How to get rid of a mattress in Minneapolis

The short answer

Priced by size, flat, disposal included:

Take the set price if you have both pieces. A queen at $103 plus a box spring at $92 is $195; the set is $143. The minimum for a visit is $75, so a twin at $82 already clears it on its own.

Why a mattress is harder to get rid of than it should be

A mattress is the one household item that resists every free route at once. It is too big for a car, too soft to stack, too contaminated for most donation programs, and increasingly not accepted in regular collection.

Check your city's bulky-item request page for the current per-item charge and whether mattresses are on the accepted list — these rules change and vary across the metro, so Richfield and St. Louis Park will not necessarily match Minneapolis proper.

And then there is the Minneapolis-specific wrinkle: a mattress left in the alley in November is a mattress you are looking at until the thaw. Snow-covered, frozen to the pavement, plowed around. There is no gentle way to say it — it becomes the block's problem and eventually a complaint.

The stairs, which is the real reason people call

Minneapolis bedrooms are frequently not on the ground floor. In a story-and-a-half bungalow through Nokomis, Standish, Hiawatha or Bancroft, the main bedroom is usually up a narrow staircase into the half-story, sometimes with a low knee wall on both sides and a hard turn at the top.

A queen box spring is rigid. It does not bend around that turn, and plenty of people discover this only on the way down, having already stripped the bed. A mattress will flex; a box spring will not.

Same story in the walk-up fourplexes around Uptown, Lowry Hill East and Whittier — three floors, no elevator, and a stairwell landing sized for 1915.

The flat price covers all of that. $143 for the set is $143 from the half-story, the third floor, or the basement guest room. No stair charge.

Option 1: donation and resale

Be realistic here. The great majority of charities in the Twin Cities will not take a used mattress at all, and the ones that do have strict condition rules: no stains, no tears, no sagging, no pet damage, no bed bug history anywhere in the building.

Resale is similarly narrow. People will buy a nearly-new mattress from a guest room in Linden Hills. Nobody is buying the one from the college apartment in Marcy-Holmes.

If yours is genuinely clean and under a few years old, it is worth one listing and one phone call. Give it a week. If it does not move, it is not going to.

Option 2: recycling drop-off

Mattresses are recyclable — the steel, foam and fiber all have end markets — and there are operators around the metro that will take them, usually for a per-unit fee. Check the current fee and whether they take box springs too, because some take one and not the other.

The catch is the same as always: you still have to get it down the stairs, into a vehicle it does not fit in, and out to wherever the facility is. A queen on the roof of a sedan across the Crosstown in a crosswind is a genuinely bad idea and a ticket waiting to happen.

If you have a truck and the mattress is already at ground level, this is a good, cheap option. Otherwise you are paying for the hard part twice.

Option 3: flat-price pickup

You book, you get the price up front, two people come and carry it out. $103 for a queen, $143 for the set, $82 for a twin out of a Dinkytown apartment.

What is included: the carry from any floor, wrapping it so the stairwell survives, the load, the drive and the disposal. What is not included: nothing. There is no dump fee added after, no stair charge, no same-day surcharge and no fuel line.

Timing note for this city. The two weeks either side of the end of August, when the student-belt leases turn over around the U, are the busiest mattress period of the year in Minneapolis by a wide margin. Book a few days ahead if you are moving out of Como, Marcy-Holmes, Prospect Park or Cedar-Riverside in that window.

Common bedroom jobs, priced

Literal addition, no bundles:

• Queen set and the frame. $143 + $68 = $211.
• Whole guest bedroom in a Fulton house. Set $143 + frame $68 + dresser $126 + nightstand $57 = $394.
• Kid's room, bunk bed out. Bunk bed $123 + two twin mattresses at $82 each = $287.
• Student apartment near campus. Twin mattress $82 + desk $83 + office chair $61 = $226.
• Downsizing a Kenwood main bedroom. King mattress $114 + box spring $92 + large dresser $148 = $354.

If the room has a lot of small stuff too, a quarter truck at $241 or a half at $431 may come in lower. You get told which before booking.

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