South Cambs Bin Dates 2026: All 98 Villages, to 18 Dec

Nobody in South Cambridgeshire needs to move their bin for the bank holiday. If you are here for the South Cambs bin collection dates for 2026 themselves, skip to the tables: they carry every remaining blue, green and black date for all eight rounds, and the last one of the year falls on 18 December.

We checked the collection calendar for 92 addresses across 43 villages on Greater Cambridge Shared Waste’s own bin day finder. Between 17 August and 20 September the tool returned 339 collection dates. Not one of them falls on a Monday. Not one falls on Monday 31 August, the late summer bank holiday. None is flagged as a moved or slipped collection.

That is unusual, and it is worth explaining. Most councils in England run Monday rounds, so a bank holiday pushes that day’s collection back and drags the rest of the week with it. Here there is no Monday round to move. South Cambridgeshire’s household rounds run Tuesday to Friday.

Which day your village goes out

From the same lookup, checked on 26 August 2026:

Two warnings about that table. It is a sample, not the register: we checked one address per postcode, and a large village can be split across more than one round. And the day is only half the answer, because which bin goes out alternates week by week. Put your own postcode into the finder for the definitive dates.

Food waste: the third wave landed on Monday

The other change to your bins happened this week and has nothing to do with the bank holiday. Weekly food waste collections reached almost 12,700 more homes from Monday 24 August, the third wave of the rollout, taking the total served to more than 60,500 across Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire. The council says the households run “from Bar Hill to Trumpington and across many other communities”.

The numbers behind it, from the same announcement:

• more than 2,800 tonnes of food waste collected since the service launched
• silver pest-proof caddies started going out in January 2026
• the waste goes to anaerobic digestion plants at Baldock, March and Thetford, where the biogas generates power and the residue becomes biofertiliser
• all households in Greater Cambridge are due to have weekly food waste collections by the end of 2026

Weekly food waste collection is not a local choice. The government’s Simpler Recycling rules make it mandatory for every council in England.

Cllr Laurence Damary-Homan, South Cambridgeshire’s lead cabinet member for the environment, said: “You might think that you don’t create any food waste, but even things like teabags, banana peel and onion skins can be included, and it all adds up! In fact, recycling food waste is one of the most impactful actions you can do at home.”

Every residential address we checked, in all 43 villages including Gamlingay, now shows a food waste round on the same day as its other bins. Caddy deliveries were still going out this week, and the service asks anyone who has not had one to report a missed delivery.

South Cambs bin collection dates for the rest of 2026

Every remaining 2026 collection date is already loaded into the council’s finder, so this is not a forecast. We pulled the full calendar for one address in each of 27 villages on 12 September 2026 and found the district runs on eight rounds: four collection days, Tuesday to Friday, each split into two fortnights that alternate with one another.

Find the round that matches your next blue and green day and the rest of your year is in the same column.

Tuesday rounds (Duxford, Melbourn, Meldreth on one fortnight; Great Shelford, Stapleford, Whittlesford on the other):

Wednesday rounds (Linton, Sawston and Great Abington on one fortnight; Balsham, Fulbourn, Great Wilbraham, Teversham and Waterbeach on the other):

Thursday rounds (Bar Hill, Cambourne, Gamlingay and Girton on one fortnight; Bassingbourn, Caldecote, Comberton, Hardwick, Milton and Steeple Morden on the other):

Friday rounds (Cottenham, Histon, Oakington, Over and Willingham on one fortnight; Longstanton and Swavesey on the other):

Food waste is separate and weekly, so it goes out on your collection day every week regardless of which bin is due.

Your village, and which of the eight rounds it is on

The tables above are useless until you know your round, so on 21 September 2026 we looked the round up for every parish in the district, one address at a time, through the council’s own bin calendar. Ninety-eight villages, checked one by one:

The quickest sanity check, and the one to use if your village straddles two rounds: look at what is due on your street this week. If your black bin goes out, you are on a round 1. If the blue and green go out, you are on a round 2. That one observation puts you in the right row for the rest of the year.

Two things the district’s own round list gets asked about. Teversham is a Wednesday village, not a Tuesday one, despite sharing a CB1 postcode with Cambridge, and it is on round 2. Balsham is Wednesday round 2 as well, not round 1, so its blue and green went out on 23 September. We checked each of those against three separate addresses.

Large villages can split across two rounds where a new estate has been added to a different run, so treat the table as the answer for the bulk of the village and check your own address if your street has ever been out of step with your neighbours.

The calendar stops on 18 December, and that is the real Christmas answer

The bold dates above are not the end of the fortnightly cycle by accident. Checked on 12 September 2026, the finder has no blue, green or black collection scheduled anywhere in South Cambridgeshire after Friday 18 December 2026. From the week of 21 December the only thing in the calendar is the weekly food waste round, and it stays that way into 2027: the Wednesday addresses we checked show food waste and nothing else every week from 23 December right through to April.

That is not a shutdown, it is a calendar that has not been published yet. The service loads the festive timetable and the following year’s rounds later in the autumn, and prints them on the annual calendar that comes through the door. Until that happens, if you want to know when your bin goes out between Christmas and the New Year, the answer is that nobody has published it.

One oddity worth knowing while you wait: the unrevised feed still shows food waste collections on Friday 25 December 2026 and Friday 1 January 2027 for the Friday villages. Those are the dates most likely to move when the festive timetable is loaded.

The bank holidays themselves change almost nothing

Only three public holidays are left in the England and Wales calendar between now and the New Year, and because South Cambridgeshire has no Monday round, just one of them lands on a collection day (gov.uk):

So the Christmas fortnight is the only part of the rest of 2026 where your collection date is likely to move, and it is the Friday villages that will feel it first. Tuesday to Thursday rounds are untouched by the holidays themselves, though councils routinely shift the whole week to catch up after a two-day shutdown, so treat every date between Christmas and the first full week of January as provisional.

The only date-accurate source for your own address is the council’s own bin day finder. We will update this page once the Christmas dates are published.

The recycling centres are the thing to check

The bins are the easy part of the bank holiday. The tips are not. Cambridgeshire County Council states plainly that opening hours at its March, Milton and Whittlesey sites change on bank holidays, and publishes the detail only on each individual site page rather than in one place. Milton is the nearest household recycling centre for most of the north and east of the district; Thriplow serves the south. The county’s own advice is to avoid 11am to 2pm, weekends and bank holidays, and its gates shut ten minutes before the published closing time.

What it means for you

Put your bins out on your normal day and at your normal time. No bank holiday between now and the New Year moves a South Cambridgeshire round, because no round runs on a Monday, and the tables above give every remaining 2026 date for all eight rounds.

The one date to diarise is your last collection of the year: 15 to 18 December for black bins and 8 to 18 December for blue and green, depending on which round you are on. After that the calendar is blank apart from weekly food waste until the service publishes the festive timetable.

If you are clearing the garage before then, check the Milton or Thriplow opening hours first, because those do change on public holidays. Our roadworks and travel page carries the rail closures south of Royston.

How we checked this

We used Greater Cambridge Shared Waste’s public bin day finder, the same tool residents use. For 92 addresses spread across 43 villages, we recorded every collection date the tool returned between 17 August and 20 September 2026, 339 dates in total, along with the bin types and the service’s own “slipped collection” flag. No date fell on a Monday, none fell on 31 August, and none was flagged as slipped.

On 12 September 2026 we went back and pulled the full published calendar, not just the next month, for one address in each of 27 villages. That is where the eight rounds and every date to 18 December come from, and it is how we know the calendar carries nothing but food waste after that.

On 21 September 2026 we ran the same lookup across the whole district, one address per parish, 98 villages, to build the village-to-round table. That pass also re-read the full calendar to the end: it still stops at 18 December 2026, with food waste and nothing else every week from 25 December right through 2027, so the festive timetable has still not been loaded. Where a village came back with a round that did not match our September sample, we checked it again against two or three more addresses before printing it, which is how Teversham and Balsham were corrected. The results are a sample of the district, not a complete register, so check your own address.

Sources

• Find your bin collection day, Greater Cambridge Shared Waste for every collection date and bin type quoted.
• Thousands more homes to receive weekly collections of food waste, South Cambridgeshire District Council, 17 August 2026 for the 12,700 homes, the 60,500 total, the 2,800 tonnes and the quote.
• Weekly food waste collections, Greater Cambridge Shared Waste for the start date confirmation and caddy deliveries.
• Household Recycling Centre locations and opening hours, Cambridgeshire County Council for the bank holiday change at March, Milton and Whittlesey and the visiting advice.
• UK bank holidays, GOV.UK for the remaining England and Wales public holiday dates in 2026 and 1 January 2027.
• Greater Cambridge Shared Waste’s bin calendar service, read on 12 September 2026, for the full published round dates behind every table in the “dates for the rest of 2026” section, and for the absence of any recycling, garden or rubbish collection after 18 December 2026.