The 2026 permit prices
Glasgow's garden waste permit is £50 regardless of when in the year you buy it, and applications for the fourth year of the scheme, running from 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2027, are open now. Edinburgh's costs £45 for the service year from 3 November 2026 to 31 October 2027, paid by direct debit or as a one-off, and the permit sticker has to be visible on the bin or it is not emptied.
South Lanarkshire charges £46.49 for 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2027. Stirling raised its permit by £8 to £60 and now requires one for every household. Renfrewshire is £57, West Lothian £55.65, East Renfrewshire £53.50, and East Lothian £40 with a new online-only application. Highland and West Dunbartonshire held their prices this year.
Four councils still collect garden waste without a charge: Fife, North Ayrshire, Orkney and Shetland. Everywhere else, the brown bin is a subscription.
- Glasgow: £50, 1 Oct 2026 to 30 Sep 2027
- Edinburgh: £45, 3 Nov 2026 to 31 Oct 2027
- South Lanarkshire: £46.49, 1 Apr 2026 to 31 Mar 2027
- Stirling £60 · Renfrewshire £57 · West Lothian £55.65
- East Renfrewshire £53.50 · East Lothian £40
- Free: Fife, North Ayrshire, Orkney, Shetland
The rules that come with the permit
A permit is per bin, not per household. A large garden with two brown bins needs two stickers. Most councils collect fortnightly during the growing season and some suspend collections over winter, which is worth checking before you pay for a year that includes December.
What goes in is grass, hedge trimmings, leaves, weeds, small prunings and cut flowers. What does not is soil, turf, rubble, stones, plant pots, treated timber, fence panels and anything from a shed clearance. Our guide to how to dispose of garden waste in Glasgow goes through the alternatives.
A bin with the wrong things in it is left unemptied, and a bin without a valid sticker is left unemptied. In the permit councils the free options are home composting or the recycling centre, where most sites accept garden waste in a car without a booking.
Garden gone past the brown bin?
Green waste, turf, soil and the shed's contents in one visit. The green fraction is composted.
Why councils charge and why it keeps rising
Garden waste collection is not a statutory duty, so it is one of the first services a council can charge for when budgets tighten. Since 2013 the number of Scottish councils charging has gone from a handful to nearly all of them, and the trend in 2026 is the same as every recent year: up.
The disposal side is cheap, because garden waste is composted rather than landfilled, but the collection round is not. A brown bin lorry, a crew and a route cost the same whether the bins are full or half empty in March.
The landfill ban makes garden waste one of the streams that must be kept out of the ground, which means councils have every reason to keep the service running and every reason to make it pay for itself.
When a permit is the wrong tool
A permit is for maintenance: the fortnightly output of a garden that is being kept up. It is useless for a garden that has been let go for three years, a hedge that has come out, a lawn that has been dug up, or a shed that has come down. That volume does not fit in a brown bin over any number of fortnights.
For that we clear the whole thing in one visit. Our garden rubbish clearance service takes green waste, turf, soil, stones, timber and the contents of the shed together, loads it for you, and sends the green fraction for composting. Trees and large shrubs are covered by small tree removal, and anything with a fence in it by fence removal.
A quarter load is £160 + VAT and a full load £550 + VAT, with heavy soil and rubble priced separately by the tonne. The Glasgow figures with worked examples are in how much does garden clearance cost?.
