Before anything else, work out whether your address is in the city or in the unincorporated county, because the two run separate programmes and give you different amounts of free. A city address gets two junk pickups a year. A county address gets one. Everything below is sorted that way: what you have already paid for, where it runs out, and what I do after that.
City of Sacramento street signs are green and county signs are white — the city offers that as a rough residency check at the gate on its free disposal day, and it is a useful first indicator. It is not the final word, so settle it with a utility bill before you book anything. A city address books through Sac311: the app, sac311.org, or 311 and (916) 264-5011. A county address is on the county's residential service and books through the county instead. Getting this wrong wastes a phone call, not a day.
City residential customers get two household junk appointments per calendar year at no extra charge. Each covers up to five cubic yards — four feet by four by nine, roughly a pickup bed — and the city can charge for anything over that. Appointments run February to October only; booking stops in mid to late October because the crews move onto leaf season. One rule is enforced harder than the rest: do not set the pile out more than 24 hours before your appointment. Earlier than that is treated as illegal dumping, and fines do get issued.
They do not come out of your two junk appointments and they are not collected on the same visit. The city runs a second programme for them: two appointments a calendar year, each taking up to two major appliances and up to four e-waste items, with a ten pound minimum for the pickup. The cancellation rule catches people — cancel or reschedule later than 5pm two business days ahead and the slot is burned anyway. Two appliances is the number to notice. A washer and a dryer fill an appointment on their own, and the fridge then waits for next time.
Most of what leaves a house in one load: furniture, mattresses and box springs, fridges, washers and water heaters, televisions and computers, the contents of a garage or a spare room, brush and prunings, remodel debris, exercise equipment, scrap metal. The part that matters is that none of it needs to be at the kerb when I arrive — second floor, back garage, apartment with a lift, all ordinary. Hazardous material is the exception and it has its own counters, further down this page.
A trip is priced on the space it fills, by the cubic yard, with a $165 minimum. The comparison worth making is against doing it yourself: Kiefer charges $35 simply to bring a pickup truck through the gate on a non-weighed load, and $61.35 a ton once you are over the scales with a $45 minimum — before fuel, an hour each way and the lifting. Under about a truck load, self-hauling is cheaper and I will tell you so. Over it, the gap closes quickly. Text a photo and an address and a number comes back fast.
Once a year the city opens the Sacramento Recycling and Transfer Station at 8491 Fruitridge Road, entrance on 84th Street, and takes almost everything for nothing between 8am and 11am. The 2026 event ran on 6 June and the next date is announced in spring, so it is worth putting a note in the diary now. City residents including apartment dwellers get in free on a utility bill or photo ID; everyone else pays a flat $77. You unload your own vehicle and it has to be a car, truck, van or SUV — trailers, U-Hauls and commercial trucks are turned away. Four mattresses and four tyres per vehicle, tyres off the rims. Fridges and air conditioners are refused over the freon, along with treated wood and anything off a building site.
Free for residents: 15 gallons of liquid or 125 pounds of solids per visit, one visit a month, nothing in a container larger than five gallons. Two sites take the full range — acids, gasoline and other flammables, household cleaners, pesticides, pool chemicals, solvents, paint and thinners, batteries, oil and antifreeze. Those are the Sacramento Recycling and Transfer Station, 8491 Fruitridge Road, (916) 737-4870, Tuesday to Saturday 8 to 5, and the North Area Recovery Station, 4450 Roseville Road in North Highlands, (916) 875-5555. Kiefer's ABOP yard at 12701 Kiefer Boulevard in Sloughhouse, same number, Tuesday to Saturday 8:30 to 4, is far narrower than people assume: antifreeze, batteries, oil, paint, aerosols, brake fluid and bulbs only. It refuses gasoline, solvents, thinners, acids, cleaners, pesticides and pool chemicals outright, so take those to Fruitridge or North Highlands.
County residential service currently includes one bulky waste appointment every twelve months — half what a city address gets, and the biggest practical difference between the two sides of the sign test. That may change. The Board of Supervisors has put a phased rate increase through a Proposition 218 process, and if it is adopted the allowance becomes two appointments in a rolling twelve months from 1 January 2027, with the sixty gallon cart moving to a proposed $42.88. If you want to object, the deadline is a trap worth knowing about: a written protest has to be received by the county by 7 December 2026, not merely postmarked by then, or handed in at the hearing on the 8th. Email does not count.
This catches out anyone who assumes garden clearance is the cheap job. At Kiefer, ordinary rubbish is $61.35 a ton and green waste, clean wood and stumps are $115.65 — close to double. Which is a strong argument for using the organics cart and the on-street pile collections instead. During leaf season, city customers on a public street with a kerb may put yard waste in the street: one pile per household, no bigger than four by four by nine, six feet clear of obstructions, out of the bike lane, nothing in plastic bags and no food waste. Fill the green cart first. You get at least seven on-street collections over the season, so the cart turns around faster than the piles do.
If the pile fits inside five cubic yards, it is between February and October, and you can wait for a date, the free city pickup does the job and costs you nothing. A load of clean broken concrete goes through Kiefer's gate free as clean inerts. Four mattresses in the back of a truck go to Fruitridge Road free, five to a vehicle. What I am actually for is the load that is bigger than the allowance, the deadline that will not move, the heavy thing at the top of the stairs, and the job that would otherwise eat a weekend.
Compiled 17 October 2026 from the City of Sacramento's 2026-27 Recycling and Solid Waste service guide and its household junk and free disposal day notices, Sacramento County's household hazardous waste drop-off brochure, the Kiefer Landfill fee schedule effective 1 January 2026, and the county's residential curbside rate pages. Fees, hours and accepted materials change. Call ahead before you load a vehicle, and tell me if anything here has gone out of date.
Send a photo and your Sacramento address. A firm total before anything is loaded, and the soonest date I have.
