What a storage unit cleanout costs in Philadelphia

The short answer

Storage units price by volume, because nobody itemizes a unit they have not opened in four years. Rough mapping, based on how full the unit actually is:

The full ladder: $241 quarter, $338 three-eighths, $431 half, $513 five-eighths, $587 three quarters, $661 seven-eighths, $732 full. The minimum is $75 per visit.

Those bands assume the unit is genuinely full floor to ceiling. Half-empty units come in lower, and a 10x10 packed solid with boxes can take more than one trip.

Why Philadelphians rent so much storage

Because the housing stock has nowhere to put anything. A row home in South Philly, Fishtown or Point Breeze is narrow and deep with no garage, no attic worth the name in the two-story stock, no loft hatch, no side yard and a basement that is already holding the heating, the laundry and the last owner's paint tins.

So people rent. The facilities cluster where the land is — along Columbus Boulevard and the Delaware waterfront, up Aramingo Avenue, out along Roosevelt Boulevard and the Northeast, and on the industrial edges of West and Southwest Philly.

And then the classic pattern: a unit rented for three months during a move becomes a unit rented for six years, holding a sofa nobody wants, boxes nobody has opened and a treadmill from a specific January.

What is actually in a Philadelphia storage unit

Consistent enough to list:

• The furniture that did not fit the new place. A sofa at $126, a loveseat at $119, a sectional at $141 for two pieces or $185 for three — often the exact piece that was too big for a row-home front room.
• A whole bed. Mattress and box spring set $143, bed frame $68, dresser $126. That is $143 + $68 + $126 = $337 for one bedroom's worth.
• Boxes. Box of books $45 each, bags of clothes $35 each, or by the bag — ten bags of debris $132, twenty $259, thirty $385.
• The gym phase. Treadmill $115, elliptical $97, weight bench $69, weight set $93.
• Seasonal and hobby. Artificial Christmas tree $37, bicycles $37 each, patio table $89 and chairs at $30.
• An inherited house's overflow. China hutch $160, armoire $148 small or $197 large, boxes of books.

The thing to be honest about: if you have not opened it in two years, you are not going to. That is the whole reason this page exists.

Facility access: sort this before booking

The unit is the easy part. The facility is where jobs go wrong.

• Gate hours. Access hours and office hours are different things, and some facilities restrict both. Confirm what applies on the day you want.
• Drive-up or interior? A drive-up unit is straightforward. An interior unit on an upper floor means a service lift, a corridor and a cart, which takes longer for the same volume. Tell us which you have.
• The lift and the loading bay. Some facilities have one of each for the whole building. On a busy Saturday on Columbus Boulevard that is a queue.
• Your gate code and your lock. Bring bolt cutters or the key. A surprising number of cleanouts stall at a padlock nobody has the key to.
• Authorisation. If you are clearing someone else's unit — a relative's, a tenant's, an estate's — the facility will want you on the account or documented as authorised. Sort that with the office first.
• Truck parking. Usually the easy part, refreshingly, since these facilities are built for vehicles. A pleasant change from a one-way street in Bella Vista.

The arithmetic of keeping it versus clearing it

Worth doing plainly, because most people have never sat down with it.

A storage unit is a recurring monthly cost with no end date. A cleanout is a single number. If a 10x10 is going to cost you somewhere between $431 and $587 to clear, work out how many months of rent that equals at your current rate — and then ask how many more months you were realistically going to pay.

For most people who have held a unit longer than about two years, the cleanout pays for itself inside a handful of months. The reason people do not do it is not the money; it is that opening the door means making decisions about things they have avoided deciding about.

Pull the good things out first

Before the truck comes, do one pass with a torch and pull what matters: documents, photographs, anything with a name on it, tools, anything you genuinely intend to use. Once it is loaded it is gone.

For the rest, Philadelphia does move decent furniture. Solid wood pieces, tools and bicycles sell in Fishtown, East Passyunk and across West Philly. Charities take clean, sound furniture, though most collect from an accessible ground-floor point rather than an interior storage corridor. And if you are clearing in late August, a working desk or bookcase put out on a Powelton or Spruce Hill pavement during move-in week has a genuine chance of walking within the hour.

What will not move, in any season: particleboard flat-pack, sagging upholstery, mattresses, and anything that has sat in an unheated unit through a few Philadelphia winters and summers.

Booking it

Tell us the unit size, roughly how full it is floor to ceiling, whether it is drive-up or interior, the facility's access hours and whether you will be there to open it. That is enough to place it on the ladder within one rung.

The price does not change for the corridor, the lift or the cart. It is a volume job, and volume is what you are paying for.

Frequently asked questions