Skip Bin Price Index — Methodology

This page defines how Local Skip Bin Hire measures skip bin prices and service coverage in Australia. It is published so that any figure we release can be checked, repeated and challenged. It is deliberately fixed: if the method changes, the change is dated and recorded at the bottom of this page rather than applied silently to past figures.

Where the numbers come from

Prices are real bookable retail prices returned by the live booking engine that powers this site, which aggregates four independent Australian skip-bin supplier networks. They are the prices a customer would actually be charged at that moment, not survey estimates, list prices or advertised "from" figures.

Basket: general waste, 7-day hire, delivered price including delivery, collection and disposal.
Per postcode, per size: the lowest bookable price available at that address on the day of measurement.
City figures are the average of those per-postcode lowest prices across the postcodes in that city's metropolitan band, and we publish the number of postcodes behind every figure.
Excluded: sizes below 2m³, hook-lift bins of 13m³ and above, and rubbish-removal (load-and-go) services, so that like is compared with like.
Suppression: a city/size figure is published only where enough postcodes carry that size to average fairly. Where they do not, we say so rather than estimating.

Coverage measurement

A postcode is recorded as returning no price only when every one of the four networks declines it across multiple bin sizes and multiple delivery dates. A single unavailable day cannot produce that result.

What these figures do not say

This is the limitation we consider most important, and we state it before anyone has to ask. Our measurements describe the four national booking networks we aggregate. A local operator we do not buy from may still serve a town we record as unserved. So a "no price" result means the national booking networks cannot serve that postcode — not that no skip bin exists anywhere in that area at any price.

Prices also move. Supplier availability, tip fees and state waste levies all change, sometimes within a week. Every figure we publish carries the date it was measured, and we do not restate past figures when prices move.

Revisions

If we find an error we correct it, date the correction, and say what changed. Monthly figures are archived at permanent URLs and are never overwritten.

Using this data

Journalists, researchers and councils are welcome to use these figures with attribution to Local Skip Bin Hire. We will provide the underlying per-postcode data on request, including for areas we do not service. Contact details are on our press page.

Method locked 28 August 2026. Prices measured continuously; the national index is recomputed monthly.