What to do with an expired car seat

You have found the date of manufacture, you have the maker's stated useful life, and the figure has passed. That settles what the maker says about using the seat. What it does not settle is what to do with the object now sitting in your hallway — and the makers do have published guidance on that.

Federal law requires the month and year of manufacture on the label. Expiration is the manufacturer’s own policy, not a federal rule.

If you have not confirmed the date yet, do that first: where the date label sits on each kind of seat, then what your maker states. A seat is only past its useful life against a figure its own manufacturer published.

Graco's guidance, in Graco's words

Graco publishes an answer to this question on its car seat expiration page. The point of the steps is that the seat is not quietly picked up and put back into service by someone who never saw the label.

An expired seat should be disposed of in a way that it won’t be reused by anyone. To help ensure a car seat won’t be used after expiration, it is a good idea to remove the cover, cut or remove the harness straps, write “DO NOT USE, EXPIRED” on it with a Sharpie, and place it in a black garbage bag before taking it to be recycled or disposed of.

Graco, "What should I do with an expired car seat?" — Graco's own expiration page, checked 2026-08-27.

That is four separate actions, and Graco's reason for each is the same one:

• Take the cover off. A bare shell does not read as a usable seat.
• Cut or remove the harness straps. Without webbing the seat cannot be put back into use.
• Write "DO NOT USE, EXPIRED" on the shell — Graco's wording, in permanent marker.
• Bag it. Graco says a black garbage bag, before it goes for recycling or disposal.

Other makers publish their own versions of this, and where they do, the wording is on that maker's page. Check your maker — its support page is the one that speaks for your seat.

Recycling and trade-in

Two routes exist beyond the household bin, and both are local rather than national. Some retailers run seasonal trade-in events, where an old seat is accepted for a store credit during a set window each year. Some municipal recycling programmes and scrap processors accept car seats, either at a facility or on a collection day, because a stripped seat is mostly recoverable plastic and metal.

We name neither, deliberately. Trade-in windows open and close, and kerbside rules differ from one county to the next, so a programme named on this page would be wrong for most readers most of the time. Check your municipality's waste or recycling page for whether car seats are accepted and how they want them presented, and check your maker's own page for anything it runs directly. This site takes no commission on any of it and links no retailer.

Before it leaves the house: the recall record

Worth one lookup on the way out. A recall can carry a remedy from the manufacturer — a replacement part or a fix — and NHTSA's guidance if you find one is to contact the maker, because some problems can be fixed. The seat's model number and date of manufacture are exactly what the lookup asks for, and both are on the label you have already found.

Look the seat up in NHTSA's recall database. We do not keep a recall status for your seat and we would not report one if we did — NHTSA's own record is the one that counts.