A storage unit is one of the cheaper cleanouts we do, and the reason is boring. Everything that makes a house expensive is missing. Drive-up unit, roll-up door, trailer parked ten feet away. No stairs, no hallway corner, no doorway the sofa does not fit through.
Most people calling about one are on somebody else's clock. The rent went up again, or auto-pay finally got cancelled, and the facility wants the unit empty and swept by a date. Below is what it costs, what the facility will and will not let you do, and what the timeline actually looks like.
Access is what makes a cleanout expensive, and a storage unit has none of it
Our price moves on three things: volume, weight, and access. Storage units zero out the third one. A basement adds a flight of stairs at $40. A third-floor walk-up adds $80. A drive-up unit adds nothing, because the trailer backs up to the door and every item travels in a straight line.
So a storage unit prices at the clean base rate. $90 for one or two items. $250 for a truck load. $425 for a half trailer. $650 for a full trailer. The exact same volume sitting in a finished basement carries the stair add-on on top of that.
Interior units are the exception, and it is worth being honest about it. A unit on the second floor of a climate-controlled building, or one at the end of a long corridor sharing a single freight elevator, is real carrying distance. That prices as an access add-on, usually the $40 tier, sometimes $80 when the elevator is slow and shared. Tell us the unit number and the floor when you text the photos and we will price it right the first time instead of on the day.
What a storage unit cleanout costs by unit size
Unit size is a decent proxy for volume, but only decent. A half-empty 10x10 and a packed 5x10 are the same job. Photos from the open door settle it in about a minute.
Weight is the part people underestimate, and it is almost always books. A unit of clothes, lamps, and empty luggage is light and comes in at 0.9x the base. Tools, filing cabinets, tile, gym equipment, and boxes of books are heavy at 1.2x. A unit with masonry or a gun safe in it is very heavy at 1.45x.
Past eight items we add $4 per item. On a storage unit that mostly bites when the contents are dozens of small separate pieces rather than one dense stack.
Quotes carry roughly plus or minus 15 percent until we see the job in person. Photos taken from inside an open unit will almost always land inside that band. A photo of a closed roll-up door tells me the color of the door.
| Unit size | Typical contents | Volume | Flat price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5x5 | Boxes, a chair, seasonal bins | 1–2 items to part of a truck load | $90 to $250 |
| 5x10, half full | A bedroom's worth of furniture and boxes | Truck load | $250 |
| 5x10 packed, or 10x10 half full | Furniture, appliances, stacked bins | Half trailer | $425 |
| 10x10 packed | A full apartment in storage | Full trailer | $650 |
| 10x20 packed floor to ceiling | A house that never got unpacked | More than one load | $650 plus a second trip |
The facility has rules, and one of them is about their dumpster
Almost every storage facility forbids putting unit contents in their dumpster. It is written into the contract, the cameras are pointed at it, and the fines are real. One unit will fill a dumpster the facility pays to empty on behalf of every other tenant, so assume the answer is no before you ask.
The rest of the rules are the ones that decide whether a cleanout goes smoothly or eats a whole morning.
- Gate hours. Plenty of gates close at 18:00 even when the office closed at 17:00. We work 07:00 to 19:00 Monday through Saturday, so tell us the gate hours before we schedule.
- Gate code and access list. Either you meet us there, or the office needs the crew on the list. Sorting that out the morning of is how people lose an hour.
- Elevator and cart rules, on interior units. Some buildings make you reserve the freight elevator in advance.
- Checkout. Empty, swept, padlock off, and the office told in writing. Leaving your own lock hanging on an empty unit is the single most common way people pay for one more month.
Sort the keepsakes before the crew shows up, not during
Do the personal sort ahead of time. Not for our sake — for yours. Standing in a unit deciding what matters while three people wait to load is the worst possible conditions for that decision, and it is the part people tell me they wish they had done differently.
Storage units hold the things that got packed in a hurry, which is why the valuable stuff is almost never in the box marked valuable. Photographs at the bottom of a bin. Documents in a dresser drawer. Military discharge papers, deeds, jewelry, and cash tucked into books. Open the drawers before the dresser goes on the trailer.
Anything still worth money should not be on the trailer at all. Furniture in good shape, working tools, bikes, and appliances all move fast on Marketplace or in a Buy Nothing group, and Goodwill, Savers, and Habitat ReStore take a lot of it. Whatever we do haul gets sorted the same way — usable goods donated locally, metal and electronics to licensed recyclers, and only true waste to the transfer station.
The hazardous list applies in a storage unit like anywhere else. We cannot take wet paint, asbestos, chemicals, medical waste, or propane tanks. Storage units are where the grill lives, and the grill usually still has a tank attached, so check that one specifically.
The honest math on a unit you stopped using
Run the numbers before you decide what is worth keeping. A 10x10 around here rents for a couple hundred dollars a month. Call it $200. Four years of that is $9,600, and a lot of people are past four years without ever having done the arithmetic.
Storage facilities are not in the business of reminding you what the unit costs per year. Auto-pay is designed to be quiet. Nobody mails a statement that says you have now spent more on rent than the contents would fetch at a yard sale.
Which is also why the hourly hauling model is wrong for this job specifically. A storage unit takes exactly as long as it takes to carry boxes to a truck, and an hourly meter turns that into somebody else's incentive. We charge $250 for a truck load whether the crew clears it in forty minutes or three hours. A slow afternoon costs us, not you.
So the comparison is straightforward. One flat charge between $250 and $650, once, against a monthly bill that does not stop until the lock comes off the door.
For facility managers and auction buyers
Abandoned and auction units are normal work for us. Facility managers call after a lien sale when the winning bidder pulled the good half and left the rest. Auction buyers call after they have sorted what they wanted and need the unit broom-clean inside the facility's deadline, which is usually 24 to 72 hours after the sale.
The pricing does not change for either. Volume, weight, access, same as any other job. There is no urgency premium. A truck load is $250 whether the deadline is Friday afternoon or next month.
Multiple units at one facility get priced as one job by total volume. Three small units that add up to a half trailer are $425, not three separate bookings and three separate trips.
We are locally owned, we work 16 towns around Billerica, and we hold 5.0 stars from 5 reviews. Payment comes after the job — cash, check, Venmo, Zelle, or card — with no deposit for standard residential work. If your facility has paperwork requirements for outside vendors, send them over with the photos and I will tell you straight what we can and cannot sign.
How fast this actually goes
On site, most storage units take the crew one to three hours. A 5x10 is often under an hour. A packed 10x20 that needs a second trailer trip is a half day.
Booking runs 24 to 48 hours from the quote, and same-day comes up often in Billerica and the towns around it. You pick a two-hour arrival window and we confirm a precise ETA the morning of.
A customer in Billerica texted us photos on a Saturday morning. She had a flat quote back within the hour, and the whole thing was gone by Tuesday. That is what most of these look like when the deadline is a week out rather than tomorrow.
If your facility deadline is inside 48 hours, put that in the first text. We will tell you straight whether we can hit it, and if we cannot, we will say so instead of booking you and hoping.
When you should not call us
If the unit is a 5x5 with ten boxes and you drive an SUV, do not book us. Two runs to the transfer station and you are done. Most towns around here charge in the $20 to $50 range per visit depending on weight, which beats our $90 comfortably.
A unit that is all metal is the same story. Steel shelving, tools, an old washer, a bed frame — a scrap collector takes that for nothing, because the metal pays him. There is no reason for it to cost you anything.
Contents worth real money get sold before they get hauled, assuming you have a couple of weeks. A unit full of decent furniture is worth a Marketplace weekend before it is worth a trailer.
And if it is hazardous, we cannot take it either. Wet paint, chemicals, propane tanks, asbestos, and medical waste need a specialist or your town's household hazardous waste day, not a junk crew pretending otherwise.
Get a flat price for the unit
Text photos taken from inside the open unit, plus your town and the facility name, to (978) 330-8980. Email works too, at quotes@statementjunkremoval.com. One flat price comes back within 24 hours, carrying roughly plus or minus 15 percent until we see it.
We run Monday through Saturday, 07:00 to 19:00, across 16 towns around Billerica. Closed Sunday. If two transfer-station runs beat the number, I will tell you that instead.