All the Ways to Get Rid of House Flies (6 Lethal, 5 Non-Lethal)

No insect is as unwelcome in your home as a common housefly: nasty, germ-spreading, and annoying! Like all insects, they have their part to play in nature, but they need to play it outside and not in your living space.

It goes without saying you’ll want to get rid of them, and in this article, I’ll tell you how. Below, I’ll share with you six lethal and five non-lethal methods for giving house flies the boot.

Avoid Attracting Flies in the First Place

The very first step in your fly reduction strategy should be to avoid attracting them. If flies aren’t near your home and don’t get inside, you won’t have to worry about anything else.

The two big attractors of common house flies are odors and light. Many things that smell good, like the foods we eat, will readily attract flies, as will nasty smells like rot, garbage, feces, and various acids. Keeping food in airtight containers, staying on top of waste control, cleaning up promptly after pets, and dealing with livestock manure will go a long way toward keeping flies out of your hair.

The other big one, often overlooked, is light. Lights shining out of your home early in the morning and in the evening will serve as a beacon for flies that would otherwise bed down in the dark. Obviously, you can’t go without light yourself at such times, but by being vigilant when you have windows or doors open, you can reduce the number that approach your home.

It’s also good policy to leave exterior porch and garage lights off if they aren’t in use. Consider installing motion sensors if security is a factor.

Installing screens on doors and windows, planting fly-repelling herbs and other plants, and keeping both the inside and outside of your home clean, sanitary, and tidy make a world of difference.

A Few Flies Can Turn Into a Major Infestation

If you’ve got more than one or two flies hanging around, you might soon be dealing with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands.

Flies reproduce very quickly, and do so by laying eggs in feces, garbage, and other areas caked with biomatter.

Open trash cans, untended animal droppings, and food left to rot are prime breeding grounds that will be ruthlessly exploited. You can’t remove flies from your property entirely, but you can manage populations by making it difficult for them to lay their eggs.

Lethal Methods

Hang Sticky Traps

This is a time-tested, efficient, and affordable way to catch and dispose of flies, especially in high-traffic areas. Hanging a coil, strip, or loop of adhesive paper, commonly called flypaper, takes only a few moments and starts working immediately with no additional input from you.

The downside is that caught flies remain visible, stuck to the paper, which is downright gross and, to some, very unsettling. Sticky traps also wear out over time as they accumulate corpses or come into contact with atmospheric dust, oil, and water vapor. This means you need to replace them more often…

If you can get past the gross-out factor, though, this stuff is perfect for dealing with repeat visitors and significant infestations alike.

Place a Dish of Vinegar and Dish Soap

A classic old-timers’ trick that still works just as well today as it did 100 years ago.

All you need to do is grab a shallow dish, fill it with a little bit of vinegar, and then add a couple of drops of dish soap before giving it a stir. Remember what I said above about flies being attracted to acidic aromas? Vinegar is a powerful fly attractant, and they will land to get a little sip of the vinegar before falling into the liquid.

The dish soap breaks the surface tension and coats the flies’ wings, resulting in death by drowning. All you’ll have to do then is pour out the old solution and the corpses before resetting.

Grow Venus Flytraps

An all-natural, clean, safe, and cool way to deal with a few incidental flies is by growing your own Venus flytraps. These scary-looking jawed plants really live up to their name!

Flies are readily attracted to these carnivorous plants by the sweet-smelling sap they release as a lure. Once a fly enters the tines and disturbs the fine hairs therein, the jaws close, and the fly is digested alive, but it is digested out of sight!

If you’ve got a green thumb and would prefer not to look at fly corpses, this is the way to go. However, they won’t do much to help with significant infestations and work better as an ongoing control measure.

Salt Shooter

Marksmen and hunters will get a kick out of this one: companies like Bug-A-Salt make what are, in essence, toy guns that shoot salvos of common table salt with each pull of the trigger.

It’s basically harmless to everything but insects, but to insects, the cloud of salt might as well be a destructive barrage of flak! These nifty gadgets have surprising range and will blast flies and other critters to pieces or at least knock their wings off so you can dispose of them.

Is it a novelty? Oh yeah, but it’s lots of fun if you don’t mind a more hands-on approach.

Fly Swatter

Sometimes the old ways work best. You’ll have to mop up fly guts when the job is done, but a good fly swatter will allow you to dispose of several flies in short order.

My advice is to regularly clean and sanitize this tool to prevent the spread of germs during use.

Bug Zapper

For areas with high fly populations or higher sensitivity to fly traffic, a bug zapper can be just the ticket. Flies are really drawn in by the hypnotizing blue light, and then they’re carbonized by an electric arc.

This is a wonderful tool for depopulation during bad fly seasons, but unfortunately, it’s an indiscriminate one: moths, pollinators, and many others will suffer the same fate.

Another con is that they don’t always work, so don’t get disappointed if you only have a few flies and they couldn’t care less about your zapper 🙂

Non-Lethal Methods

Make Your Own Fly Spray

There are many all-natural, safe, and organic odors that repulse flies. Many of these aromas actually smell quite pleasant to us! Tea tree oil, mint, basil, rosemary, lavender, and more can all keep flies at bay with regular applications around doors, windows, and other surfaces. Check out our other article to give you some ideas.

Place or Plant Repellent Herbs

If sprays aren’t your thing, consider planting or placing pots holding fly-repellent herbs… Live mint, basil, lavender, and more will naturally repulse flies and other harmful or annoying insects besides. This is another good option for keeping your home cheery, clean, and safe.

Catch and Release with a Bug Net

Some folks truly wouldn’t hurt even a fly. Hey, I’m not judging! Even tiny lives have value. A good bug net, of the type used for catching butterflies and other specimens, works wonders on flies also.

Once you’ve caught the little pest, you can step outside and invert the mesh netting to turn it loose without injury.

Keep Your Home Clean!

Flies won’t hang out in your home if there’s nothing for them to eat and nowhere for them to breed.

As discussed above, keeping food contained or tightly covered, garbage cans sealed, and all surfaces scrupulously clean will deprive flies of the nutrition and biomatter they need to continue their life cycle.

I know, I know. Sometimes you just don’t have time. But consider that a grubby household is literally inviting pestilence in the form of flies; that should give you some motivation!

Turn Fans Up to High

House flies are incredibly, infuriatingly agile, and they have reflexes that would make a mongoose envious. You and I both know they are very difficult to catch, but they are still just tiny insects, and that means they are easily blown around by strong air currents.

You can make your home inhospitable to flies by turning up your ceiling fans, box fans, and any other fans to high and really stirring the air. Flies are known to vacate areas where strong drafts push them around.