City of Omaha's Free Yard Waste Pickup: Fall 2026 Dates, Rules and What Goes in the Bag
Last updated October 28, 2026
Twice a year, the City of Omaha picks up as many paper bags of leaves, grass and garden cleanup as you can drag to the curb, and you don't pay anything extra. The catch is the calendar. You get six free weeks in the spring and six in the fall, and the rules are spread across several pages of the city's Wasteline site.
We put them all in one place, with a printable cheat sheet for the fridge or the garage wall.
If you'd rather have your yard waste picked up every week of the year, with your kitchen scraps going along with it, Omaha has that too. It's at the bottom of this page.
This is an unofficial guide written by Hillside Solutions. The free yard waste program is run by the City of Omaha through Wasteline and its hauler, FCC Environmental. Every rule below comes from wasteline.org. If anything here ever disagrees with the city, go with what it says on wasteline.org.
The short version
Fall 2026: Monday, Oct. 26 through Friday, Dec. 4
Spring 2027: not announced yet. Spring 2026 ran May 4 – June 12.
Bags: paper yard waste bags only, under 40 pounds each, no sticker needed
Set-out: next to your trash cart by 6 a.m. on your regular collection day
How many: no limit
Branches: bundles still need a yard waste sticker, even during the free weeks
Missed pickup: call the city's Solid Waste Helpline at 402-444-5238
Print the cheat sheet
It fits on regular letter paper and covers both the spring and fall seasons, so you can keep it up all year.
Printable cheat sheet for the City of Omaha’s free spring and fall yard waste pickup, showing bag rules, branch bundle rules, and what is and isn’t allowed.
When is Omaha's free yard waste pickup?
The city runs two seasons of free yard waste collection a year, six weeks each, timed to when yards produce the most. During those weeks a separate truck comes by on your regular trash day, picks up your paper bags, and takes them to Oma-Gro, the city's composting facility.
The exact dates move a little every year. Here's the recent pattern:
Spring usually runs early May into mid-June. 2026: May 4 – June 12.
Fall usually runs late October into early December. 2026: Oct. 26 – Dec. 4. 2024: Oct. 28 – Dec. 6. 2022: Oct. 24 – Dec. 2.
The city posts each season's dates on wasteline.org, and we update this page when they do.
How to set out your bags
Fill paper yard waste bags. Hardware and home stores carry them.
Keep each bag under 40 pounds.
Skip the sticker. Paper bags don't need one during the free weeks.
Set the bags next to your black-lid trash cart by 6 a.m. on your regular collection day.
Do it again next week, with as many bags as you need.
Branches still need a sticker
Your leaf bags ride free during the season. Your branches don't. Every brush bundle needs its own prepaid yard waste sticker, free weeks included.
To get a bundle picked up:
Tie it with string or natural twine. Wire, rope, and plastic or nylon twine get it left behind.
Keep branches under 4 feet long and under 2 inches thick.
Keep the whole bundle under 30 pounds.
Wrap one sticker around the twine.
Stickers cost $2.61 each in 2026, and this year's are blue. You can buy them at Hy-Vee, Family Fare, Supermercado Nuestra Familia, Menards, and Westlake and Elkhorn Ace Hardware, and Wasteline keeps the full list. A sticker is good for the year printed on it and the year after, so leftover 2026 stickers still work in 2027.
What goes in the bag
Yes:
Leaves
Grass clippings
Weeds, flowers and garden plants
Fallen apples and rotten or extra fruit and vegetables from the garden
A dead houseplant, once you take it out of the pot
Bundled branches, with a sticker
No:
Plastic bags, including the green ones labeled compostable
Cardboard boxes of yard waste
Kitchen food scraps like coffee grounds, eggshells and peels
Pet waste or kitty litter
Whole bags of soil or sod
Rocks, sand or street sweepings
Lumber, treated lumber or sawdust
Trash or litter
Christmas wreaths and evergreen roping (the wire inside makes them garbage)
Your trash cart, plastic bags and kitchen scraps
Yard waste can go loose in your black-lid trash cart any week of the year at no extra cost. It won't be composted, though. Whatever goes in the cart heads to the landfill with the rest of your trash. If you do use the cart, the city suggests putting a bag of garbage in first so packed leaves don't get stuck at the bottom when the truck tips it.
Plastic bags are fine inside the cart. Set one out at the curb and it stays there.
Wasteline counts coffee grounds, eggshells and peels as household garbage, so they're out of the city's program entirely. The Compost Club takes them, and we'll get to that below.
Holidays and missed pickups
When a holiday lands on a weekday, every pickup after it shifts one day later for the rest of that week. In the fall season that means Thanksgiving: Thursday pickup moves to Friday, and Friday moves to Saturday. In the spring, Memorial Day pushes the whole week back a day.
FCC runs routes until 7 p.m. If your bags are still at the curb the next day, leave them out and call the city's Solid Waste Helpline at 402-444-5238. Wasteline wants service problems reported by phone.
Sorting out the numbers you'll see online
Search for this program and you'll find a few numbers that don't match. Here's where each one stands:
Bag weight: Wasteline lists 40 pounds. A few news stories, and some AI search summaries, say 45. Keep your bags under 40 and you're covered either way.
Bundle weight: Wasteline's sticker page says under 30 pounds, and its yard waste page says up to 40. Under 30 meets both.
Sticker price: $2.61 in 2026, per Wasteline's current pricing page. The $2 and $2.50 figures floating around are from past years.
Oma-Gro's address: the self-haul site moved to 6502 S. 60th St. Older pages still list the Bellevue location on Harlan Lewis Road.
Where your yard waste goes
Bags picked up during the free weeks go to Oma-Gro, the City of Omaha's composting facility, and come back out as Oma-Gro compost.
You can also haul yard waste to Oma-Gro yourself, free, any time it's open. It's at 6502 S. 60th St., at 60th and Harrison where the Al Veys ballfields used to be. Stop at the office before you unload. Winter hours are 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays, and summer hours run to 6 p.m. It's closed on city holidays and shuts for the season from Dec. 22 to April 1. Same rules as the curb: no plastic bags, no stumps, and no branches thicker than 2 inches.
The best place for your grass clippings is your lawn. Mow and leave them where they fall, and you'll have fewer bags to fill. The city has a whole page on it, called Stop Bagging for a Healthier Lawn.
The other 40 weeks of the year
Twelve free weeks leaves 40 more. During those, your choices for yard waste are the trash cart (landfill), a $2.61 sticker on every bag and bundle, or a drive to Oma-Gro before it closes for the winter.
There's a fourth option, and it takes your kitchen scraps too.
Curbside Compost Club: weekly pickup, all year
The Curbside Compost Club is Omaha's first year-round curbside composting service, run by Hillside Solutions. We bring a cart to your house, and every week we pick up your food scraps and yard waste, starting at $25 a month.
What goes in the cart:
Fruit and vegetable scraps
Meat, dairy and bones
Coffee grounds, filters and eggshells
Pet waste
Leaves, grass, weeds, flowers and dead plants
Small twigs and branches
When the cart's full, set extra yard waste next to it in brown paper yard waste bags, under 40 pounds each. There's no bag limit and no sticker, any week of the year. Members can also drop larger limbs at the Soil Dynamics yard downtown for free.
Keep out of the cart: plastic bags, compostable plates and cutlery, bioplastics, shredded paper, glass and metal.
35-gallon cart: $25 a month
65-gallon cart: $30 a month
95-gallon cart: $35 a month
Every plan includes 3 cubic feet of compost credits each calendar year (soil, compost or mulch from Soil Dynamics), 20% off Soil Dynamics products all year, and a free month for every neighbor you refer.
Your scraps go to Soil Dynamics, where they're screened and ground. From there, together with Hillside Fund, we deliver the material to farms around Omaha as organic fertilizer, so those farms use less synthetic fertilizer.
Curbside runs in a growing list of Omaha neighborhoods. Enter your address on the Curbside Compost Club page to see whether we come to your street. If we don't yet, you'll land on the waitlist and hear from us when we do.
Drop-off Compost Club: anywhere in the metro
Drop-off Club is built for kitchen scraps, and it works wherever you live in the metro. Keep a bucket in your kitchen, then empty it at any of our 60+ drop-off sites, any day, any time. Sites are spread across Downtown, Midtown, North Omaha, Benson, Florence, West and Northwest Omaha, Millard, Ralston, Elkhorn, Sarpy County and Council Bluffs. Members get a map with the exact addresses.
Drop-off takes meat, dairy, bones and pet waste, plus BPI-certified compostable plates, cups and cutlery that curbside can't take. Plastic bags stay out of the drop-off carts.
It's $10 a month or $105 a year, with the same 3 cubic feet of compost credits each year and 20% off at Soil Dynamics. Join the Drop-off Compost Club.
Which one fits you
City free seasons: 12 weeks a year. Free, with stickers for branches. Leaves and grass in paper bags. No kitchen scraps, meat, dairy, bones or pet waste. The city's truck hauls it to Oma-Gro.
Curbside Compost Club: every week, all year, from $25 a month. Leaves and grass in the cart, plus unlimited paper bags. Kitchen scraps, meat, dairy, bones and pet waste all go in. We haul it to Soil Dynamics, then on to local farms.
Drop-off Compost Club: any day, any time, for $10 a month or $105 a year. Built for food scraps, including meat, dairy, bones, pet waste and BPI-certified compostable plates and cutlery. You haul it to a drop-off site, and it goes to Soil Dynamics.
If your yard waste is mostly fall leaves and spring cleanup, the city's free weeks are a great deal. Use them.
If food scraps are what's filling your trash cart, Drop-off is the cheapest way to keep them out of the landfill.
If you want yard waste and kitchen scraps gone every week without hauling anything yourself, go with Curbside.
Quick answers
Does the free yard waste pickup cover my house?
It covers homes that get City of Omaha trash collection through Wasteline. If you live outside Omaha city limits, in Papillion, La Vista, Bellevue or Ralston for example, ask your own trash hauler what they offer.
Is the free yard waste pickup the same as Fall Cleanup?
No. Fall Cleanup is a separate city program with neighborhood drop sites on set Saturdays for bulky items like furniture, appliances and tires. Yard waste pickup happens at your curb on your regular trash day. Wasteline posts the details for both.
Can I use the compostable plastic bags from the store?
Only inside your black-lid cart. At the curb, the city takes paper yard waste bags and nothing else.
Ready to compost all year? Check your address on the Curbside Compost Club page. If we're not on your street yet, Drop-off Club works anywhere in the metro in the meantime.