DSNY takes furniture at the curb for free. The catch is the day. It goes out on your building's regular collection night, there is no appointment to book, and there is no way to move that date up. If the sofa is already out of your apartment and your night is Thursday, the date is the whole problem. A curbside pickup is $99 for a sofa, and it goes today when you book by 2 PM where same-day is running, seven days a week.
When free is the right call
If your building has a super or a porter, this is a five-minute problem. Put the piece in the service area, tell the super it is going out, and it goes out on collection night. You do not need us for that.
Same answer if the piece is still decent and you have a few days. Photograph it, post it to your Buy Nothing group or a stooping account with the cross street, and put it down when someone is on the way. A clean dresser in Brooklyn is gone in under an hour.
Housing Works and Habitat NYC ReStore both take furniture, though what each one accepts and how far out it books varies by location and changes with what they have room for. Both screen by photo before they agree to come, and both put you on their own pickup calendar. That calendar is theirs, not yours, and a piece they turn down at the door is back in your apartment.
Where the free route stops
The free route is not a service you call. It is a night. Your furniture goes out with your building's regular collection, and DSNY does not run bulk appointments you can schedule around a move. Miss the set-out window and the piece waits for the next collection night. That can be one night. It can be five.
So the real question is not what disposal costs. It is where the sofa sits between now and then. In a house, that gap is what the garage is for. A New York apartment has no in-between. The sofa is in your living room, in a shared hallway where the neighbors have to walk around it, or on the sidewalk with your address attached to it for four days.
That is the piece nobody plans for. You do not get to pick the night. Someone else already picked it.
You pick the day. DSNY tells you the day. A sofa or loveseat is $99, and each additional piece is $28. A dresser, desk, dining table or bookshelf is $79, and each additional piece is $29. A queen mattress is $99, and each additional piece is $30. That is the whole price. Nothing is added when the hauler arrives and it cannot change after you book. Book by 2 PM and a local hauler comes today where same-day is running, seven days a week. Haulers start their routes between 8 and 10 in the morning, almost half of pickups are done by noon and three quarters by 2 PM. You get a text with the arrival window before they come, and photos once it is gone. Nobody comes inside and nobody goes up your stairs, so there is no service elevator to reserve and no certificate of insurance to file. The piece needs to be outside at street level when the hauler arrives.
See my price for a sofaBook the day first, then bring it down
Most people do this backwards. They wrestle the sofa down to the sidewalk, then start looking for someone to take it. Now there is a sofa on a public sidewalk and a clock running.
Do it the other way. Pick the day at checkout, get the text with the arrival window, and bring the piece down to meet it. The sofa spends an hour outside instead of four days. That order of operations is the entire reason to pay for this, and it costs nothing to get right.
Moving out this week works the same way. Book the pickup for the day you are already emptying the place. Most movers will not touch your old furniture, and the ones that will quote it as a separate job while the truck is idling. Pricing here is per piece, so a studio's worth of furniture costs what those pieces cost. You see the total before you pay and it does not move when the hauler gets there.
What if you cannot get it downstairs
We do not do stairs. Neither does DSNY. If the sofa is on the fourth floor of a walk-up and you cannot move it yourself, no curbside service solves that, ours included. Nobody enters your apartment.
A moving or labor crew will carry it down for an hourly rate. Once it is at street level, DSNY takes it on your collection night and we take it on the day you pick. Or you take the sofa apart. Most of them come apart into a frame, a base and cushions once you pull the legs and cut the fabric off the underside, and the pieces go down a stairwell one at a time.
If your building has a service elevator, reserve it before you touch anything. Plenty of buildings only run it on weekdays during business hours, and some want a certificate of insurance from anyone you hire.
What DSNY will not take on trash night
Anything with refrigerant needs its own DSNY appointment before it is collected. That covers refrigerators, freezers, window air conditioners and dehumidifiers. The refrigerant has to be recovered first, so the unit sits in your apartment until that appointment comes around. Book it at nyc.gov/311. This is the one part of the city's system that is genuinely a queue.
Screens are a state rule, not a city one. New York bans televisions, monitors and computers from household trash statewide. The city runs drop-off events on its own calendar, and some apartment buildings have an ecycleNYC bin in the basement, so ask your super before you carry a television anywhere.
Metal furniture goes out on your recycling night, not your trash night. A metal bed frame or a filing cabinet set out on the wrong night can sit through a full cycle.
Mattresses and box springs have to be sealed in a plastic bag before they touch the sidewalk. Bags run a few dollars at any hardware store. Full mattress rules here.
Set out the night before your collection day, not the morning of. Look up your building's day and current set-out window at nyc.gov/311 before you carry anything down, because the hours have changed and old blog posts have not.
Is this an actual company
Fair question when you have never heard of us and we are asking for $99. We are a booking platform with local haulers in all 50 states, and we move more than 1,000 items a month. You get a text with the arrival window, and photos once the piece is gone.
"I was concerned this wasn't a legit company, but they absolutely are and I'm so glad I found them as I was quoted $1500 by another company." — Melissa Mader, Google
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