How to Get Rid of a Mattress in Los Angeles

First, decide whether it is going anywhere but the recycler

Mattresses are the one household item with essentially no resale or donation market. Most charities in Los Angeles will not accept a used mattress at all, and the ones that do have condition standards strict enough that a normal ten-year-old queen will not clear them. Health rules around used bedding are the reason, and they are not negotiable.

So skip the two weeks of trying. The decision in front of you is narrower than it looks: take it somewhere yourself, get it on a scheduled pickup, or have it collected.

The drop-off route

California runs a statewide mattress recycling program. Programs like this are funded through the retail chain rather than at the gate, which is why a participating site will usually accept a residential mattress without charging you when you arrive. There are sites across Los Angeles County.

What changes constantly is which sites participate, their hours, how many mattresses they take per visit, and what condition they will refuse. Do not trust a number or an address from an article. Look up the program's current official page and your own city's bulky-item page before you drive anywhere.

The catch is transport. A queen mattress does not fit in a car. Folding it in half to force it into an SUV is how mattresses get permanently creased and, occasionally, how they come off a roof rack on the 101. If you do not have a truck or a van, this route costs you a rental before it costs you anything else.

Scheduled city pickup

The City of Los Angeles runs bulky-item collection, and so do Santa Monica, Culver City, West Hollywood, Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank and the rest of the independent cities scattered across the county. They are separate programs with separate rules. Whatever your neighbor in a different city told you is probably not your rule.

All of them work the same way structurally: you request a date, and on that date the mattress must be at the curb or the alley by a set hour. In the flats of Mar Vista or North Hollywood that is easy. On a Venice walk street with no vehicle access, on a canyon road with no shoulder, or at a hillside house in Highland Park with thirty steps down to the sidewalk, getting the mattress to the pickup point is the entire job. Check your own city's current page for the details.

What LA buildings do to a mattress move

A king mattress is roughly 76 inches wide. A 1920s courtyard building in Koreatown or Los Feliz has a stair that turns ninety degrees on a half-landing, and that turn is where kings stop. Dingbat apartments across Palms and Van Nuys have an exterior stair and no elevator. Spanish fourplexes in West Adams have a narrow interior stair with a handrail that eats four inches of width.

This is a two-person job in almost every LA apartment, and the second person matters more than the truck. A mattress that flexes in the middle cannot be steered by one set of hands around a landing, and a box spring, which does not flex at all, is worse.

Flat-price pickup, in numbers

A twin mattress is $82. A full or double is $94. A queen is $103. A king or Cal king is $114. A box spring of any size is $92. A mattress and box spring taken together as a set is $143.

Beds are rarely one piece. A queen with its box spring and a standard metal platform frame is $103 + $92 + $68 = $263. A kid's room emptied — a twin mattress, a box spring and a headboard — is $82 + $92 + $57 = $231. A full bedroom with a king mattress, its box spring, a king bed frame and a nightstand is $114 + $92 + $152 + $57 = $415.

The minimum for a visit is $75. Disposal is included. There is no stair charge and no fee for a long carry from a house that sits below the street.

Bedbug and moisture cases

If you are removing a mattress because of bedbugs, say so when you book. It changes how the item is bagged and handled and it protects everyone else in the building, which in a Los Angeles fourplex with shared walls is not a small thing. It does not change your price.

Moisture is the other LA-specific one. A mattress stored in a Venice or Playa del Rey garage under the marine layer picks up mildew that you will smell before you see it. A mattress left in a Valley garage through a Reseda August does the opposite — the foam dries out and starts crumbling. Neither is a candidate for a recycler with condition standards, and both are worth handling sooner rather than letting them sit another season.

Which one to pick

Own a truck, live on a flat street, clean and dry mattress, free weekday morning: drive it to a participating drop-off site and pay nothing at the gate. That is the cheapest honest answer and we will not pretend otherwise.

Third-floor walk-up, hillside stair run, bedbugs, mildew, a lease that ends Saturday, or a mattress that is one of several things going out at once: book the pickup. $103 for a queen carried down from any floor with disposal included buys back the whole afternoon.

Frequently asked questions