Serving King & Pierce County contractors since 2020
The honest answer is that it depends on five things, and four of them are inside your control. Rather than publish a figure that would be wrong for most of the jobs reading this page, here is what actually moves the number — so you can work out where your job sits before you book, and so the quote you get back makes sense when it arrives.
Pick a size and a date and the booking tool prices your job directly. Takes a couple of minutes.
Container size is the biggest single factor, and the mistake runs both ways. Order too big and you have paid for space the job was never going to fill. Order too small and the box fills before the work is finished, which means a second haul — and two hauls cost more than the larger container would have. The gap between two adjacent sizes is much smaller than the gap between one haul and two.
That second failure is the more expensive one and it is the more common. It is also the easier to avoid, because it comes down to describing the scope accurately rather than estimating a volume. The size guide sets all five containers side by side with dimensions and what each one suits, which is the fastest way to place your job.
Volume is what people estimate. Weight is what surprises them. Every container has a limit on what it can safely carry as well as what it can hold, and dense material reaches that limit long before the box looks full — sometimes when it looks barely started.
This is why the 10-yard rock box exists. Concrete, dirt, rock, brick and asphalt go in it and in nothing else, because it is the only container rated to carry that material. It is also the shortest box we run, which strikes people as backwards until they think about it: a container built for weight does not need to be tall.
The practical consequence for a Tacoma job is that a mixed scope is often two orders rather than one. A demolition that produces framing and a slab is a large container plus a rock box, and knowing that at booking is what keeps it from becoming a surprise later. Our Tacoma concrete page goes into where a loaded rock box can sit, which on this city's hills is its own question.
Rental length is the driver people think of second and it is more manageable than the first two, because it is largely a scheduling question. A container that lands the morning the crew starts and goes when they finish is doing exactly what it should. One that sits for a week waiting on a trade is costing you time it did not need to.
The lever here is coordination rather than negotiation. Tell us when the work actually starts rather than when you would like the box to arrive, and say if the schedule is likely to move — tear-offs and exterior work shift with the weather, and it is easier to plan around that than to react to it. Same-day delivery is available when the schedule allows, and booking ahead is worth it in the busy stretch of the year.
A permit only matters if the container needs the road. On private property — a driveway, a lot, a fenced job site — none is involved, and that covers most work in Tacoma. Where a box has to sit on a public street, a planting strip or a sidewalk, the city administers that right-of-way and it wants arranging before delivery day. Older parts of the city with narrow frontages and no off-street room are where this comes up.
Access is the quiet one, and Tacoma asks more of a delivery than most cities we serve. Grade, streets that were narrow before anyone parked on them, overhead service lines, and alleys that are sometimes the answer and sometimes not. None of that changes a rate card; what it changes is whether the first attempt works, and a delivery that has to be rescheduled costs everybody a day. Our main Tacoma page covers those constraints in detail. The short version for pricing a job: describe the set spot when you book and the problem generally disappears.
Rather talk it through? Call the Pierce County office and you will get someone who knows the routes.
(253) 753-8183That comes from the booking tool, and there is a reason rather than an evasion behind it. A figure printed on a page is a guess about a job it has never seen — it does not know your material, your timeline, or whether the box is going on a driveway or a street. Any number general enough to publish is too general to rely on.
Booking takes a couple of minutes, prices your actual scope, and is live. If your job is unusual, or you are weighing two sizes and want somebody to call it, the phone is faster and you will get a person who knows the routes and what went out last week.
Worth saying plainly: on a small enough scope, renting anything is the wrong answer. If you have a trailer and a spare morning, you can take the material to the Tacoma transfer station yourself — that page covers the hours, how the fees are structured, and roughly where the line falls between a few runs and a container being the cheaper use of your day.
Working elsewhere in the area? The same five drivers apply across our Pierce County service area and up into King County, and Puyallup and Lakewood both have pages of their own. If the job is a re-roof, our roofing guide sizes a container by the roof type — the material decides more than the roof area does, which is exactly the weight question above in a different coat.
Because a list would be wrong for most of the jobs that read it. What a container costs depends on the size, what is going in it, how long it stays, and whether it needs the road — and a figure that ignores those is a number you cannot rely on. The booking tool prices your actual job in a couple of minutes, and it is live rather than whatever a page said last year.
Weight, more often than anything else. Volume is what people estimate and weight is what surprises them, because dense material reaches the limit of what a container can carry long before it looks full. Concrete, dirt, rock, brick and asphalt all behave that way, which is why they go in the rock box rather than a larger container.
Only if the job actually fits it. A box that fills before the work is done means a second haul, and two hauls cost more than the larger container would have. The reverse is also true — an oversized box on a small job is capacity you paid for and never used. Describe the scope when you book and we will tell you which way it goes.
Only if it sits on a public street, a planting strip or a sidewalk. On private property — a driveway, a lot, a fenced job site — no permit is involved. Where the road is the only option, the city administers that right-of-way and it wants arranging before delivery day rather than on it.
