How Much to Charge for Moving: Hourly Local, Weight Long-Haul

Short answer: How much to charge for moving splits into two systems. Local jobs price on crew hours — a three-mover crew with a truck at roughly $133 an hour fully loaded becomes a published rate near $185 an hour at a 28 percent margin. Long-distance prices on weight or volume against mileage, using about 7 pounds per cubic foot to convert. Accessorials — stairs, long carry, shuttle, specialty items — are always separate lines.

The single most expensive mistake in this trade is not the hourly rate. It is the gap between the hours you estimated and the hours the job took, because on a flat or not-to-exceed quote every hour over comes straight out of profit at full cost. What follows builds the rate, then builds the estimate, then shows what a two-hour overrun does to a job that looked healthy on paper. Since almost everything you own drives, independent contractor mileage log is worth reading alongside this.

Which unit applies — the hour or the pound?

The distance decides, and mixing the two systems is how quotes become unenforceable.

	Local move	Long-distance move
Unit	Crew hours × crew size, plus truck	Weight or cubic feet × distance
What the customer sees	An hourly rate and an estimated window	A line-haul figure plus accessorials
Travel	Billed as travel time or a stated trip fee	Inside the line-haul rate
Where the risk sits	Hours, especially on a capped quote	Weight underestimated at the origin
Estimate method	Walk-through or detailed inventory	Inventory converted to cubic feet, then to pounds
What kills you	Stairs and carry distance nobody mentioned	A shuttle nobody scoped

Some states impose their own local rules on top — several require specific travel-time treatment on intrastate moves — so check what your state regulator requires before publishing a rate card.

What does one crew hour actually cost me?

Build it around the crew that actually rolls, not around one mover’s wage.

Layer	Example calculation	Per crew hour
Driver plus two movers, with burden	($24.00 + $19.00 + $18.00) × 1.34 for payroll taxes, comp, and liability	$81.74
Truck — payment, insurance, fuel, maintenance, DOT compliance	$27,000 a year ÷ 1,250 billable crew hours	$21.60
Operating cost		$103.34
Overhead	$37,500 a year — dispatch, phone, yard, advertising, estimating time, claims — ÷ 1,250 hours	$30.00
Fully loaded cost		$133.34

Turn that into the rate you publish: $133.34 ÷ 0.72 gives $185.19, so a three-mover crew posts at $185 an hour to earn a 28 percent margin. Add a mover and the rate moves with the wage line, not by a round number somebody guessed.

Workers’ comp deserves a hard look in that burden multiplier. Moving classes are among the more expensive on the schedule, and an operator using a generic 1.20 factor is understating every hour by several dollars.

How do I estimate the hours before I quote them?

Convert the home into cubic feet, then into pounds, then into loading time. The industry conversion is roughly 7 pounds per cubic foot of household goods, which is the same figure that turns a visual survey into a shipping weight.

Home	Typical cubic feet	Weight at 7 lb/cf
Studio	300 to 400	2,100 to 2,800 lb
One bedroom	450 to 600	3,150 to 4,200 lb
Two bedroom apartment	750 to 950	5,250 to 6,650 lb
Three bedroom house	1,200 to 1,600	8,400 to 11,200 lb
Four bedroom house	1,700 to 2,200	11,900 to 15,400 lb

Then apply your own crew’s loading rate in cubic feet per hour, measured off your last twenty jobs rather than borrowed. Unloading generally runs faster than loading unless the customer wants furniture placed and boxes distributed by room, in which case it does not.

A quote given over the phone without a survey is a bet. Video walk-throughs cost fifteen minutes and eliminate most of the surprises — the garage, the storage unit across town, the basement nobody mentioned, the piano.

What does the walk from the truck to the door cost?

More than anything else on the estimate, and it is invisible on a phone call.

Condition	What it does to the clock	How to bill it
Stairs above the first floor	Adds 10 to 20% to load or unload	Per flight, per end
Elevator, reserved and held	Slower per trip but predictable	Inside the hourly, if the reservation holds
Elevator, not reserved	Crew waits, clock runs	Hourly, with the risk stated in writing
Carry over 75 ft from the truck	A full extra round trip per item	Per 50 ft beyond the threshold
Shuttle needed for a big truck	Second vehicle plus a transfer	Per shuttle
Permit or metered street parking	Longer carry plus the permit cost	At cost, plus the added hours

The elevator line is where local movers bleed. A building that requires a certificate of insurance and a booked freight elevator will happily let your crew stand in a lobby for ninety minutes if the reservation was never confirmed. Confirm it yourself, in writing, and put a clause in the estimate saying that waiting time is billable.

How do I price packing separately?

As its own service with its own unit, because packing is per box and moving is per hour.

• Boxes packed, priced per box by size, with dish barrels and wardrobes at their own rate.
• Materials, itemized at cost plus markup: cartons, paper, tape, shrink, mattress bags, TV boxes.
• Custom crates, per crate by dimension, for glass tops, marble, and art.
• Unpacking and debris removal, a separate line most customers decline and some pay well for.
• Partial packing, quoted by room rather than by the box, when it is only the kitchen and the closets.

Do not fold packing materials into the hourly rate. The customer who packs everything themselves is subsidizing the one who does not, and the one who does not gets a quote that looks artificially cheap.

Which items never ride inside the hourly rate?

Anything that changes crew size, equipment, or liability.

Item	Why it comes out of the hourly
Upright or grand piano	Four to five movers, board or skid, straps, and real damage exposure
Gun safe over 500 lb	Stair climber, extra crew, floor protection
Pool table	Disassembly and slate handling, usually a specialist
Treadmill and large gym equipment	Disassembly and reassembly time
Marble, stone, and glass tops	Crating, vertical transport, high claim value
Appliances needing disconnection	Gas and water lines are licensed trades, not movers
Hot tubs, safes over 1,000 lb, vehicles	Different equipment entirely — subcontract or decline

Valuation is its own line and worth explaining to the customer rather than burying. On interstate moves, released value protection is the free federal default at 60 cents per pound per article, which pays $15 on a 25 lb television — full value protection costs money and carries a deductible. FMCSA’s Protect Your Move resources spell out what the customer is entitled to. Quote the upgrade rather than absorbing claims exposure to look cheap.

What does the math look like on a two-bedroom local move?

Two-bedroom apartment on the second floor with no elevator, moving three miles to a single-family house. Roughly 850 cubic feet, about 5,950 lb, with two beds and a table to break down and reassemble.

Step	Calculation	Amount
Crew time — yard to site 0.4, walk-through and floor protection 0.3, disassembly 0.4, load with stairs 4.0, drive 0.4, unload and place 2.6, reassembly 0.4, site to yard 0.4	8.9 crew hours × $103.34	$919.73
Overhead	8.9 × $30.00	$267.00
Materials — wardrobes, mattress bags, shrink, tape		$74.00
Total cost		$1,260.73
Billed — 8.1 on-site hours × $185, travel 0.8 hr at $185, materials at $95		$1,741.50
Margin realized	($1,741.50 − $1,260.73) ÷ $1,741.50	27.6%

Now break it in two steps, because the cap and the overrun are separate wounds. Suppose the estimate said 8.9 hours and you offered a not-to-exceed price of $1,600 to close the sale. Even if the job runs exactly as estimated, that cap takes revenue from $1,741.50 to $1,600 and margin from 27.6 percent to 21.2 percent — the price of giving the customer certainty, and a trade you may be happy to make knowingly. Then the job runs 10.4 hours because the elevator at the destination was never reserved. Those extra 1.5 crew hours cost $200.01 at full operating and overhead, revenue is still capped at $1,600, cost is now $1,460.74, and the margin is 8.7 percent. Nothing about the rate was wrong. The estimate was.

Where does the profit actually leak on a moving job?

Two places, and only one of them is arithmetic.

The arithmetic one is markup versus margin. Adding 28 percent to $1,260.73 gives $1,613.73, which is a 21.9 percent margin, not 28. Dividing instead gives $1,750.99, so the markup version comes in $137.26 light on one small job. To hit a target margin you divide: 0.75 for 25 percent, 0.72 for 28, 0.70 for 30.

The bigger one is estimate accuracy, and it does not show up in any formula. Every hour beyond the estimate on a capped quote is billed at zero and costs $133.34. Track estimated hours against actual hours on every job for two months, sorted by building type, and the pattern will name itself: walk-ups, long carries, or customers who were not packed when you arrived. Then price those conditions instead of hoping.

How do I sanity-check my hourly rate?

Internal ratios first, since they are measurements rather than opinions.

• Revenue per crew hour. $1,741.50 over 8.9 hours is $195.67. Compare it across move types; anything far below the published rate means unbilled time.
• Materials as a share of revenue. Small on a move-only job, large on a full-pack, and they should never be blended.
• Estimate accuracy. Actual hours divided by estimated hours, tracked as a running average. Anything consistently above 1.1 is a pricing problem disguised as a scheduling problem.

For an outside check, call three local companies as a customer and price a comparable move in your own city. National averages blend markets with different wage floors, fuel costs, and comp rates, and they say nothing about your building stock. Watch your close rate too: booking nearly every call means the rate is under the market. Structuring the business around that revenue is a separate question, covered in do I need an LLC to freelance, and collections are in how to get clients to pay.

What gets recorded on move day?

The clock, the condition of the goods, the fuel and materials receipts, and the miles. Every one of them is a document you will want if a claim shows up six weeks later.

Keel is built to do that from the tailgate. The invoice goes out before the truck leaves the destination, with your own numbering, your logo, your brand color, and a payment link rendered as a QR code the customer scans off your screen — the payment goes through your own processor, Keel just carries the link. Fuel, tolls, materials, and equipment receipts get photographed and read on the device by Apple Intelligence, which keeps the truck line in your hourly cost table honest instead of annual guesswork. Mileage logs by trip, which matters when the vehicle is the business; the rate itself is in IRS mileage rate 2026. Nothing leaves the phone: no account, no bank connection, no cloud, and an App Store privacy label that reads Data Not Collected. The append-only, hash-chained ledger means the record of what you invoiced and when cannot be quietly edited after the fact. At year end the Accountant Pack exports a CSV and a one-page summary, and the whole year leaves as a single file. Keel is free with unlimited invoices, receipts, and mileage; Keel Pro is a one-time $249.99 Lifetime purchase, not a subscription.

Frequently asked questions

How much should I charge per hour for a moving crew?

Derive it from the crew you actually send. Add the wages of every mover with a burden multiplier from your own payroll and comp statements, add the truck’s annual cost divided by billable crew hours, add overhead per hour, then divide by one minus your target margin. A three-mover crew and a truck costing $133 an hour fully loaded publishes near $185 an hour at a 28 percent margin.

How do I price a long-distance move?

On weight or volume against distance, not on hours. Convert the inventory to cubic feet, apply roughly 7 pounds per cubic foot for shipping weight, and apply your line-haul rate for that weight and mileage band. Then add accessorials separately: stairs, long carry, shuttle, storage in transit, and expedited delivery windows. Give the estimate in writing and be explicit about whether it is binding.

Should I charge for travel time on a local move?

Yes, in some form, because the truck and crew are on the clock from the yard. Common structures are a flat trip fee, one hour of travel added to the invoice, or billing actual drive time both ways. Pick one, publish it, and state it in the estimate. Some states set specific requirements for how travel time is charged on intrastate moves.

How much extra should I charge for stairs and long carries?

Enough to cover the added hours, quoted per flight and per 50 feet of carry beyond a stated threshold. Stairs add roughly 10 to 20 percent to load or unload time depending on the flight and the item mix, and a carry over 75 feet turns each trip into a full extra round trip. Measure both at the walk-through and put them on the estimate rather than discovering them on move day.

What insurance or valuation should I offer customers?

On interstate moves the free federal default is released value protection at 60 cents per pound per article, which pays very little on modern electronics, and full value protection is the paid upgrade with a deductible. Explain the difference plainly, price the upgrade as its own line, and document the condition of high-value items with photos before loading.

Why do moving jobs go over the estimated hours?

Almost always access and readiness rather than volume. Unreserved elevators, long carries, customers still packing when the crew arrives, parking that pushes the truck a block away, and items nobody mentioned in the survey. Track actual hours against estimated hours by building type for two months and the pattern becomes obvious, at which point those conditions get priced instead of absorbed.

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This article is general information, not professional or tax advice.