WM: reviews, rating and service info

WM reviews on the BBB and Trustpilot are mostly about missed pickups, rising bills and trouble cancelling. WM is your collector only under your city’s franchise or contract, or your own subscription, so check your city or county page before you judge the crew on your street.

WM (Waste Management) calls itself North America’s largest waste solutions provider, serving the United States and Canada. It collects at a home under a municipal franchise, a homeowners association or other agreement, or a subscription the household orders online. Holidays and delays vary by location. Check WM’s holiday and service delay pages with your address, and your city or county page to see who is assigned.

Where the company collects

WM’s own claim is service across the United States and Canada, and its service locations page is organized by state. WM sells residential subscriptions online with no annual contract. Its subscription terms say that customers covered by a municipal franchise, a homeowners association or an individual agreement may be under different terms, so the rules for a franchise city can differ from what WM’s national pages say.

How to tell if it is your hauler

WM’s sign-up, bulk pickup and delay tools all ask for your address, and the Pickup Schedule & ETA page asks you to verify an account. A match shows that WM offers service there, not that it is assigned to your street. Your city or county page says whether one hauler holds the franchise, the city collects itself, or residents choose.

Holiday schedules and service alerts

• Holidays: WM’s holiday page searches your area for holidays that affect service in the next 7 days and warns that holidays vary by location. Its commonly observed list for 2026 is New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Presidents Day, Good Friday, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. A holiday on that list does not always move your pickup.
• Delays: the Notifications page checks a service address for delays; My WM account holders can log in instead.

What they collect

WM’s subscription terms cover non-hazardous trash, organic waste and, where included, recyclables. Tires and hazardous, medical, radioactive or flammable materials are excluded. Single-stream recycling takes paper, mail, magazines and newspaper; flattened cardboard and paperboard; aluminum, tin and steel cans; glass, though not at all locations; and rigid plastics #1, #2 and #5. It must be clean, dry, loose and unbagged, with no foam, film, plastic bags or food-soiled paper. WM can charge $5 per overloaded cart and $5 per contaminated recycling cart, each time. Subscription carts go to the curb by 7 a.m. on collection day.

For WM customers, bulk pickup covers items such as mattresses, box springs, bed frames, furniture, cabinets and Christmas trees; pricing varies by area. Bulbs, batteries and electronics can go through At Your Door Special Collection where eligible (WMAtYourDoor.com or 800-449-7587) or mail-back kits.

Customer service

• The support page routes billing, container, schedule and holiday requests to an agent. WM’s terms send customers there to find the customer service for their area, or to ntoacs@wm.com.
• To cancel a subscription, the terms give 866-964-2729, an automated line; a cart removal charge may apply.
• Subscription bills come in advance and are due in 30 days. Card or digital wallet payments carry a $1.99 convenience fee; bank withdrawals do not.

What this is not

A WM truck on your street, or a WM notice from another city, does not make WM your hauler or set your holiday rule. Where the city collects its own trash, WM’s pages do not apply.

WM reviews and complaints

WM is not accredited by the BBB, and the BBB does not rate it: WM’s BBB profile shows “Not Rated” because of an extensive pattern of complaints and customer reviews. That profile, which covers WM’s headquarters and its corporate-owned locations, lists 2,474 complaints in the last three years, 746 of them closed in the last 12 months, and about one in three is filed as a billing issue. On Trustpilot, WM’s claimed profile averages 1.2 out of 5 from 1,642 reviews, and WM has replied to 96% of the negative ones.

The same problems come up again and again in those complaints and reviews:

• missed trash, recycling or yard waste pickups, reported several times before a truck comes back;
• bills that rise, with fuel or energy charges, late fees and a charge to take the cart away when service ends;
• cancelling: carts left on the property and bills that keep coming after the account is closed;
• customer service that is hard to reach by phone or chat.

These are customers’ accounts, not findings of ours. A national total mixes hundreds of local operations, so it says little about the crew on one street: your city or county page says who is assigned there.

On Trashbagging

Check the city first: States & Cities. The King County edition lists WM among the haulers that the county’s finder can name for an unincorporated address.

Context photo: Recycling and waste sorting stations at Moscone Center in San Francisco. Intel Free Press, 2013-09-02. CC BY 2.0 · Source. Resized for web.