to get a king with a pillow top around a stair turn without putting it through the drywall. That's a real service worth real money — we charge for it. What it doesn't support is a surcharge bolted on top, as though the mattress itself were the expensive part.
McJunk publishes a Triangle rate card with a $175 minimum and truck tiers of $305 / $435 / $565 / $695 — and then adds, in print, $40 per mattress, along with $10 per tire, $10 per CRT television and a $10 to $50 trip charge. Those are their published figures, not our characterization of them.
Set $40 next to $15 and the arithmetic doesn't resolve. The surcharge is close to three times the local disposal cost of the thing it's charged for. It isn't a pass-through of a fee they're absorbing; it's a pricing decision. And it compounds fast in exactly the situations where mattresses actually appear: three mattresses out of a four-bedroom student house on Ninth Street is $120 of surcharge before anybody weighs the load or opens the tier table. A landlord turning over two units pays it twice.
Compare Junk Doctors, who publish a $135 minimum with tiers of $298 / $488 / $608 / $738 and no mattress fee on their card — genuinely more straightforward on this specific point. And the national brands — 1-800-GOT-JUNK, College HUNKS, Junk King — don't publish a Triangle price at all; they quote truck space on site, so you find out what a mattress costs while a crew stands in your bedroom.
We don't have a mattress surcharge. A queen is $139 whether it's the only thing in the truck or the fourth one in, because there's no cost to pass on. Full comparison of every hauler's published numbers is on our Triangle hauler page.
| Option | Cost | Speed | Who lifts it | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Donate it | Free | — | — | Most charities won't take used mattresses at all — including Habitat ReStore and Goodwill, on hygiene grounds |
| City of Raleigh Bulky Load | $35 | Scheduled collection day | You | Raleigh-proper only, curbside-only, and it soaks up whatever weather arrives before the truck does |
| Self-haul to South Wake Landfill | ~$15 per mattress or box spring | An afternoon | You | Needs a truck, straps and a helper — and a bare mattress must be covered in transit |
| Traditional truck-fill hauler | $135 min (Junk Doctors) / $175 min (McJunk) + $40 per mattress at McJunk; nationals quote on arrival | 1–3 days | They do | Volume pricing plus a surcharge on the cheapest item to dispose of |
| JunkRabbit | Queen $139 flat · twin $111 · king $154 · box spring $124 | Same day, most days | We do | None — photo-quoted, no surcharge, carried down from the bedroom |
Municipal, landfill and competitor figures are those organizations' own published rates, current as of 2026. Our numbers are the flat item prices below.
Here is the most useful sentence on this page: most charities will not accept a used mattress. Not Habitat for Humanity ReStore, whose ten Triangle stores will happily collect your dresser, your dining set and your kitchen cabinets for free across Wake, Johnston, Durham and Orange counties. Not Goodwill of Eastern North Carolina, headquartered right here in Raleigh and taking usable household goods region-wide. Bedding is the exception, and it's a hygiene policy, not a judgment about your mattress. It applies even when the mattress is clean, even when it's nearly new, even when you have the receipt.
People lose a week to this. They list the mattress on a donation site, arrange a pickup, and get turned away at the dock — and now it's seven days later and the bed is still in the room. Plan for the mattress to be a disposal job from the start. Donate the parts that are actually donatable: the bed frame, the headboard, the nightstands, the dresser. Those charities want all of it.
The one place worth checking is a campus move-out donation drive. NC State, Duke and UNC often run collections during the move-out window, and where those accept bedding it's a genuinely free route. Ask your residence hall before you assume.
City of Raleigh Solid Waste Services collects a scheduled curbside Bulky Load for $35, and a mattress qualifies. (A special or appliance item is $70, electronics are collected free up to four items a week, and tires aren't accepted.) It's the cheapest paid option in the Triangle and we'll say so plainly.
The three conditions are the same three that trip everyone up. It's for City of Raleigh residential solid-waste customers only — Cary, Apex, Morrisville, Holly Springs, Garner, Wake Forest, Knightdale, Durham, Chapel Hill and Carrboro run their own arrangements, so a large share of the people who find the $35 figure can't use it. It's curbside, so you're the one wrestling a queen around the stair turn from a second-floor bedroom or a bonus room over the garage. And it's scheduled, so the mattress waits at the street — and a mattress is uniquely bad at waiting outdoors, since one Triangle thunderstorm turns a dry queen into forty extra pounds of soaked foam that's now much harder to move and no longer anyone's idea of a clean disposal.
Add the covenant problem: across the HOA suburbs, a mattress propped against a mailbox for several days is about as visible as bulk gets. We don't publish the program's size and weight limits or the request procedure here because we haven't verified them — confirm at raleigh.gov. The full eligibility breakdown is in our Bulky Load vs paid pickup guide.
Drive it to South Wake Landfill yourself and it's about $15 per mattress or box spring. For a set, thirty dollars and a Saturday. That is unbeatable and it's the honest recommendation if you have the vehicle.
What "if you have the vehicle" actually requires: a pickup or a rented truck — a mattress does not go in an SUV with the seats down, and it doesn't go on a car roof either. Straps, and this is not optional: a bare mattress behaves like a sail at highway speed, and an unsecured load on I-40 is both a genuine hazard to the car behind you and a citable offense. Cover it in transit for the same reason and to keep it dry. A second person, because a king is a two-person object even flat on the ground. And scale-house hours, which for most people means a weekday afternoon off work. Rent the truck and you're past our flat price before you reach the gate.
One picture, taken where it sits. Size is all we need. The price comes back in seconds and it's fixed before anyone is dispatched.
| Item | Flat price |
|---|---|
| Twin mattress | $111 |
| Box spring (any size) | $124 |
| Full / double mattress | $126 |
| Queen mattress | $139 |
| King mattress | $154 |
| Mattress + box-spring set | $192 |
| Bed frame | $92 |
| Headboard | $77 |
$75 minimum on very small jobs. Carry-out, stairs and disposal included. No mattress surcharge, no trip charge, no on-site re-quote. Clearing the frame, the headboard, the dresser and the nightstands in the same trip? One photo, one quote for the whole bedroom. No NC sales tax on the service. Multiple mattresses — a four-bedroom student house, a landlord's turnover stack — price together as one job. Full service detail is on the mattress removal page.
The Triangle has an unusually concentrated version of this problem. NC State enrolls roughly 38,000 students, UNC-Chapel Hill about 21,000 undergraduates, and Duke around 17,000 — and they empty inside the same early-to-mid-May window. For about two weeks, Hillsborough Street, Ninth Street in Durham and the Chapel Hill and Carrboro rental streets are lined with mattresses, because a mattress is the one thing that categorically doesn't fit in a parent's SUV alongside four years of everything else.
Two pieces of practical advice for that week. Check the campus donation drive first — where one is running and accepts bedding, it's free and it's the right answer. And book the haul for the day you actually leave, not three days earlier. A mattress parked in a residence-hall hallway, a breezeway or an apartment stairwell in the interim is a fire-code violation, an eyesore your neighbors will remember, and frequently a thing that migrates into somebody else's doorway overnight. Move-out windows are enforced to the hour, so we schedule against the hall's stated deadline rather than a guess, and stage on the street rather than in a fire lane. Book a day or two ahead in that window — it's the only stretch of the year the Triangle calendar genuinely fills. More on the whole move-out on our student move-out guide.
August brings a smaller echo as the replacements get delivered and last year's beds come out.
If there's any possibility of an infestation, bag the mattress in a disposal bag before it leaves the bedroom and tell the crew when you book. That's the whole protocol, and it matters more than people expect.
Nobody is going to refuse the job or add a fee because you were honest. What a crew that knows can do is bag it properly, load it apart from anything else, and clean the truck down afterward, instead of unknowingly carrying the problem into a truck and then into the next customer's house. In an apartment building — and Morrisville, Brier Creek, Glenwood South and the student corridors are apartment-dense — dragging an unbagged infested mattress down a shared stairwell is precisely how it becomes the whole building's problem. Ten seconds of disclosure prevents that.
Since donation is off the table for used bedding, recycling is the only meaningful environmental question with a mattress — and mattresses are unusually good candidates for it. A mattress is mostly recoverable material once it's cut open: the steel innerspring goes to scrap, the foam is reprocessed into carpet underlay and padding, and the fiber and felt layers are recovered. Where recycling routing exists, mattresses are broken down for those streams rather than buried, and steel gets pulled for scrap where the load makes it practical. What can't be recovered is disposed of properly, at roughly $15 a piece.
That local cheapness is also the reason our prices sit where they do rather than higher. We're not pricing around a punitive tip fee. A mattress should be a cheap add to any load, and on our quote it is.
There are no basements in North Carolina, so the mattress is never coming up from a downstairs storage room — it's coming down from a second-floor bedroom, a bonus room over the garage, or an attic access. In the newer builds across North Raleigh, Apex, Holly Springs and Wake Forest, the bonus-room stair is usually the tightest turn in the house, and folding a pillow-top king through it is genuinely awkward work.
Inside the Beltline it's the doorways. Five Points, Hayes Barton, Historic Oakwood and Mordecai are 1910s–1930s houses with narrow halls, steep original stairs and heart-pine floors, on streets where a truck loads on-street or not at all.
Apartments and condos are a coordination job. Downtown Raleigh, Glenwood South, the Village District, North Hills, Morrisville and Brier Creek mean a loading dock, a reserved elevator, and sometimes a certificate of insurance naming the building. Lighter than a Manhattan co-op board, but it needs arranging before the crew shows up — and none of it is compatible with a curbside program.
"Spent a week trying to donate a barely-used guest queen before learning nobody takes mattresses. Should have read this first. One photo, gone the next morning."
"Three mattresses out of a Ninth Street house at the end of the semester. Got quoted a per-mattress fee elsewhere; here it was just three prices and no add-ons."
"New bed arriving Saturday, old king and box spring upstairs. Flat quote from a photo Thursday, out of the room Friday, and the price didn't move at the door."
How much does it cost to dispose of a mattress in Raleigh?
The disposal itself is about $15 — South Wake Landfill's per-mattress rate, against roughly $37 a ton for ordinary waste. Everything above that is labor and a truck. Our flats: twin $111, full $126, queen $139, king $154, box spring $124, set $192, $75 minimum, no surcharge.
Why do some haulers add a $40 mattress fee?
McJunk's published card does, alongside $10 a tire, $10 a CRT TV and a $10–$50 trip charge. We can't find a local cost that supports it: a mattress isn't hazardous, isn't landfill-banned in NC, and tips at about $15. We don't charge one.
Will Goodwill or Habitat ReStore take a used mattress?
Almost certainly not — used bedding is refused on hygiene grounds even when it looks clean. They'll gladly take the frame, headboard and dresser. Treat the mattress as a disposal job from the start.
Will the City of Raleigh pick it up?
Yes, for $35 on a scheduled curbside Bulky Load — but only for City of Raleigh solid-waste customers, only from the curb, and it sits outside until collection day. Cary, Apex, Morrisville, Holly Springs, Garner, Wake Forest, Knightdale, Durham, Chapel Hill and Carrboro aren't on it. Verify at raleigh.gov.
Can I haul it myself?
Yes, about $15 a piece at South Wake. You need a truck, straps and a second person, and a bare mattress must be covered and secured in transit — it acts like a sail on the highway.
What about during NC State or Duke move-out?
Check your campus donation drive first, then book the haul for the day you actually leave — a mattress left in a hallway or breezeway is a fire-code problem. Early-to-mid May fills up across Hillsborough Street, Ninth Street and Chapel Hill; book a day or two ahead.
What happens to it afterward?
Where routing exists, mattresses are broken down for steel, foam and fiber recovery rather than landfilled. What can't be recovered is disposed of properly at about $15 a piece.
What if it has bed bugs?
Bag it before it leaves the bedroom and tell us when you book. No refusal, no extra charge — it just lets the crew load and clean down properly instead of moving the problem into a truck.