Last updated 24 September 2026
The lead says clearance. It doesn't say what's in the garage.
Leads Do Work sells a rubbish removal lead for £10 plus VAT, on top of an £11 weekly fee. Lead Pronto quotes from £15 a lead, Rubbish.com charges £295 a year for as many as it sends, and Zapo, the company that was Get Work, runs search ads for house clearers from £400 a month plus VAT. A householder's click on a rubbish or clearance search, bought from Google yourself, costs £3.00 to £6.49.
That lead price stays the same whether the job is one sofa or a full van, which is a 12-fold difference in what you'll earn. And the lead rarely tells you what's going in the van, which decides what you're allowed to do with it.
A real lead, word for word
"Need a bed frame, mattress, 5 chairs, 4 suitcases, 2 televisions, 1 monitor, some rubbish bags removing"
That's a sample waste clearance lead on MyBuilder's own sign-up page. Checkatrade tells homeowners to expect about £20 extra for each screen and £25 for the mattress. If those five chairs are padded, they fall under a disposal rule most clearance quotes never price in. What the rule says.
Where we stand
We don't sell waste removal leads. We help you get your own.
This guide is the honest version of what buying waste removal leads costs, and who else gets them. What we do instead is build rubbish removal firms a website that turns visits into calls, and run Google Ads in an account in your own name, so every lead that comes in is a customer who found you, and nobody else was sold it.
What the load is worth
One price per lead, whether it's a sofa or a full van load.
Checkatrade prices house clearances by how much of a van they fill, from £175 for a quarter load up to £595 for a full one of around a tonne. Its furniture disposal guide puts a single two-seater sofa at £50. Below is what a bought lead costs you for each job you win, if you win one in 3.
| Job | Typical UK price | Leads Do Work, £10 a lead | Zapo, about £40 a lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Take away one two-seater sofa | £50 | £30 a win, 60% of it | £120 a win, 240% of it |
| Quarter-van clearance, up to 250 kg | From £175 | £30 a win, 17% of it | £120 a win, 69% of it |
| Half-van clearance, up to 500 kg | From £325 | £30 a win, 9% of it | £120 a win, 37% of it |
| Three-quarter van, up to 750 kg | From £400 | £30 a win, 8% of it | £120 a win, 30% of it |
| Full-van clearance, up to 1,000 kg | From £595 | £30 a win, 5% of it | £120 a win, 20% of it |
Clearance prices are Checkatrade's "from" figures in its June 2026 house clearance guide; the sofa is from its furniture disposal guide, last updated May 2024. The win rate of one in 3 is what MyJobQuote's help centre says it expects of its trades. Neither lead price includes VAT, and the Zapo figure divides its cheapest plan by the leads it forecasts.
As a rough guide, winning a job should cost somewhere near 10 to 15 percent of its price. The £10 lead sits inside that from a half-van clearance up, runs a little over on a quarter van at 17%, and misses badly on a single item, where it takes 60% of the sofa. At Zapo's rate even a full van works out at 20%, and the sofa costs more to win than it pays.
If single items fill your day
Bought leads only work on single items if you stack several on one run. Ask for the postcode and a photo before you pay for anything, and price the sofa knowing it has to travel apart from the rest of the load.
If you do whole-house clearances
A full van at £595 carries a £10 lead easily, and even Zapo's comes to 20% of it. What costs you there is the extra items: Checkatrade tells homeowners to budget around £120 for a large fridge freezer, so ask about appliances before you quote.
Your numbers
Work out what a lead can cost before it eats the job.
Start from one of Checkatrade's load sizes or type in your own average job. Say how many quotes it takes to win one, then try a seller's price per lead against it.
WHAT CAN YOU PAY FOR A WASTE REMOVAL LEAD?
Pick a job, or type in what yours are worth
Starts on one in three, the figure MyJobQuote tells its own trades to expect. Put in yours.
You can pay up to about
£16
a lead, winning one in 3
- Healthy range, per won job
- £33 to £49
- Which per lead is
- £11 to £16
Put a seller's price in the last box and this will tell you what each won job would cost you.
The 10 to 15 percent band is a rule of thumb, not a measurement. Take your tipping costs off the job price first if you want the honest answer.
Who sells them
Eight sellers of waste removal leads, and how many others ring the same customer.
Each row is taken from the seller's own waste, clearance or pricing page. Leads Do Work is the only one that puts a fixed price on each waste lead.
| Seller | Price | Who else gets the lead | In their words |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leads Do Work | £10 + VAT a rubbish lead, £11 a week | 1 to 3 others, never over 5 | "customers must respond quickly" |
| Lead Pronto | From £15 a lead, a guide price | Not stated | "No contract and no notice period" |
| Rubbish.com | £295 a year inc VAT | Other carriers quoting | "Unlimited leads from your chosen area" |
| MyBuilder | A fee when the customer shortlists you | Whoever the customer picks | "Respond to as many leads as you like" |
| Bark | Credits at £1.80 + VAT each | Up to 5 professionals | "£1.80 per credit" |
| Leads Everyday | Not published | Nobody | "never shared with competitors" |
| Click Source | Not published | Calls come to your own phone | "your second month is completely free" |
| Get Work (now Zapo) | £400 to £1,600 + VAT a month | Nobody | "exclusive house clearance leads" |
Leads Do Work: a £10 lead with a fee behind it
Its Connect price list charges £10 plus VAT for a "Waste | Rubbish Removal" lead from a household and £13 for a skip hire one. The weekly fee comes to £572 plus VAT over a year, close to the price of a full-van clearance before you've bought a single lead. Its terms say "Customers compete with 1 to 3 tradesmen for the same work, with no more than 5 competing for any given job", and returns are "manually reviewed".
Its public skip hire feed is worth reading before you buy. Of the 10 latest leads on 24 September 2026, 5 were clearances of a garage, store room, bedroom or house rather than building or garden work, the jobs a man-and-van firm quotes for against the skip. One reads "Clearing garage and garden waste plus some furniture".
Rubbish.com: a year of leads, and a quote list you share
For £295 a year including VAT it sends "Unlimited leads from your chosen area", with "No commission, no payper-lead, ever". That's the cheapest route here if you win a few jobs from it. The catch is on the customer side of the same site: "Compare quotes from local licensed man-and-van teams and choose the one that works best for you." You're one of several prices, and it doesn't say how many.
Lead Pronto: a guide price and a quiet gap
It sells rubbish removal, house clearance and skip hire leads from Google, Meta and TikTok "From £15 per lead delivered", with a footnote that the real price "depends on your sector and the area you cover", and booked appointments from £130. There's no contract. The page never says whether a lead goes to you alone or to several firms, so that's the first thing to ask.
MyBuilder and Bark: several quotes by design
MyBuilder lets you respond to as many waste clearance leads as you like and charges a fee when a customer shortlists you, whether or not you get the job; more in is MyBuilder worth it. Bark sells credits at £1.80 each plus VAT, up to 5 professionals can answer, and it tells homeowners the average waste removal job costs £108, with a "Great Value" figure of £50. What that does to your price is in the shared-lead trap.
Managed ads: exclusive, and priced by the month
Zapo says it "delivers exclusive leads to house clearance companies, house clearers and waste disposal experts" from search ads, starting at £400 a month plus VAT, £200 of it ad budget, for 10 forecast leads. Leads Everyday promises waste clearance leads "never shared with competitors" from "Targeted Google Ads", though its own process says "We build targeted lists and craft compelling outreach." Click Source runs Google ads and Local Services Ads for you, and if no leads arrive in the first month, "your second month is completely free". Leads Everyday and Click Source publish no price.
Everything here about Leads Do Work's contract comes from its own published terms and conditions, last read on 24 September 2026. Terms get revised, so check yours against the current version before you act on anything.
Rather have waste removal leads that are yours alone?
That's what we do. We don't sell leads. We build the website and run the Google Ads that bring waste removal customers straight to you, in an ad account in your name that stays yours if you ever leave.
See pricingBuying the click yourself
Sellers pay 4 times more to find you than you'd pay to find the householder.
A waste firm searching "waste removal leads" costs the sellers bidding on it £18.22 a click, with the top of the page at £21.41. The householder typing "rubbish removal", the biggest search in the trade at 9,900 a month, costs £4.21. Across the searches below, clicks run from £3.00 for "mattress removal" to £6.49 for "house clearance services". The last column assumes 7.33% of clicks turn into a lead, WordStream's home improvement figure from American search campaigns, so it's an estimate rather than a UK measurement.
| Search | Searches a month | Per click | Per lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| house clearance services | 720 | £6.49 | £89 |
| waste removal services | 880 | £5.42 | £74 |
| builders waste removal | 320 | £5.11 | £70 |
| house clearance | 5,400 | £5.06 | £69 |
| rubbish removal services | 260 | £4.94 | £67 |
| house clearance near me | 5,400 | £4.85 | £66 |
| junk removal | 1,300 | £4.81 | £66 |
| rubbish clearance | 1,900 | £4.37 | £60 |
| waste removal | 4,400 | £4.29 | £59 |
| man with van rubbish removal | 210 | £4.28 | £58 |
| rubbish removal | 9,900 | £4.21 | £57 |
| rubbish removal near me | 5,400 | £3.95 | £54 |
| sofa removal | 2,900 | £3.94 | £54 |
| mattress removal | 1,900 | £3.00 | £41 |
Click prices are what UK advertisers were bidding on 24 September 2026, and many pay less than their bid.
At £41 to £89 a lead, your own ads cost several times Leads Do Work's £10 and roughly the same as Zapo's £40. On a sofa that's a loss either way. On a clearance, the difference is that the householder rang you and nobody else, and your ad can do some of the sorting first:
- Put your CB number in the ad
- Bid on clearances, not single items
- Ask for a photo of the load
- Ask what is upholstered
- The call comes to you alone
- The account stays in your name
With 5,400 searches a month, "house clearance" is the one to build around, because a clearance can carry the click and a sofa can't. A form with a photo upload tells you the size of the load and what's in it before you drive out. If a steady monthly budget is the plan, how much to spend on Google Ads helps you pick the figure.
Google Local Services Ads
"Junk removal services" is on Google's list of UK Local Services Ads categories. Google screens the business before it goes live, you pay for each call you answer, and there are no lead credits for UK advertisers. We've written up the sign-up checks and billing in a separate guide to Local Services Ads.
The sofa rule
The cheapest job in the van comes with the strictest rule.
Old upholstered seating often holds flame retardants the law treats as persistent organic pollutants, or POPs. The Environment Agency's guidance, last updated on 29 July 2026, covers sofas and armchairs, and also kitchen and dining chairs, garden furniture, footstools, bean bags and office chairs made to domestic fire standards. Mattresses, beds and curtains aren't domestic seating under it.
Keep it apart
It can ride in the same van as the rest of a clearance, but not mixed in or crushed with it, and it comes off separately. It mustn't go in a skip with other waste either.
Write it down right
The transfer note has to call it "domestic seating waste containing POPs", give the code 20 03 07 and list the chemicals, even where it's mixed with other waste.
Burn it, never bury it
It has to be incinerated. Landfill sites must refuse it, and if it gets mixed into a load, the whole load is treated as POPs waste.
The leads don't flag any of this. On Leads Do Work's skip hire feed, 3 of the 10 latest mentioned furniture, chairs or soft furnishings going in a skip, and MyBuilder's sample lead above lists five chairs. The guidance names a skip as one of the places it mustn't be mixed in, which gives a man-and-van firm a real reason to be the better quote.
So ask "is anything upholstered?" before you price a clearance, and quote any sofa or chair as its own line. At £50, a sofa won through a £10 lead has already spent £30 of its price before it reaches a site that can take it.
Before the van leaves
Your customer is told to check you. Make your number easy to find.
The government's duty of care code tells a householder hiring a skip or a house clearance firm to check it holds an up-to-date upper tier registration, and says a private business being exempt or lower tier is "very rare". If their rubbish is found dumped and they can't show they checked, the council can fine them, £200 by default and up to £600. The code suggests they note your registration number or photograph it. Put it on your website, your quotes and your van, and the check takes them seconds.
In England, registering as a carrier costs £191.02, and upper tier renews every 3 years at £130.25. Turning a sole trader business into a limited company counts as a new registration at the full fee, so budget for it when you incorporate. Gardeners carrying their own cuttings work under different rules, set out in our gardening leads guide.
The landlord clearance
A householder doesn't need a transfer note for their own rubbish. A landlord or letting agent clearing a property after tenants leave does, because the code says that isn't household waste. Get the note signed on the day and keep it 2 years, as you would for any load you tip.
The tip keeps a record
From 1 October 2026, permitted sites in England and Wales must log each load they take, carrier included, within 2 working days. The government's plan brings carriers onto the same service from October 2027, and from 2027 registration is due to become a permit with stricter rules.
The van that dumps it
Under section 33 of the Environmental Protection Act, whoever controls a van is treated as knowingly causing any waste dumped from it, instructions or not, with up to 5 years in prison on conviction in the Crown Court. Section 34B lets officers seize the van.
That last one matters most when you send a subcontractor or a new driver out with your name on the job. The Act gives a defence for taking all reasonable precautions and all due diligence, and the tipping receipts and transfer notes you keep for 2 years are part of how you'd prove it.
Through the year
Rubbish removal hardly has a season. Skip hire does.
UK searches for "rubbish removal near me" peaked in March and were lowest in January and February, only about 1.8 times apart. Most months sat on the same band, so a budget set for rubbish removal can run flat through the year with a push in spring.
UK searches for "rubbish removal near me", by month
September 2025 to August 2026. Google Ads keyword data, rounded bands.
Skip searches swing three times harder
"skip hire near me" reached 60,500 a month in March and April and dropped to 18,100 in December, about 3.3 times apart. Half the skip requests on Leads Do Work's feed were clearances, which is work a man-and-van firm quotes for too.
What a skip costs the customer
Checkatrade puts a mini skip at £75 to £175 a week, plus a council permit of around £15 to £60 if it sits on the road. You load it for them and there's no permit to apply for, so say so in the ad.
Where the lead came from
A seller's word isn't a check. Your own notes are.
The Information Commissioner's Office says a business buying marketing data has to run proportionate checks of its own, and can't lean on the seller's promises. A customer who agreed to hear from the seller hasn't agreed to your texts or emails; that consent has to name you. A fine against a home improvement firm that blamed its lead supplier is covered in our roofing leads guide.
Questions for any seller of rubbish removal leads:
- Where was this customer found?
- Is my business named in the consent?
- How many other carriers got it?
- Is there a photo of the load?
- Is it a house or a landlord clearance?
Keep the replies with the lead. If the ICO ever asks how you checked, a note of what the seller told you and when is worth more than anything on their website.
Which way to go
Buy leads for clearances. Never pay one to find a single sofa.
Buy per lead if
- The van has a gap today
- The lead is a clearance
- You can ring back in minutes
- Few others got the lead
Think twice if
- It is one item on its own
- Five firms are quoting too
- The weekly fee never stops
- Nobody asked what is in it
Run your own if
- You want whole clearances
- You want the call alone
- Your CB number sells you
- Your account, kept if you leave
Plenty of firms buy a handful of leads to fill a quiet afternoon and let repeat landlords and letting agents carry the rest. Moving a household's furniture to a new address is a different trade with its own sellers, covered in our removals leads guide, and every trade side by side is in our guide to trade leads.
Our sources
Where these figures come from.
Our interest, stated up front: TradeBlitz is paid to build trade websites and manage their Google Ads, which is the alternative to every seller in this guide. That's why each one is quoted from its own pages, and why the tables show where a bought lead beats your own ads on price.
We read the sellers' pages and price lists on 24 September 2026. The search and click figures are Google's own advertising data for the UK, taken on 24 September 2026. Job and skip prices come from Checkatrade's cost guides. The seating rules are the Environment Agency's, the registration and transfer note rules come from gov.uk and the duty of care code, digital tracking from gov.uk, and the fly-tipping rules from the Environmental Protection Act 1990. They're England's rules; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland keep their own registers.
Questions waste firms ask
Waste removal leads, answered.
- How much do waste removal leads cost in the UK?
- Leads Do Work charges £10 plus VAT for a rubbish removal lead and £13 for a skip hire one, with an £11 weekly fee on its Connect plan. Lead Pronto quotes from £15 a lead as a guide price, Rubbish.com charges £295 a year including VAT for unlimited leads, and Zapo's managed search ads run from £400 to £1,600 a month plus VAT. Bought direct from Google, a householder's click on a rubbish or clearance search costs £3.00 to £6.49.
- Is a single-item lead worth buying?
- Only just, if at all. Checkatrade puts taking away one two-seater sofa at £50. Win one lead in 3 at £10 each and that sofa has cost you £30 to find, 60% of the price, before you have paid to tip it. The same lead on a full-van clearance at £595 is 5%.
- Are waste removal leads shared?
- Mostly. Leads Do Work says 1 to 3 other firms compete for each job and never more than 5. Bark lets up to 5 professionals respond, MyBuilder lets you respond to as many leads as you like, and Rubbish.com tells customers to compare quotes from local carriers. Leads Everyday and Zapo say theirs are exclusive, and Lead Pronto's page doesn't say either way.
- What licence does a rubbish removal business need?
- In England, a business that carries other people's waste must register with the Environment Agency as a waste carrier. Registration costs £191.02, and an upper tier registration is renewed every 3 years for £130.25. Going from sole trader to limited company means a new registration at the full fee. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland register separately.
- Can I put a sofa in the van with the rest of a clearance?
- On the same van, yes, but not mixed in. Environment Agency guidance says upholstered domestic seating that may contain POPs must be kept apart from other waste during collection, separated when you unload, described on the transfer note as domestic seating waste containing POPs with code 20 03 07, and incinerated. Landfill sites must turn it away, and if it gets mixed in, the whole load has to be treated as POPs waste.
- Do I need a waste transfer note for a house clearance?
- The householder doesn't need one for their own household waste. You do when you hand the load on to a tip or transfer station, and you keep it 2 years. A clearance for a landlord or letting agent after tenants leave is different: the government's code says that isn't household waste, so the note is needed from the start.
- What does digital waste tracking change for a waste removal firm?
- From 1 October 2026, every permitted site in England and Wales must record each load it receives, including who carried it, within 2 working days. The government plans to make carriers use the same service from October 2027, and has said that from 2027 registration will move to a permit system with stricter rules. Transfer notes carry on alongside it for now.
- Is it legal to buy rubbish removal leads?
- Yes, as long as you check the source. The ICO says a business buying marketing data must carry out its own proportionate checks rather than take the seller's word for it, and consent to be texted or emailed has to name your business.
Keep reading
More straight answers for trades.
Full vans, booked by customers who rang you and nobody else.
We build your website and run Google Ads in an account in your own name, pointed at the clearances that fill a van rather than the single items that don't. See the price, then tell us where you work and what you want more of, and we'll set the ads up around it.