Dumpster Rental in Hodgenville, KY

Roll-off containers for Hodgenville homes and jobsites

Hodgenville is the LaRue County seat, a town of 3,235 people south-east of Elizabethtown. The first thing to be exact about is the county, because getting it wrong is the most common error made about this town: Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park is here, in LaRue County — not in Hardin County. Lincoln was born at Sinking Spring Farm near Hodgenville, and the park’s two units, Sinking Spring and Knob Creek, are administered by the National Park Service. Elizabethtown’s genuine Lincoln connection is a different and quieter one, about Thomas Lincoln’s years there as a carpenter. Confusing the two is a Hardin County habit and we are not going to repeat it on a LaRue County page.

The county distinction is not trivia. It is the whole structure of the answer. In Kentucky, under KRS 224.43-315, each county must provide a universal collection program for all municipal solid waste generated within it — by county collection, by contract, by franchise, by staffed convenience centers, or by approved alternatives. And “all persons providing collection service, including collection for the purpose of recycling, shall register annually with the counties.” Under 401 KAR 49:080 that registration goes to the county in which the service is provided, by 1 February, each year. So the county line is not just a mapping convention: it is the line at which one program, one registration desk and one set of arrangements hands over to another.

Which means everything this site says about Hardin County’s arrangements — its franchise, its seven recycling drop-offs, its annual household hazardous waste event, its Planning and Development Commission on (270) 769-5479 — is about Hardin County. LaRue County has its own answers and they are LaRue County’s to give. We did not establish LaRue County’s collection arrangements, its convenience center provision, its planning desk or its solid waste contact, and we are not going to guess them. Nor did we establish the City of Hodgenville’s own ordinances — container rules, street rules, hauler rules, burning rules — or a published city phone number. Ask the city and the county. “We could not find one” is not “there is none.”

What does connect Hodgenville to Elizabethtown is the metropolitan area: the Elizabethtown, KY Metropolitan Statistical Area is two counties — Hardin and LaRue — with Elizabethtown and Fort Knox as its principal cities. That is a real, published relationship, and it is the honest reason we run out this way rather than a marketing one.

The work here is small-county-seat work: houses around the square that are older than the trucks, farm and outbuilding clearance on the roads out of town, estate clearances where a house has been in one family for decades, roof tear-offs on stock that is due, and the seasonal storm and brush jobs that come with open country.

What we know about working in Hodgenville

Three layers, and only two of them are ours to explain.

The city layer — not ours. Hodgenville is an incorporated city with its own government, and we did not verify its ordinances or a published phone number. This page therefore contains no Hodgenville rule. It is worth saying why we are so insistent: in this region a city’s power inside its own limits is real and separate. That principle was settled here in a 1979 Kentucky Court of Appeals decision brought by Elizabethtown, Radcliff and Vine Grove against the Hardin County Fiscal Court, holding that counties “lack unilateral authority” to franchise garbage collection inside city boundaries. Reading one city’s code across to another is exactly the mistake that decision was about.

The county layer — LaRue’s, not Hardin’s. If your address is in LaRue County, then LaRue County is where a collector registers annually and LaRue County is where the universal collection program sits. Hardin County’s seven 24-hour recycling drop-offs and its annual household hazardous waste and electronics events are Hardin County’s programs, published for Hardin County; we did not establish whether a LaRue address may use them, so ask before you drive. The right first call for that is your own county, and if you want the Hardin County side of the answer, Hardin County Solid Waste is on (270) 360-9207.

The Commonwealth layer — identical in all 120 counties. Kentucky has a mandatory statewide building code under KRS 198B.050: the 2018 Kentucky Building Code and the 2018 Kentucky Residential Code, both effective 3 December 2024. KRS 198B.060(8) then provides that a single-family dwelling is not required to be permitted or inspected “unless a local government has established a building inspection program.” Some Kentucky local governments have and some have not — Elizabethtown deliberately did, and wrote single-family dwellings expressly into it at § 150.01(C). Whether Hodgenville or LaRue County has, we could not establish, and it is the first question to ask before a demolition. On fire, the reversal that catches out-of-state contractors: there is no International Fire Code in Kentucky. 815 KAR 10:060 adopts NFPA 1 (2018), whose Chapter 19 covers combustible waste and refuse, and the same regulation says at § 2(1) that it applies to all buildings “except one (1) and two (2) family dwellings.”

Materials, which do not vary by county at all. In the box: framing, roofing, drywall, plaster, flooring, cabinetry, fixtures, siding, decking, brush and storm debris. Kentucky’s own definition at 401 KAR 47:005 is unusually broad and expressly includes uncontaminated vegetation from “land clearing and grubbing, utility line maintenance, and seasonal and storm related cleanup.” Out of the box, always: liquids, paint, oil, antifreeze, fuel, solvent, pressurized cylinders, batteries. Tires are the one disposal restriction we can state as Kentucky law — KRS 224.50-856 permits disposal only “by transfer to a permitted solid waste disposal facility”, and moving more than 50 brings the state’s waste tire transporter rules into play.

Old houses, and the two federal questions that go with them. Paid work disturbing painted surfaces in housing built before 1978 needs a firm certified by EPA in lead-safe work practices, because Kentucky is not one of the states that runs its own RRP program — that certification is federal. Lead abatement is the exception: Kentucky runs that itself, through its own Environmental Lead Program. On asbestos, the Energy and Environment Cabinet’s own page says removal and disposal from “single-family homes or apartments of four or less units is not regulated under Kentucky law”, which is a statement about notification and not about safety, federal rules, worker protection or what a facility will accept. Test before you demolish. Commercial, school and five-plus-unit buildings run under 401 KAR 58:025, notification at least 10 working days ahead, Division for Air Quality (502) 564-3999.

And digging. Footings, posts, fence lines, service trenches: Kentucky 811 first — dial 811 or use kentucky811.org, allow two full working days, the ticket lasts 21 calendar days, and hand-dig inside the 18-inch tolerance zone either side of the mark.

• CountyLaRue County
• Run from our yardSouth-east of Elizabethtown, out of Hardin County altogether and into LaRue
• Main routesUS 31E and the roads south-east out of Elizabethtown
• Typical deliverySame or next day

Getting a truck to you

Hodgenville is an out-of-county run for us, so we schedule the set and the pull together rather than promising same-day, and we would rather give you a time we can hold than one we have to move. In town, the older streets around the square carry the constraints you would expect from housing of that age: narrow drives, a tight turn in off the street, an older apron and a low service drop. A 20-yard container wants roughly sixty feet of straight approach, about eleven feet of working width and better than twenty feet of clear overhead so the hoist can stand the box up as it comes off the rails; a 15 is the practical answer where the lot will not give that. Out on the county roads the surface is the whole question, and a gravel lane that carries a pickup all year is not a test of what a loaded roll-off truck does coming back out after rain — the harm is the point load under the rails rather than the total weight, and we carry plywood and use it as a matter of course. Around fifty inches of rain falls here in a year and there is no dry season, so keep the load level with the rails and covered on a long job, because water is weight you paid to haul. Tell us the drive width, the surface, the grade and the overhead and we will tell you what fits before the truck leaves. (270) 900-6891.

Routes we run: US 31E and the roads south-east out of Elizabethtown, the county roads running in from the Hardin County line, the town square and the streets around it, the routes south toward Upton and the county’s southern end, the connectors east toward the Nelson County side.

Landmarks and neighborhoods we work around

Permits, streets and placement in Hodgenville

Start with the question that decides everything else: which government are you standing in. On this page the answer starts a level higher than it does anywhere else on the site, because you are not in Hardin County at all. Hodgenville is a home rule class city and it is the LaRue County seat, which means the county government that answers for you keeps its offices in your own town rather than in ours.

Crossing a Kentucky county line changes more at once than people expect. The universal collection duty under KRS 224.43-315 is carried county by county, so the body that owes it here is LaRue County, not Hardin. The franchise, contract or convenience-center arrangement that discharges it is LaRue County’s. The solid waste office, the code enforcement officer and the planning desk are LaRue County’s. Hardin County’s drop-offs, its annual household hazardous waste event and its annual electronics event are Hardin County’s programs, published for Hardin County addresses, and whether a LaRue County address may use them is a question for the county before you drive over with a load, not after. One layer does carry across from Hardin: LaRue County is inside the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet’s District 4 — Breckinridge, Grayson, Green, Hardin, Hart, LaRue, Marion, Meade, Nelson, Taylor and Washington — and inside the Lincoln Trail Area Development District. So the state road answer and the regional planning answer are the same ones we give at home, even though nothing municipal is.

And then the municipal layer, where we say least because we know least. Elizabethtown has written an unusual amount down, and we quote it by section elsewhere on this site because down there we actually can. § 92.030 makes a violation of the garbage subchapter “a public nuisance” outright. § 92.031(F) makes “failure to dispose of all garbage, debris and rubbish at least one time per week” a violation in itself — so letting material pile up in the yard is the offense, before anybody complains about it. § 92.031(B) requires anything “that can be blown away by the wind” to be in a covered container, and § 92.031(E) makes dumping on any premises in the city a violation “with or without the consent of the owner.” On the building side, § 150.16 publishes the fees as they stand in the code — a residential demolition permit at $50, a commercial one at $100, and no fee at all on construction work valued under $10,000, which is not the same thing as no permit. § 154.011 voids a permit if the work is “suspended or abandoned for a period of six months.” And § 154.135(F) is the one that names our own equipment: it requires that trash collection areas “shall not be visible from a street” and sets them “no closer than 20 feet of any street, public sidewalk or pedestrian walkway”, using the words “trash dumpsters” expressly. Read that last one carefully: it is a zoning design standard for permanent trash enclosures on commercial and multifamily sites, judged at development-plan stage. It is not a rule that your roll-off has to stand twenty feet off the street, and we will not let anyone read it that way. All of that is City of Elizabethtown code, in a different county, and none of it reaches Hodgenville. We publish it here for one reason: so that a reader who has found an Elizabethtown section number somewhere on the internet can see plainly that it is not theirs. The City of Hodgenville’s own ordinances — container rules, street and right-of-way rules, hauler rules, burning rules, fees — we did not establish, and this page states none of them. Assuming one Kentucky city’s rules match another’s is precisely the instinct this market punishes. We did not establish a published phone number for the City of Hodgenville that we are willing to reprint — what a search returns for a small Kentucky city is aggregator listings rather than the city’s own page, and a wrong number printed confidently is worse than no number at all — so take these questions to City Hall directly, at the courthouse or the city building.

Now the part most companies in this trade skip. The safe line first, and it covers nearly every job: on private property you control, no right-of-way permission arises at all — not the city’s and not the county’s. That is true in LaRue County exactly as it is true at home, because it is not a local rule; it is what private property means.

Beyond the property line there are three possible owners of the ground and we can only name one of them with confidence. Inside the city limits the street belongs to the City of Hodgenville, whose rules we did not establish. Outside them it belongs to LaRue County, whose rules we did not establish either. On a numbered state route it belongs to the Commonwealth, and that one we can point you at: the encroachment form is TC 99-1 under 603 KAR 5:120, administered by the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. A rough Kentucky test that holds up well: a road with a number is usually state, a road with only a name is usually local. We did not establish that a temporary container is a listed encroachment and we do not claim the Cabinet requires a permit for one — only that the Cabinet, not city hall, is the desk that answers for a state road. Put that question to Hodgenville City Hall before the truck is booked rather than after — and to them, not to us, because it is their street. And before any excavation, whichever county you are in, Kentucky 811 comes first.

One rule follows the container rather than the address, and Kentucky writes it in a way that catches out anybody who has worked in another state. The Commonwealth does not use the model fire code most of the country adopts. Its Standards of Safety at 815 KAR 10:060 adopt NFPA 1 (2018), and combustible waste and refuse is its Chapter 19 — the parent chapter, which is as far as we are prepared to take it in print. We did not verify a subsection, we did not verify a clearance measured in feet, and we are not going to publish either one off a forum post. What we will publish is the exemption, because it decides most of the jobs on this page: § 2(1) of that regulation applies it to all buildings “except one (1) and two (2) family dwellings.” A container on a driveway at a single-family house is outside its reach altogether. Against a commercial building, a school or a larger apartment block it is not, and then the only question that matters is who looks at it. Who the fire officials with jurisdiction are in Hodgenville we did not establish, and in a different county we would be guessing twice over. Ask locally before a container goes against a commercial wall; the state exemption for houses is the part that does not depend on the answer. For a picture of what a nameable fire authority looks like: Elizabethtown adopts both the national fire codes and the Kentucky Standards of Safety by reference at Chapter 93 of its code, and runs its own department — Chief Mark Malone, three stations on Ring Road and East Dixie Avenue, 74 personnel, ISO Class 2, with a Fire Prevention division that does home and business inspections on (270) 765-2121. That is one desk, in one city, and it is the only one on this site we can name.

Two questions follow the load rather than the address, and neither is settled at a city hall. The first is where a load can lawfully go. Kentucky permits disposal facilities in classes — contained, construction and demolition debris, inert, residual and special waste — and it issues a separate permit class for construction and demolition debris landfills. That is why “where does it go?” has a genuinely different answer for a kitchen remodel than for a roof tear-off, and why we ask what is going in the box while we are quoting it rather than finding out at the scale. Hardin County operates its own permitted contained landfill on Audubon Trace in Elizabethtown, and we name it here as public infrastructure and nothing more — its hours, gate rules and accepted materials we could not establish, so ask the county on (270) 360-9207 rather than driving over on spec. The one disposal figure we will ever publish is statutory rather than commercial: Kentucky charges a $1.75-per-ton environmental remediation fee under KRS 224.43-500, and it funds the Kentucky Pride Fund, which pays to clean up closed landfills and eliminate illegal open dumps. Every legally disposed ton pays into that. Every fly-tipped ton does not.

The second is what the box may carry, and the honest answer is that the material rules barely move across this whole service area while the government rules move constantly. What goes in is the dry, solid remainder of a building project — the stud, the sheet, the board, the shingle, the fixture, the fence and the storm-thrown limb. What stays out, always and everywhere: liquids of any kind, paint, oil, antifreeze, fuel, solvent, pressurized cylinders, batteries, and anything still wet. And one piece of ordinary sense that Elizabethtown happens to have written into law for its own addresses — § 92.031(A) gives you 96 consecutive hours for anything “subject to decay”, and only in a tightly covered container. Whether or not that section reaches you, the advice behind it does: bag the kitchen waste for your ordinary collection and keep the container for the debris, because a roll-off standing on a drive for a week is not a bin.

Then there are the City of Elizabethtown’s three free collection programs, which are the best argument for a container anybody has ever made and the City makes it without meaning to. What follows is a different county’s county seat describing its own arrangements, and we set it out so the contrast is visible rather than assumed. Spring Clean-Up 2026 runs 30 March through 1 May for junk and debris, with appliances collected 27 April to 1 May on a call-in basis and freon-containing units needing a removal tag first; the collection areas are drawn geographically, west and east of US 31-W and north and south of KY 1357 or KY 251. And the published refusal list reads: “No garbage, hazardous materials, liquids (paints, oil, antifreeze, etc.), construction debris, tires, or automobiles.” Brush collection takes only “debris resulting from trees and shrubs which have been pruned or trimmed”, under twelve inches in diameter and five feet in length, on a four-week rotating schedule across four areas that has been in place since 1 October 2024; it expressly “does not include collection of cut trees and shrubs or debris resulting from the clearing of land”, oversize material goes to the Public Works facility on Nicholas Street, and the sentence that ends the argument is the City’s own: “Licensed contractors must remove and dispose of debris from their own work professionally.” Leaf pick-up is a fall program, clear bags under 50 pounds, and the City asks you to “separate brush and debris from loose leaves piles.” Those dates and that rotation move, so confirm current dates with Elizabethtown Public Works, 301 Waterworks Drive, on (270) 737-7890 — Director Don Hill’s department — rather than trusting a page you read in another season.

What the box stands on settles more arguments here than what size it is, and the reason is under the whole county rather than on top of it. This is limestone country: the Kentucky Geological Survey puts it plainly that “about 55 percent of Kentucky is underlain by rocks that could develop karst terrain” and “25 percent of the state is known to have well-developed karst features” — and the eight-county Lincoln Trail region took $293,984 of FEMA money so that KGS could build it a karst hazard mitigation plan with LiDAR. Four things we will not do with any of that, and they matter more than the geology. We will not tell you a truck causes a sinkhole, because no agency says it and KGS attributes collapse to water and soil piping. We will not read a map and tell you your property is or is not at risk, because KGS says its own sinkhole data is “not recommended for predicting future subsidence.” We will not publish a percentage or a sinkhole count for this county, because there is not an honest one to publish. And we are not geologists, which is the shortest of the four and the most important. What we do is place a loaded container on the firmest, best-drained surface available, put plywood under the rails, and keep every liquid out of it — the Energy and Environment Cabinet describes karst as “sensitive to groundwater pollution” for a reason.

Water is the other half of that, and here it is a scheduling fact rather than a warning. There is no dry month anywhere in this part of Kentucky, but there is a wettest and a driest, and they are further apart than people assume: measured at Elizabethtown, May averages around 5.82 inches of rain and September around 3.14. May is also when renovation season starts, which is why the busiest weeks of our year are the wettest ones. September is the quiet secret of the calendar here — the driest month, still mild, and the best window in the year for outdoor demolition, land clearing and anything that wants the ground to stay firm under a loaded truck. If your job can move, move it there. And whenever it runs, cover the load: a container left open through a wet spell collects water, water is weight, and weight is what disposal is billed on.

Winter here is not a snow problem. This part of Kentucky averages only about five inches of snow in a year against roughly fifty inches of rain, and December to February lows sit around 23 to 27 degrees — cold enough to freeze what fell and thaw it again by afternoon. The risk that actually stops work in this part of Kentucky is ice. The January 2009 ice storm is the benchmark people still measure against. It hit central Kentucky broadly — the weather service describes the region rather than this county, and we are not going to invent a local ice figure we do not have. Ice debris is its own category: limb wood tangled with gutter, siding, fence and roofing, arriving all at once across a whole neighborhood, and none of it fits a brush program designed for pruned trimmings. Forecasts and warnings for every county on this site come from NWS Louisville — the Louisville forecast office, not the Paducah one, which is a mistake we see made about this county constantly.

The last piece is the housing, because it decides what comes out of it. Hardin County holds about 51,149 housing units across 623.40 square miles, and it reportedly borders more counties than any other in the Commonwealth — with a 2020 population of 110,702 and a 2025 estimate of 113,482. Elizabethtown itself covers 27.18 square miles and is estimated at 35,448, up close to 13 percent since 2020. About two in five homes in the county went up before 1980, and the single biggest decade is the 1970s, so a large share of the stock sits on the older side of the federal lead rule’s 1978 line. Translated into containers that means two different loads on two different streets: plaster, cast iron, layered shingle and pre-1978 paint on one, and first-remodel tidy-up on the other. The older one weighs considerably more, and it is the one we get called for. One footnote for anybody opening up a lower level: EPA’s position on radon does not turn on a map at all — “all homes should be tested, regardless of zone designation.” We publish a zone number for Hardin County and we do not publish one for a county we did not check.

Collection is the last of the four questions, and it is the one where the four tiers on this site part company completely. Hardin County’s franchise has nothing to do with a Hodgenville address at all. Every Kentucky county carries the universal collection duty separately under KRS 224.43-315, and it can discharge it by county collection, by contract, by franchise, by staffed convenience centers or by an approved alternative. Which of those your county chose, and what the city does inside its own limits, are two questions for two desks in your own town. What the county runs instead of a curbside service for the awkward material is drop-off and events. Hardin County runs seven recycling drop-offs, open around the clock, and it is worth knowing where they are before you load a trunk: Eastview, Elizabethtown, the Farmers Market, Glendale, Radcliff, Sonora and Vine Grove. They are narrow — four material streams and nothing else — and the county writes the limit down rather than leaving it to be discovered. The routes for paint, chemicals, batteries and electronics are events rather than places, and they come round once a year. Solid Waste Coordinator Stephanie Givens and the department are at 150 N Provident Way, Suite 223, on (270) 360-9207. None of that is a route for renovation debris, and none of it is open on the afternoon you finish a demolition.

Two things then travel with the load rather than with the address, and they are the two that decide what you actually pay for. The first is where it can go, which is a question of permit class rather than of distance. The second is what it weighs, because disposal is billed by weight and density beats volume every time — a container of household contents and a container of tile, mortar and broken concrete are the same box and not remotely the same job. That is why the conversation about contents comes before the quote rather than after it, and why the honest answer to “what size?” sometimes runs downward: on heavy material, take the smaller box twice. Roof tear-off is the standard example and it is not close — shingle reaches lawful payload while there is still room above the rails, so it never belongs in a 30 or a 40. Tell us the material and we will size it on the phone.

Sizes we deliver to Hodgenville