What a cleanout actually costs
Here is the question nobody in this business wants to answer in writing: what is this going to cost me?
You have called three companies. Two wouldn't give a number over the phone. One quoted a flat rate so high you assumed it was a mistake. Your mother's house has forty years in it, you live in Ohio, and you have eleven days before the closing.
So let's do the thing almost nobody does. Let's put real numbers on a page.
Our rate is $30 an hour, per person.
That's it. That's the rate. No trip charge, no fuel surcharge, no weekend premium, no "assessment fee" that gets credited toward a job you haven't agreed to yet.
Dump runs are included in the labor estimate. We show them separately so you can see what they cost in labor hours. One person makes the run while the rest of the crew keeps working, so a load costs one person-hour — $30 — not an hour times the whole crew. Two loads, two person-hours. There is no separate dump fee. We pay the landfill's tipping fee out of our end. Most companies pass that straight through to you, itemized, at whatever the scale house charged that day.
Donation runs are never a separate fee either. They do take real time, and that time is on the clock like everything else. It still almost always costs you less than dumping the same items.
If we finish early, you pay for the hours we worked, not the hours we estimated.
Why hourly matters more than people realize
A flat-rate quote has to price in the worst case, because the company eats the difference if the job runs long. That means you are paying for the garage that might have been terrible.
The Henderson job below — a full single-story house, garage included — comes to about $1,260** with us. The flat-rate quotes families show us on that same house usually run **$2,400 to $3,800. Same house, same work. The only difference is who absorbs the uncertainty.
With hourly, the clock stops when the work stops. You can see our full breakdown on our Pricing page .
Three real jobs, start to finish
These are composites of the kind of work we do every week in Henderson, Las Vegas and Boulder City. Your house is not these houses, but this is the shape of it.
A one-bedroom apartment, resident moving to assisted living
Two people, five hours. Sort the unit with the family, pack what's going to the new apartment, load donations, one dump run for what nobody can use.
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Labor: 2 people × 5 hours = 10 person-hours
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Of which dump run: 1 person-hour
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Total: 10 person-hours × $30 = **$300**
A 1,600 sq ft Henderson single-story with a full garage — this is your mother's house
Three people, two days, roughly seven working hours each day. Day one is the garage and the spare bedrooms. Day two is the kitchen, the closets, and the final sweep. Four donation runs, two loaded dump runs. This is a classic Estate Cleanout .
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Labor: 3 people × 14 hours = 42 person-hours
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Of which dump runs: 2 person-hours
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Total: 42 person-hours × $30 = **$1,260**
A post-discharge room reconfiguration, done in a day
Mom comes home Thursday with a walker. Two people, four hours. Bed moved downstairs, the dining room converted to a bedroom, furniture pulled back to widen the walking paths, rugs and cords cleared off the floor, bathroom and bedroom set up within reach. This is one of our Hospital & Rehab Returns services.
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Labor: 2 people × 4 hours = 8 person-hours
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Of which dump run: usually none; if one is needed, it comes out of the 8 hours
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Total: 8 person-hours × $30 = **$240**
Where most houses land
Most full-house cleanouts we do come in between $900 and $2,000. Single rooms and apartments are usually $250 to $500. If your house is packed, has stairs, or nobody has made decisions yet, expect the high end.
What actually moves the number
Six things, in roughly the order they matter.
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Volume, not square footage. A 3,000 sq ft house that's been kept up takes less time than a 1,200 sq ft house where nothing has left in twenty years. We're pricing what's in it, not the floor plan.
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Stairs. A second-floor bedroom or a basement roughly doubles the handling time for everything that comes out of it.
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Weight and material. Books, tile, paint, and dense furniture take longer to load, carry, and unload. Some materials also require special handling.
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How much gets donated. Donations are good for you and good for us, but staging and running them is time on the clock. It usually still beats dumping the same items.
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Decisions made in advance. The single biggest variable. If the family has already decided what goes, the crew moves. If every item needs a phone call to a sibling, the day stretches.
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Special handling. Appliances with refrigerant, a piano, a gun safe, a hot tub, hazardous materials. These get quoted separately because they have their own handling and disposal rules.
What insurance and public programs will not pay for
Families ask this constantly, and the answer is not what they hope.
Medicare does not cover this. Medicare pays for skilled care — nursing, therapy, medical equipment. It explicitly excludes what it calls custodial care and household services. Clearing a walking path so your father doesn't trip on the way to the bathroom is exactly the kind of thing that prevents an expensive readmission, and exactly the kind of thing Medicare won't pay a dollar toward.
Home health and hospice won't do it either. Not because they don't care — because their scope of practice doesn't include moving furniture or hauling boxes. A home health aide is not permitted to carry a dresser down a hallway.
Nevada's Medicaid waiver is a narrow exception, and probably not the one you're looking for. The state's Home and Community Based Services Waiver for the Frail Elderly does cover chore services for Nevadans 65 and older. But read what that actually means before you get your hopes up. "Chore services" there is trash removal from the yard, washing walls, shampooing carpets — not a house cleanout, not furniture moving. To qualify, you have to need a nursing-facility level of care, meaning that without the waiver you'd be admitted within thirty days. You have to be financially eligible: in 2026, $2,982 a month in income and $2,000 in countable assets for a single applicant. And the program is capped — when the slots fill, there's a waitlist.
If you are eleven days from a closing, this program is not going to get you there. It's worth knowing about for ongoing support at home. It is not a cleanout solution on a deadline.
Long-term care insurance sometimes reimburses. Read the policy. Some cover move management and home modification; most don't cover cleanouts. Ask before you assume.
For most families, this is a private-pay expense. Which is exactly why the number should be on a webpage instead of extracted over the phone.
How you get your number
We come out, walk the rooms with you, and put a written estimate in your hand before anything moves: how many people, how many hours, what it adds up to, and a ceiling it won't go past. Then we bill the hours we actually work. If the garage goes faster than we thought, you pay less than the estimate. That's the part a flat rate can't do for you.
It takes fifteen or twenty minutes, it's free, and there's no obligation and no pressure to decide that day. You can book your Free In-Home Evaluation directly on our site.
If you're out of state — and a lot of the families who call us are — we do the walk-through by video and email the estimate the same day.
Call (702) 439-2352 or book a free walk-through . Serving Henderson, Las Vegas and Boulder City.