Custom waste guide
Office strip-out 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
A 6m³ skip bin clears a small office of up to about ten desks. Allow 10m³ for ten to thirty desks, and stage multiple bins above that.
Size a commercial job by desk count, not by floor area. Floor area tells you nothing about how much is being thrown away; desks, chairs, pedestals and storage units are what fill the bin, and they come in countable units.
| The office | Size |
|---|---|
| Home office or single room | 3m³ |
| Small suite, up to 5 desks | 4m³ |
| Small office, up to 10 desks | 6m³ |
| 10–30 desks | 10m³ |
| Full floor, 30+ desks | Staged bins, or repeat collections |
Australian guides answer "small office" as either 2–4m³ or 6–8m³ — a flat contradiction, and neither figure comes with a unit you can count. Desks are.
What goes in
- Desks, workstations and partition screens
- Office chairs and soft seating
- Pedestals, filing cabinets and storage units
- Shelving, whiteboards and pinboards
- Carpet tiles and floor coverings
- Kitchenette fit-out and non-gas appliances
- General packaging and fit-out waste
Three things that cannot go in the skip — and this is where offices differ
This is the section every competing page omits, and it is the part that actually creates liability for a business.
1. Confidential paper is not general waste. Client files, personnel records, financial documents and anything carrying personal information should be securely destroyed, not tipped into an open skip on a public street. A skip bin is not a secure disposal method and we do not offer one. Use a secure document destruction service and get the certificate.
2. E-waste is a separate stream. Monitors, screens, computers, servers, printers, phones and networking gear are e-waste. Our booking engine does not price them automatically — TVs and screens are routed to manual confirmation rather than quoted — so if they are part of the job, say so and we will confirm what your supplier will take. Better still, use an e-waste recycler or your council's e-waste drop-off.
3. Batteries are never accepted. UPS units, laptop batteries and backup power packs are prohibited in every bin.
Commercial waste is excluded from council clean-up services
Worth knowing before you go looking for a free option: council hard waste and clean-up services are for residential waste. Councils explicitly exclude waste from commercial and industrial operations. An office clearout will not qualify, whatever the volume.
What size, and what it costs
| Size | n | Typical price | Median | Full range |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3m³ | 234 | $329–$429 | $346 | $233–$916 |
| 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 site postcode for the live figure.
One 8m³ beats two 4m³ by a median $117, and is the cheaper option in 74% of the 221 postcodes priced at both sizes. For a clearout happening in one hit, take the single larger bin.
Which waste category
General waste covers a standard office strip-out. Furniture, carpet tile, partitioning and packaging are all light mixed material.
It changes if you are taking out a fit-out with structure in it — screeded floors, brick or block partitioning, tiled bathrooms. That moves into mixed heavy waste, which ran a median $106 above general waste for the same 4m³ across 33 postcodes and was never once cheaper where both priced.
What is NOT allowed
Never accepted in any skip bin, no exceptions:
- Asbestos, fibro and fibreglass — a real risk in commercial fit-outs from before 1990, including vinyl flooring, backing and wall linings. Must be assessed and removed by a licensed asbestos remover.
- Chemicals, liquids, oils, fuels, paints and solvents
- Gas bottles and aerosols, full or empty — including fire extinguishers
- Batteries, including UPS and laptop batteries
- Clinical or medical waste — including a first aid room's sharps
If prohibited items are found after collection, contamination and disposal fees are charged and the load may be rejected.
Practical notes
- Placement and access are the hard part of a commercial job. A CBD or main-road office usually means kerbside placement, which needs council approval, and often an after-hours or weekend delivery window. Both take lead time — start before the lease end date, not after.
- Loading dock and lift access. If the office is above ground level, the bin is only half the problem. Confirm lift access and dock booking with building management before the bin is scheduled.
- We arrange the bin; you load it. We do not do manual removal, loading, carrying, sorting or office strip-out. For a large clearout on a lease deadline, budget for the labour separately.
- Take the longer hire. 3, 5 and 7 days cost the same in 60% of the 60 postcodes tested on 30 August 2026 — useful when a clearout has to happen across a weekend.
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.