How We Get Our Numbers

Where real, published prices exist for a city, we go and get them — from the firm's own price list or the council's own website, never from another price-guide site. These figures differ from city to city because the underlying prices genuinely do.

• Skip hire

  Published price lists from 56 named local skip firms across 39 cities, plus road-permit fees checked with 163 councils — 147 of them publish a figure.

  Shown on skip hire city pages as "What local firms actually charge" and the permit card.

• Dropped kerbs

  Vehicle-crossover application fees checked with 340 highway authorities; 261 publish a fee, and the range runs from free to over £500.

  Shown on paving & driveway city pages and the dropped kerb cost guide.

• Council pest control

  20 councils' pest-control charges read from their own websites in August 2026. 14 publish fees; 6 no longer run a service at all — which we say plainly, because that is the answer.

  Shown on the pest control city pages for those councils.

• Window cleaning

  Published round prices from named local window cleaners in 8 cities.

  Shown on those window cleaner city pages.

• Removals corridors

  39 city-to-city routes costed with real road miles and a price band per house size.

  Shown on removals city and route pages.

Alongside prices, city pages carry local context from official datasets — listed buildings, housing stock, road collisions, driving-test pass rates, home sales, registered food businesses — sourced from bodies like the ONS, DfT, DVSA, the Food Standards Agency and Historic England.

• The source's own live page, every time. A council fee comes from that council's website; a firm's price from that firm's price list. We link the source next to the figure so you can check it yourself.
• Checked twice before publishing. Every harvested figure is independently re-checked against the live page before it appears on the site.
• A missing figure stays missing. If a council doesn't publish a fee, we say "not published — contact the council". We never fill a gap with a guess.
• Dated, not "just updated". Sourced tables carry the month we actually checked them. We don't re-stamp pages to look fresh.

Most jobs in most cities have no published local price anywhere. For those we show a modelled estimate: a national base range compiled from published cost guides, adjusted by a per-city multiplier built from ONS earnings data. These pages are labelled "modelled estimates" — they are a starting point for your budget, not a quote.

The full model, with a worked example, is on our About page. Where first-hand data exists for a city it always takes precedence over the model.