Our industrial and C&D rate is a $200 base covering 500 kg, with everything over that billed at a flat $0.20 per kilogram. No brackets, no tiers, no step changes. That sounds almost too plain to write a post about — until you've seen what the tiered alternative does to a contractor's invoice.
How a tiered ladder actually behaves
A tiered overage structure charges different per-unit rates as you cross volume thresholds. On paper it looks like volume discounting. In practice, the thresholds are placed exactly where they extract the most. Cross a tier boundary by a single kilogram and you can be billed as though you'd hit the top of that tier. The structure quietly rewards the hauler for two things: under-quoting the base to win the contract, and over-billing the spillover to make the margin back.
The behaviour it creates
The worst part isn't even the money — it's what tiered billing does to how you operate. Contractors on tiered contracts start timing their cleanouts to dodge tier boundaries. They hold material that should move. They split loads in ways that make no operational sense, purely to stay under a billing line. The waste structure ends up dictating the work schedule, which is exactly backwards.
What a flat rate does instead
At a flat $0.20/kg, your invoice tracks linearly with the actual mass you moved. Ten kilograms over costs two dollars. Nine hundred over costs a hundred and eighty. There's no boundary to game because there's no boundary. You move material when the job needs it moved, and the bill is just arithmetic you can do in your head.
It's also verifiable. Every load is weighed on a certified truck scale, so the number on the invoice traces straight back to a weight ticket. You're never billed against an estimate or a rounded-up tier — you're billed against a recorded mass.
The trade-off we accept
A flat rate means we can't win a contract by low-balling a base rate we plan to claw back in overage. We have to quote the base honestly because that's most of what we'll collect. We think that's the right pressure to put on ourselves: it keeps our pricing legible, and it means a customer never discovers the real cost of the contract only after the loads start running heavy.
One number, applied to a weighed mass. It's not a clever pricing innovation. It's just the version that doesn't require you to watch us.
Questions about your waste program?
One local dispatcher, one written quote, no annual contract. We're happy to sanity-check your current setup.