Custom waste guide
Deceased estate waste planner
Build a skip plan from the materials you actually have. This guide recommends a waste type and skip size. It does not calculate prices.
Waste type recommendation
Skip size recommendation
Material compatibility checks
No pricing in this guide
Your skip plan
Your recommended selections
You selected: —
Why this waste type?
What can go in the bin?
What must stay out?
What happens next?
Enter your delivery postcode or suburb. We’ll preload the waste type on the homepage and keep this recommended size ready. You’ll still choose the Bin Type there; if it supports this size, we’ll apply it automatically.
The direct answer
An 8m³ skip bin clears a standard three-bedroom home. Add a second bin, or step to 10m³, if there is a shed, garage or workshop as well.
Sizing this job by bedrooms alone under-estimates it. Use this instead:
| The property | Size |
|---|---|
| One-bedroom unit or retirement apartment | 3m³–4m³ |
| Two-bedroom unit | 6m³ |
| Three-bedroom house | 8m³ |
| Three-bedroom house with a full shed or garage | 10m³, or 8m³ + 4m³ |
| Four-bedroom house, or a long-held family home | 10m³, staged over two hires |
Take your time over this. There is no rush that is worth getting it wrong, and the practical notes below are written on the assumption that you will need more than one weekend.
Why this needs a bigger bin than a normal clear-out
A deceased estate is a whole-of-property clearance, not a declutter. Everything goes: furniture, beds, wardrobes, linen, kitchenware, decades of paper, the contents of the shed and the garage.
It is also, in volume terms, the lightest kind of load — soft furnishings, clothing, bedding, books and paper. That means volume is the binding constraint, not anything else. You will run out of space long before anything else limits you, so size for the space.
Australian guides answer this question with anything from 6m³ to 25m³ — a threefold spread on the same house, with no reasoning shown. Our answer above is operational judgement from arranging these bins. What we can measure is that of the 338 paid orders in the 65 days to 30 August 2026, 313 named a size — and only 11.2% of those 313 (35 orders) were 8m³ or larger (10.4% measured against all 338). The large bins are genuinely uncommon, and this job is one of the few that warrants one.
What goes in
- Furniture from every room, including beds and bed bases
- Mattresses — accepted in most areas with a surcharge (see below)
- Wardrobes, drawers, bookshelves, dining settings
- Clothing, linen, curtains, bedding and soft furnishings
- Books, papers, files and photographs once reviewed
- Kitchenware, crockery, small appliances
- Non-gas whitegoods — fridge with gas removed, washer, dryer, oven
- Carpet, rugs and floor coverings
- Shed and garage contents, garden pots, tools
Before anything goes in the bin
This is the part that matters more than the size, and no size guide says it.
- Wills, deeds, titles, insurance papers and financial records — set aside and keep. They are routinely found in bedroom drawers and shoeboxes, not in filing cabinets.
- Photographs, letters and personal papers — once they are in the bin they are gone. If nobody has time to review them now, box them and decide later.
- Jewellery, coins, medals and service records — check pockets, tins and the backs of drawers.
- Anything with a beneficiary's name on it. If the estate is not settled, clearing ahead of the executor's instructions can create a real problem.
We arrange the bin and we can hold it longer if you need more time. What we cannot do is bring anything back out of it.
What size, and what it costs
| Size | n | Typical price | Median | Full range |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4m³ | 275 | $423–$553 | $446 | $329–$799 |
| 6m³ | 247 | $588–$700 | $647 | $446–$1,117 |
| 8m³ | 245 | $758–$997 | $835 | $717–$1,487 |
| 10m³ | 270 | $899–$1,095 | $967 | $775–$1,895 |
Live prices from our booking engine, general waste, 7-day hire, including delivery, collection, tipping and GST. Source: demand-ladders.json — 305 Australian postcodes captured 30 August 2026 for a 7 September 2026 delivery, live supplier-network quotes only. n is how many of those 305 postcodes were priced at that size.
This is not the same measurement as our skip bin price index. That page reports our published price list — a mean of the lowest advertised catalogue price for each size across 826 metropolitan postcodes — where the national 4m³ reads $534 (source dataset catalogue-stats.json, generated 27 August 2026; index read 31 August 2026). Those are list averages, not quotes. The figures above are medians of live supplier-network quotes across 305 postcodes, metro and regional, captured 30 August 2026, where the 4m³ median is $446 over n = 275. Mean against median, published list price against live quote, 826 metro postcodes against 305 mixed: the gap is method and population, not a price change, and neither figure supersedes the other. The index says as much itself: "A live quote for your own postcode is often lower." If you quote one, say which one.
Enter the property's postcode for the live figure.
One 8m³ beats two 4m³. Two 4m³ bins cost a median $117 more than a single 8m³ and are the dearer option in 74% of the 221 postcodes priced at both sizes. If the choice is between one big bin and two medium ones for the same total volume, take the big one.
Where a second bin does make sense is when the job splits naturally in two — the house now, the shed in a fortnight. That is a staging decision, not a sizing mistake, and it is a reasonable way to spread both the cost and the effort.
Take the longest hire that costs nothing
For the same bin across 60 postcodes on 30 August 2026:
| Hire | Median | vs 3 days |
|---|---|---|
| 3, 5 or 7 days | $443 | same price in 60% of postcodes |
| 10 days | $456 | +$47 |
| 14 days | $458 | +$54 |
| 21 days | $580 | +$139 |
14 days for a median $54 more than 3 days is the single best-value decision on this page. This is not a job to do against a clock.
Which waste category
General waste or household waste — they priced within a median $2 of each other across the 27 postcodes that priced both at 4m³, so there is nothing to choose between them on cost.
Keep the shed separate in your head: if the shed produces soil, rubble, pavers or old fencing, that is a different category and probably a different bin. See the waste category answer.
What is NOT allowed
Never accepted in any skip bin, no exceptions:
- Asbestos, fibro and fibreglass
- Chemicals, liquids, oils, fuels, paints and solvents
- Gas bottles and aerosols
- Batteries
- Clinical or medical waste
A deceased estate is the job most likely to turn up all five. Older homes accumulate paint tins, garden chemicals, fuel containers, a spare gas bottle, car batteries — and often unused prescription medicines and sharps, which are clinical waste and must go back to a pharmacy, not into a bin.
Set all of it aside before the bin arrives and use your council's chemical, hazardous waste and e-waste drop-off. If prohibited items are found after collection, contamination and disposal fees are charged and the load may be rejected.
Asbestos is a live risk in any home built or renovated before 1990 — sheeting, eaves, vinyl flooring, the shed itself. It must be assessed and removed by a licensed asbestos remover.
Surcharged items, and why there is no figure here. Mattresses and tyres are accepted in most areas and carry a per-item fee. We do not publish a figure for it, and you should distrust any page that does. We hold per-city surcharge data and it does not support a published number: it was measured in a single postcode, this corpus files that one measurement under two different postcodes, every row carries the booking engine's own verified: false flag, and one market declares a unit price of zero for all three items while the quote total still moves. Declare the items when you book and the quote for your postcode will show the fee that applies there.
Most estates have two or three mattresses and often a set of old tyres in the garage, so this is worth doing before you book.
What we do and do not do
We arrange the bin: it is delivered, you load it, it is collected and the accepted waste is disposed of.
We do not do manual removal, loading, carrying, sorting or house clearance. For an estate that matters — if there is nobody able to do the physical work, a skip bin is not by itself the answer, and you may need a clearance service as well as a bin. We would rather tell you that up front than deliver a bin to a house nobody can empty.
Where the waste-category figures on this page come from
Source: waste-categories-live-probe-20260830.json — nine categories priced at 4m³ across 33 Australian postcodes on 30 August 2026 for a 7 September delivery.
That file records prices only; it carries no per-quote source flag. Cross-matched against waste-type-prices.json (1,485 quotes captured the same day, every one flagged LIVE_NETWORK), 149 of its 264 values are independently confirmed as live supplier prices, agreeing to the dollar with zero disagreements. The other 115 — 16 postcodes, including all 8 Western Australian, the 1 South Australian and 7 of the 8 Queensland postcodes — cannot be certified either way, and are not presented here as live supplier prices. Every direction reported above survives a cut to the confirmed-live values only; the magnitudes on mixed rubble and light building waste do not, and should be read as approximate. The full split and the sensitivity table are on what waste category do I need.