Dumpster Rental in Longmont, CO

Roll-off containers for Longmont homes and jobsites

Longmont is the fifth straddle city in this service area and the one where the split is most lopsided. It is a home rule city in Boulder and Weld counties, and it is mostly Boulder, with a portion extending east into Weld. That matters because most of what this site knows in detail is Weld and Larimer — those are the counties this business runs in daily and the counties whose published rules we read for this build. For a Longmont address on the Weld side, the county material on this site applies. For an address on the Boulder side, which is most of the city, it does not, and we are not going to summarize a county government we did not research. That is a limit, and telling you about it is more useful than papering over it.

Longmont is home rule, which under Article XX of the Colorado Constitution means it draws its powers from its own charter and can legislate in local matters beyond state statute. A city of Longmont’s size that is home rule is very likely to have its own rules about what may occupy a street, and possibly about containers on private property too. We could not verify any of that, and the ordinance quoted elsewhere on this site — Johnstown Municipal Code § 7-35 — is Johnstown’s and stops at Johnstown’s town line. So the honest sequence for a Longmont job is: ask the city what it requires, then call us and we will work to it. We would rather be the hauler who told you to check than the one who guessed and left you with a citation.

What we do know applies here as everywhere in Colorado. There is no statewide residential building code — every municipality and county adopts its own editions on its own timetable, so every “the code says” sentence needs a jurisdiction attached to it. Colorado is not authorized by EPA for the lead Renovation, Repair and Painting rule, so certification for pre-1978 housing work runs through EPA directly. Asbestos is an air quality matter under CDPHE Regulation 8, Part B, with a single-family trigger of 32 square feet or 50 linear feet and a ten working day notification, plus notification for any demolition regardless of size. And Colorado 811 requires at least two business days notice by statute before you excavate, not counting the day you call.

Longmont sits on St. Vrain Creek, which is one of the watercourses the National Weather Service named in its service assessment of the September 2013 Front Range floods — alongside the Big Thompson, the Little Thompson, Left Hand Creek, the Cache la Poudre, Boulder Creek and the South Platte. Across the region that event killed eight people, destroyed nearly two thousand homes and damaged twenty-eight thousand more. If you are cleaning out a basement or a lower level after water, the sequence matters as much as the container does, and the flood and storm debris guide lays it out.

The last thing worth saying plainly: Longmont is at the outer edge of our range. We schedule it rather than promise same-day, because a run down the corridor and back takes most of a working morning. If you need a container in Longmont, call (970) 427-0341 and give us a week rather than an afternoon, and we will book the set and the pull together so you are not left waiting on a truck at the end of the job.

What we know about working in Longmont

The one thing that is settled anywhere in Colorado, Longmont included: on private property — a driveway, a yard, a parking lot — no right-of-way permit is in play at all. Right-of-way permits regulate work in the public right-of-way. Your own driveway is not that. What can still apply on private ground is a city ordinance about containers, a covenant, a landlord’s consent and the fire code, and on the first of those in Longmont we have nothing verified to offer you. Ask the city.

The fire code we can answer, because it does not come from the city. The International Fire Code sets a five-foot separation between a container and combustible walls, openings or combustible roof eave lines. In the 2024 edition, § 304.3.5 applies it to dumpsters and containers of 1.5 cubic yards or more, and the adjacent § 304.3.4 applies the same five feet from 1.0 cubic yard, with an exception where the container itself is built of noncombustible or low heat release material. Every roll-off is far above both thresholds, so there is no threshold question in practice — it is five feet, and the eave line counts as well as the wall, which on a house with deep overhangs puts the box further out than people expect. We could not verify which edition Longmont’s fire authority enforces; the five feet is consistent across the editions we could read.

On the county fork: if your address is on the Weld side of the city, the Weld material on this site applies to you, and two pieces of it are worth knowing. First, Weld County adopts no fire code at all — its ordinance says the International Fire Code “shall apply only when adopted by a local fire district and shall not be enforced under this Building Code” — so on unincorporated Weld ground the fire protection district is the authority and district boundaries do not follow municipal boundaries. Second, Weld County Public Works handles right-of-way on (970) 400-4000, with language broad enough to cover occupation of a county right-of-way but no explicit mention of dumpsters, so a call is warranted rather than an assumption. Weld’s 2024 building code package takes effect 15 June 2026. If your address is on the Boulder side, none of that is your county, and we will not pretend to know what is.

Disposal in Colorado runs narrower than the rules people carry in from other states. There is no Colorado yard-waste landfill ban. The landfills serving this region list yard waste and tree branches among accepted materials, and A-1 Organics composts green material on 970-454-3492. What is banned outright is electronics, from every Colorado landfill since 1 July 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303. Waste tires are refused at the gate by the local operators, and state rules require registration to transport ten or more of them. Refrigerators, freezers and air conditioners are refused for their refrigerant; lead-acid batteries, liquids, propane cylinders and hot ashes are on the published refusal lists too. Beyond the statutory bans, what a Colorado landfill accepts is set facility by facility in its own approved operating plan, which is the real reason we ask what is going in the box before we quote.

Two operational notes that apply to any Longmont job we take. The first is weight. Basements are ordinary in this climate — both nearby counties publish a 30-inch frost line, and where you must dig thirty inches for frost anyway the marginal cost of a basement is low. Basement demolition and finish-out produce drywall, framing, carpet, tile and sometimes concrete, which is dense enough that the box fills by weight long before it fills by volume. The second is wind. Chinook downslope windstorms are a recurring Front Range hazard, with gusts recorded as high as 137 mph in the January 1982 event, and jurisdictions here publish basic wind speeds from 115 mph upward for a reason. An open-top container full of light material is a distribution system in a wind event. We tarp, and we ask you to keep it covered between loads. Watches and warnings for this corridor come from NWS Denver/Boulder, not the western Colorado office.

• RegionBoulder and Weld Counties
• Distance from our yardSouth-southwest of the yard, a scheduled run down the corridor rather than a quick set
• Main routesI-25 south and west on Colorado 66
• Typical deliverySame or next day

Getting a truck to you

Longmont is a scheduled run for us, not a spontaneous one. We come south on I-25 and cut west, and by the time the box is set and the truck is back on the frontage road most of the morning is gone. That shapes how we book it: firm date for the set, firm date for the pull, both agreed at the same time. The city itself has three different kinds of approach and the size we bring depends on which one you have. Downtown and the older grid: narrow drives, mature trees, low service drops, and overhead is what costs a delivery rather than width — a hoist needs better than twenty feet of clear air above the rails. The mid-century blocks: reasonable widths, but often a single-car drive with a garage tight to the house, which means the five-foot fire separation decides the placement before the driveway does. The newer eastern subdivisions: easy geometry, but new sod, shallow irrigation lines beside the drive and streets that have not taken a final asphalt lift. A 20-yard container wants roughly sixty feet of straight approach and about eleven feet of working width. We put plywood down under the wheels as a matter of course on a drive we do not know. Send a photo of the last hundred feet, tell us the surface and the grade, and call (970) 427-0341.

Routes we run: I-25 south and west on Colorado 66, the county road grid across from the interstate, US 287 for the western side of the city, Colorado 119 for the run in from the south, the frontage roads when the interstate work is slow.

Landmarks and neighborhoods we work around

Permits, streets and placement in Longmont

Start with the question that decides everything else: which government are you standing in. Around here that is harder than it sounds, because five of the municipalities we run to straddle a county line — Johnstown, Windsor, Berthoud, Erie and Longmont. One town government, two county governments underneath it. Longmont is a home rule city that is mostly in Boulder County, with a Weld County portion. So the likelier county here is Boulder, and a Longmont address is not a safe bet for Weld the way people up the corridor assume. Two addresses a mile apart can answer to two building departments, two road departments and two right-of-way desks, and the street address is the only thing that settles it. That is why we ask for one before we quote anything that touches a permit. It is not a hedge; in this market it is the single most useful thing anybody can tell you.

Inside the town limits the town is the government that matters. It runs the permit counter, it owns the streets — I-25 belongs to CDOT, and so does every US and state route through this market, whichever municipality they pass through — and any rule it has written about containers is its rule rather than the county’s. Underneath that sits a distinction Colorado takes seriously. A home rule municipality draws its powers from its own charter under Article XX of the Colorado Constitution and can legislate in local matters beyond what state statute prescribes; a statutory town works from state statute. Longmont is a home rule city. In practice the home rule places are the ones most likely to have written their own hauler licensing, their own container ordinances and their own right-of-way permits, which is exactly why the permits content on this site is written town by town rather than county-wide.

Step outside the town limits and the county becomes the road authority and the building department, and here that means naming which one before you dial. On the Boulder side that is Boulder County, whose road and right-of-way desks we have not researched and will not describe. On the Weld side it is Weld County Public Works on (970) 400-4000. Building code needs the same treatment, because Colorado has no statewide residential building code — every jurisdiction adopts separately and on its own timetable. Weld County’s 2024 package takes effect 15 June 2026 and Larimer County’s 1 January 2026. Give us the address and we will tell you which owner you are dealing with before we load a truck, because on a straddle town a town name is not enough to go on.

Now the part most of our competitors skip. Start with the line that is safe everywhere: on private property — a driveway, a yard, a parking lot — no right-of-way permit is in play at all. None, from the town or from either county. That covers the overwhelming majority of what we set in Longmont. What can still apply on private ground is a town ordinance about containers, a homeowners association covenant, a landlord’s consent and the fire code — and of those, the fire code is the one with a number in it.

It is the street case that needs a phone call, and in a straddle town it needs the right one. A few miles up the corridor, Johnstown has written its rule down: Johnstown Municipal Code § 7-35 provides that “no person shall place, store or maintain a dumpster on any public property unless expressly authorized in writing by the Town,” and placement in violation “is considered a nuisance.” That is Johnstown’s ordinance and it stops at Johnstown’s town line. It tells you nothing whatever about Longmont. We could not verify whether Longmont licenses haulers, requires a container or right-of-way permit, or has a dumpster ordinance of its own, and we are not going to assume Johnstown’s rules travel. We do not have a phone number for Longmont that we are willing to reprint — what a search returns is aggregator listings rather than the town’s own page — so go to the town clerk and ask there. “We could not find one” is not the same sentence as “there is none,” and we would rather hand you the right phone number than a confident guess. If the job is outside the town limits, the county is the desk instead: on the Boulder side that is Boulder County, whose road and right-of-way desks we have not researched and will not describe, and on the Weld side Weld County Public Works on (970) 400-4000. An honest caveat on each. Weld County’s right-of-way material covers occupation of and construction within county rights-of-way in broad language but does not name dumpsters or containers, so the fair reading is that a call is warranted rather than that a permit is certainly required; and Boulder County’s right-of-way rules we did not research, and we are not going to characterize a county we have not read. Whether or not permission is involved, call Colorado 811 before anything is dug, trenched, driven or pulled.

The driveway carries one rule of its own and it is a fire rule. There is no statewide fire code doing this job in Colorado, so the edition depends on who adopted it, and the one we can name is the 2024 International Fire Code as adopted by the Town of Johnstown. In that edition § 304.3.5 keeps dumpsters and containers of 1.5 cubic yards or more out of buildings and at least five feet from combustible walls, openings and combustible roof eave lines, with no exception; the adjacent § 304.3.4 applies the same five feet from 1.0 cubic yard, with an exception where the container itself is noncombustible. Both sections exist and neither one is “the” threshold, which is where most of the copy on the internet goes wrong — along with a “ten feet from the building” rule of thumb that is nobody’s code at all. It does not matter here anyway: every roll-off we run is many times over both figures, so the answer never changes. Five feet, always, and it is measured from the eave line, not just from the wall. On a Longmont lot with a deep eave and a narrow side yard that is a real measurement, and we take it before the rails come off the truck. And note where you take that question out here. Weld County enforces no fire code at all — its ordinance says the International Fire Code shall apply only when adopted by a local fire district and shall not be enforced under the county’s Building Code — so on unincorporated Weld ground the fire protection district is the authority, not the county, and district lines do not follow town lines. Front Range Fire Rescue takes placement questions for Johnstown and Milliken on 970-587-4464.

Last, the approach. To swing a box off the rails we want about 60 feet of straight, roughly 11 feet of working width and 20-plus feet of clear overhead. What fails that test in Longmont is rarely the highway; it is almost always the last hundred feet. This is flat, irrigated high plains rather than mountain country — our own ground out at Kelim sits at 4,938 feet — so a truck here runs a section-line grid and a four-lane interstate instead of switchbacks, and the things that go wrong are different ones. In the newer subdivisions it is fresh sod, a shallow irrigation line beside the drive and a street still on base course without its final asphalt lift. On acreage it is a quarter mile of gravel lane that carries a pickup all year and ruts badly under a loaded truck in a spring thaw. In the older grids it is a low service drop and a mature shade tree over the only flat spot — a gap that looks wide open at eye level can be closed at twenty feet. Walk it, look up, and tell us what you see.

Two more layers reach every job we run, and neither of them starts at a local counter. The first is what may lawfully go in the box. Solid waste in this state is CDPHE’s, under the solid waste regulations at 6 CCR 1007-2, and the structure is not the one people bring with them from the Southeast. A Colorado landfill is authorized by a Certificate of Designation issued by the county under C.R.S. § 30-20-102, with state review — a county instrument, and one that attaches to disposal facilities rather than to haulers. Beyond the statutory bans, what a landfill will take is set facility by facility in its own approved operating plan rather than by a statewide list, which is exactly why we ask what is going in the box before we quote a job instead of after.

The bans themselves are shorter than newcomers expect and they run the opposite way from the Southeast. Colorado has no yard-waste landfill ban. The landfills serving this area accept yard waste and brush, and A-1 Organics composts green material on 970-454-3492 if you would rather route it that way. What is banned outright is electronics, kept out of every Colorado landfill since 1 July 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303 — no televisions, monitors or computers in the container. Waste tires are refused at the gate by the local operators, and state rules require registration to transport ten or more, so tires never go in our boxes. Paint, solvents, fuel, automotive fluids, batteries, propane cylinders and pool chemicals stay out as well; those are a household hazardous waste run, not a container load.

Asbestos is the hard stop. We do not accept asbestos in our containers. In Colorado it is an air quality matter rather than a solid waste one, which surprises people: the CDPHE Air Pollution Control Division runs it under Regulation 8, Part B. In a single-family home the trigger is 32 square feet or 50 linear feet — far tighter than the federal commercial numbers — notification runs ten working days, the permit fee is published at $60 to $180, and a demolition requires notification regardless of size. The asbestos line is 720-507-5136. None of that is our filing to make, but all of it sits ahead of the container and we would rather book around it than deliver into a stop-work order.

The other date is 1978, which puts a job under the federal Renovation, Repair and Painting rule — and here Colorado is the opposite of most states people move from. Colorado is not authorized by EPA to run the RRP program, so a firm working on pre-1978 housing certifies with EPA directly rather than with a state agency. How often that bites depends on where you are standing: in Johnstown, only about one home in ten predates 1980 and the median year built is 2007, so RRP is concentrated in the old core rather than spread across the market. Then, before anything is dug, trenched, driven or pulled, call Colorado 811 on 811 or 800-922-1987. The statute is C.R.S. Title 9, Article 1.5, and the notice period is two business days, not counting the day of notice. Be aware that Colorado 811’s own homepage says three business days while the statute and the site’s interior pages say two — give yourself the longer of the two and you are safe either way. White-line the dig area first. Setting a box on a driveway does not trigger the call; your project does — footings, fence posts, a stump, a sewer lateral. Our permit and placement guide walks the whole sequence in order.

The ground under Longmont decides most of the rest, and almost every instinct carried in from a wetter market is wrong here. This is irrigated high plains: our own ground at Kelim sits at 4,938 feet, and precipitation across this market runs about 15.34 inches a year on the 1991–2020 normals at Greeley — roughly a third of what the Southeast gets. We are not going to tell you what the soil does underneath, because we did not establish it for this ground and it is not the sort of thing to guess at in print. What we will tell you is how the surface behaves under a truck, because that is what we deal with. A loaded 20 yard box is several tons carried on four small contact points. Dry, this ground takes it. Wet — after an irrigation set, a cloudburst or a spring thaw — it ruts, and a quarter mile of lane that carries a pickup all year will not carry us. So the driveway is the surface and the lawn is not, plywood or timber mats go under every wheel and under both rails on every placement, all year round, and after a wet stretch we would rather move a date than tear up two hundred feet of drive.

The houses match the climate rather than the map. Basements are ordinary here, which changes a cleanout more than it changes a price: stairs mean hand-carrying, and a smaller box parked close to the walkout beats a bigger one parked out of the way. Both counties publish a 30-inch frost line, so footings, water services and sewer laterals sit at least that deep, and a trench that would be shallow somewhere warmer is a real excavation here. Spoil is the densest material that comes off a residential site, which is why a footing repair or a sewer lateral is a 10 yard loaded low conversation rather than a 20 yard one. The season starts later than newcomers plan for as well: the average last spring frost is around 12 May. One adjacent question comes up often enough while a house is open to be worth answering, and we will answer it the way EPA does rather than by naming a number off a map that gave us two different readings: “Homes with elevated levels of radon have been found in all three zones. All homes should be tested, regardless of zone designation.”

The vintage of the housing is the part that surprises people who know this corridor only from the interstate, and it cuts the work in two. In Johnstown, whose mailing address our yard uses, the median year built is 2007 and 71.8 percent of the housing went up in 2000 or later; only about one home in ten predates 1980, concentrated in the old Parish Avenue and Main Street core from the sugar and dairy era, where pre-1978 lead paint and older asbestos are live questions. Everywhere else the jobs are new-build cleanup, first remodels and hail roofs. The growth behind that is real and it is fast: Johnstown went from 17,303 people at the 2020 census to 22,433 by the 2025 estimate, a 29.5 percent gain that put it tenth in the nation for growth among places of 20,000 or more in 2024–25, with 528 single-family permits in 2025. Weld County as a whole went from 328,981 to 378,426 over the same five years. Those are Census numbers, and they are why new-construction cleanup is a steady service line here rather than an afterthought.

Then the weather, and here there is one hazard that matters more than all the others put together. Hail is the anchor job. This corridor takes seven to nine hail days a year and is the most hail-prone stretch of the United States. Roof tear-off is what this market buys containers for, and it does not arrive evenly — it arrives in bursts, in the week after a storm, when every roofer in the corridor calls on the same morning. If you have just been hit, call early; that is the honest advice. Wind is the second one. Chinook downslope windstorms come off the mountains hard enough that Front Range gusts have been recorded as high as 137 mph, and the design wind speed in Weld County is 115 mph. An empty container is a sail and a loose tarp is a kite, so we weight what we cover and we would rather set a box against a windbreak than out in the open. Weld County has more recorded tornadoes than any other county in the United States. Watches and warnings for both counties come from NWS Denver/Boulder on 303-494-3210. An open container left uncovered through a heavy storm fills with water and grit, and that is weight you pay us to haul. Tarp it, or ask us for one.

Where all of it ends up is the local detail we like best, because the lawful routes out of a Longmont project close one at a time and none of them close because we say so. Neither county collects residential waste, so there is no county truck to compare us with. A municipal cart, where a town provides one, is a cart on a schedule and is not built for shingles, drywall, cabinets, tile, concrete or framing lumber. Electronics may not go to a Colorado landfill at all. Tires are refused at the gate. And beyond the statutory bans, each landfill’s own approved operating plan decides the rest. The one place the Southeast’s habits genuinely do not transfer is green waste: Colorado has no yard-waste landfill ban, so clean woody debris has more than one lawful route here — the landfills take it, and A-1 Organics composts it on 970-454-3492. Keep it in a load of its own and you keep that choice. Everything else rides to a permitted facility in one of our boxes, which is the argument for a container stated by somebody other than us.

What Longmont does about household collection — whether it runs a program, contracts one out, licenses haulers or leaves it to the market — we did not verify, and we are not going to describe it from memory. We do not have a phone number for Longmont that we are willing to reprint — what a search returns is aggregator listings rather than the town’s own page — so go to the town clerk and ask there. What we can tell you is that Johnstown, up the corridor, provides collection by contract under § 7-61(a), billed with the water bill under § 7-65(a) and not extended to multifamily buildings of three units or more or to commercial customers — which is Johnstown’s arrangement and nobody else’s. What is constant right across this market is the part that matters to us: no residential cart program anywhere here is built for construction and demolition debris. Shingles, drywall, cabinets, tile, concrete and framing lumber are ours to handle whichever side of a line the house sits on, and a cart is not a kitchen tear-out, a basement or a roof.

Underneath the town sits the county layer, and in a straddle town it is two layers rather than one. Weld County collects no residential waste anywhere in the county, and what Boulder County does on its side we did not research and will not describe. What exists instead is drop-off: Weld County runs two household hazardous waste facilities — 1311 North 17th Avenue in Greeley and 5500 Highway 52 in Dacono — free to Weld County residents, capped at 200 pounds a visit, on (970) 400-2217, plus a seasonal one-ton landfill voucher, one per Weld address. The Weld facilities are free to Weld residents only, so which side of the line the house sits on decides whether that route is open to you at all. Neither of those is a curbside service and neither of them takes job debris. That is the whole argument for a container out here, and it is not our argument — it is the governments’ own description of what they do and do not do. See the Colorado disposal and recycling rules for the rest of it.

Sizes we deliver to Longmont