Mattress disposal laws in Chicago: what the rules actually turn on

The short answer

A queen mattress is $103 to have picked up and taken away. A twin is $82, a full is $94, a king or Cal King is $114. A mattress and its box spring go together as a set at $143. Those prices are flat, they are published before you book, and they include the carry-out and the disposal.

The legal part is separate, and it is the part people get wrong. There is no single mattress law covering the Chicago area. What you may leave in the alley behind your three-flat is set by the municipality you actually live in. Chicago, Evanston, Oak Park, Berwyn, Cicero and Skokie each publish their own bulky-item rules, and they are not the same document. Before you drag anything down the back stairs, open your own municipality's current bulky-item page and read what it says today.

Why there is no one rule for the whole metro

People talk about Chicago rules as if the city limits were the boundary of the problem. For a mattress they are not. A tenant in Rogers Park, a condo owner in Evanston six blocks north, and a bungalow owner in Berwyn are under three different sets of instructions, and all three of them are going to ask their landlord or their neighbor instead of the municipality that actually decides.

There is a second split inside the city that matters even more. In much of the metro, whether your municipality collects from your building at all depends on how many units the building has. Small two-flats and three-flats are often on municipal service. Larger buildings contract a private scavenger company, and the mattress is that company's problem, not the city's. So the first question is not what the rule says. It is who is even collecting behind your building.

If you rent, your building manager knows which of those two you are. Ask before you plan around a collection day that does not exist for your address.

What the rules generally turn on

Across the metro, bulky-item instructions for mattresses tend to be built from the same handful of questions. Yours will answer some version of each:

• Who collects your building. Municipal service or a private scavenger contract, decided by building size.
• Where it goes out. Most Chicago blocks are served from the alley, not the curb. Municipalities with front-street collection say so explicitly.
• Whether it has to be wrapped or bagged. Many programs in the region require a mattress to be sealed in plastic before it is set out, for the crew's sake as much as yours.
• When it can go out. Programs that accept mattresses usually have a window tied to your collection day, and something set out five days early is just an abandoned mattress in the meantime.
• Whether you have to request it first. Some programs take bulky items on the regular route. Others want a request logged before the truck comes.

We are deliberately not printing a fee, a program name or a schedule here. Those change, they differ by suburb, and a wrong one costs you a wasted Saturday. Your municipality's current page is the only source worth trusting on it.

The alley is not a disposal plan

Chicago is an alley city. Almost every residential block has one, and that alley is where the carts live, where the garages open, and where furniture quietly appears. It is also where a mattress goes to sit for three weeks.

Two things happen to a mattress left against a garage door in Chicago. First, the weather gets it. Wind off the lake flattens it across the alley, then it rains, then in November it freezes into the gravel and nobody can move it until March. Second, the responsibility lands on the building. Municipalities across the region treat an abandoned bulky item as the property owner's problem, which means the notice goes to whoever owns the two-flat, not to the tenant on the second floor who put it there. If you rent, that is a conversation with your landlord you do not want to have.

There is also the reason mattresses get their own paragraph in every program in the country: bed bugs. A used mattress sitting open in a shared alley behind six buildings is exactly the transfer mechanism that wrapping requirements exist to stop. If you are setting one out at all, seal it.

What mattress removal actually costs

These are flat prices. They are the same whether the mattress is on the third floor of a Logan Square graystone or in a Lakeview high-rise, and they include the carry-out and the disposal.

The minimum for a visit is $75. A headboard on its own is $57, which sits under that minimum, so a single headboard is a $75 job. That is the one case where it is worth finding a second thing to send out with it.

A full bedroom cleared in one stop: a queen mattress and box spring set at $143 plus a solid queen bed frame at $126 comes to $143 + $126 = $269.

Getting it out of a three-flat

The rule question is the easy half. The hard half is the staircase.

A Chicago three-flat has a rear wooden porch and a back staircase, and that staircase is where a queen mattress goes to get stuck. The runs are steep, the landings are short, and the top-floor turn usually gives you about the width of the mattress and nothing else. Add a storm door that opens outward at the bottom and you have the standard Chicago mattress problem.

Basements are the other one. Real Chicago basements, the kind under a bungalow in Portage Park or a two-flat in Avondale, have narrow stairs with a turn at the bottom, and a mattress that went down there flat ten years ago has to come up on edge past a low header. None of that changes the price. There is no stair charge, no walk-up fee and no extra for the third floor. You are quoted for the mattress, not for the building.

High-rises downtown and in Lakeview

If you are in a tower in Streeterville, River North, the South Loop, the Gold Coast or along the lake in Lakeview, your building has its own paperwork layer on top of whatever the municipality says.

Most of these buildings want a certificate of insurance naming the association and the management company before a hauler is allowed past the dock, and they want the freight elevator reserved for a specific window. Those windows tend to be weekday business hours and they fill up, which is why booking the elevator is usually the slower half of the job. Get the reservation first, then book the pickup into it, and send the building your management contact so the certificate can be issued to the right entity. The mattress price does not change for any of this.

Doing it in one pass

The efficient version is simple. Decide whether your municipality will take it at all, and on what terms. If it will and you are willing to wrap it, schedule it and keep it inside until the window opens. If it will not, if you are in a larger building on a private contract, or if the honest answer is that nobody in the house wants to carry a queen down a wet back staircase in February, book a pickup and put it on the calendar.

Either way, bundle. If the mattress is going, the box spring and the frame are almost always going with it, and the other bedroom probably has something too. Two twin mattresses out of a kids' room is $82 + $82 = $164 in one stop. Clearing a guest room of a queen set at $143, a nightstand at $57 and a dresser at $126 comes to $143 + $57 + $126 = $326. One visit, one price, and the alley stays clear.

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