Apartment cleanout cost in Indianapolis

The short answer

Two ways to price it, both published up front.

By volume, if the unit is full and mixed:

By item, if it is a short list. Sofa $126, queen mattress $103, dresser $126, desk $83, TV under 42 inches $62. Minimum visit $75.

Indianapolis apartments are not one building type

Pricing is the same everywhere, but the job is not, and it helps to know which kind you are clearing.

Converted doubles and old houses. Fountain Square, the Near Eastside, Herron-Morton, parts of Broad Ripple. Two or three units carved out of a 1900s house. Narrow stairs, a landing turn, sometimes an exterior rear stair that is steep and open to the weather. No elevator, obviously.

Garden-style complexes. Castleton, Lawrence, the west side, Greenwood, the 465 ring generally. Two or three stories, exterior stairwells, parking lots that are wide but far from the door. The carry is long and outdoors, which matters in February.

Downtown and Mass Ave buildings. Elevators, loading docks, and a building manager with a certificate-of-insurance requirement and a reserved freight window. Fine — just book the elevator and tell us the window.

Student-adjacent rentals. Around Butler along 46th and Sunset, and near the IU Indianapolis campus on the near west side. Turnover is compressed into a couple of August weeks and everybody wants the same Saturday.

What drives the number

• How much furniture stayed. A unit stripped to boxes is a quarter load. A unit with the sofa, the bed and the dining set still in it is a half to three-quarters.
• The closets. Everyone underestimates the hall closet and the coat closet. Bags of clothes at $35 each add up fast.
• The balcony or patio. Garden apartments in Castleton and on the south side almost always have a rusted grill and two plastic chairs out there. Charcoal grill $59, propane grill $71, patio chair $30 each.
• Whether there is a storage cage. Basement storage in an old converted double or a lockable cage in a garden complex usually holds more than the tenant remembers.

Two real cleanouts, added up

One-bedroom in a Fountain Square double, second floor, tenant took the clothes and left everything else: sofa $126 + queen mattress $103 + box spring $92 + bed frame $68 + coffee table $67 + TV 42–65 inch $68 = $524. In that case the half-load volume price of $431 is the better number, so that is what you would take.

Studio near the IU Indianapolis campus, mostly boxes: twin mattress $82 + desk $83 + office chair $61 + box of books $45 = $271. Close to the quarter-load price of $241, so again you take whichever is lower.

That is the whole point of publishing both ladders. You pick the cheaper of two numbers you can see before anyone shows up.

Access notes that actually matter in Indy

There is no stair fee, no walk-up fee and no long-carry fee, so none of this changes your price. It changes the timing, which matters if you are handing keys back at noon.

• Exterior stairs in winter. Garden complexes on the north and east sides have open stairwells that ice over. Crews take those slowly and salt where they can.
• Alley access. Converted doubles in the older neighborhoods often have the only usable truck access in a gravel alley behind the building. Tell us if the alley gate is padlocked.
• Freight elevators downtown. Book the window with the building before you book the pickup, and check whether they want a certificate of insurance on file first.
• Move-out season. Late July into August, complexes across the metro turn over at once. Elevators and dumpster pads get busy and so do we.

If you are the landlord, not the tenant

Tenant-left property is the common Indianapolis turnover job. Two practical points.

First, make sure you have satisfied whatever notice and storage obligations apply to abandoned property in Indiana before anything leaves the unit — that is a legal question for your attorney or property manager, not a junk-removal question, and getting it wrong is expensive.

Second, once you are clear to proceed, a full unit clear-out is one visit. Everything down to the carpet, including the mattress the tenant left and the twelve bags of debris in the second bedroom. Bags are priced flatly too: 10 bags $132, 15 bags $196, 20 bags $259.

Getting the deposit back

If you are the tenant, the arithmetic is usually simple. A cleanout that costs $241 to $431 is generally less than what a complex will charge back against a deposit for leaving furniture behind, and it is much less than what a downtown building will bill for a dumpster overfill.

Book it for the day before your final walkthrough, not the day of. That way if you find one more thing in the storage cage, there is still time.

Frequently asked questions