Three ways to move the same house
Full service movers send a crew that loads, drives and unloads, and optionally packs. You buy back the whole weekend and most of the risk. The price is quoted either by the hour for a local move or by weight and distance for a long one, and the quoted figure is only part of what appears on the final bill.
A rental truck you drive is the cheapest line item and the most expensive in every other currency. The rental rate is not the cost: fuel at nine miles to the gallon over several hundred miles is a real number, and so are the pads, the dolly, the coverage, a night in a motel, and the friends who will need feeding or the hired help who will need paying at both ends.
Portable containers sit between the two. A container is dropped at the house, you load it over several days at your own pace, it is collected and driven, and you unload it at the other end. You still do the labor but not the driving, and the ability to keep it in storage for a month solves the common problem of a gap between the two lease or closing dates.
Why this page asks for your quotes instead of guessing
There is no honest national price for a move. The same three-bedroom house moved the same six hundred miles is quoted differently by season, by whether the origin has stairs, by whether a tractor-trailer can park on the street, by the direction of travel on that lane, and by whether the truck would otherwise be running empty. Any single figure printed as a typical cost is an average across situations that have nothing in common.
What is useful is structure. Every option here has costs that the headline number leaves out, and they are the same costs every time: fuel, mileage, materials, labor at both ends, coverage, and the charges that appear when the truck cannot park close to the door. Put your own quoted rates in and the page adds those consistently to all three, so the comparison is between complete numbers rather than between a mover's all-in price and a truck's daily rate.
The charges that appear on moving day
Accessorials are the industry term for extras, and they are where a quote and an invoice separate. A long carry charge applies when the truck cannot get within a set distance of the door. A shuttle charge applies when a full-size truck cannot reach the address at all and a smaller one has to ferry the load. Stair and elevator charges apply per flight or per building. Storage in transit applies when the delivery address is not ready. Bulky item charges apply to pianos, safes, treadmills and large televisions.
Every one of these is predictable in advance if someone looks at both addresses. That is the real argument for insisting on a survey, more than the accuracy of the weight: a surveyor who has seen your street will tell you about the shuttle before the day rather than on it.
Valuation is not insurance
Interstate movers must offer two levels of liability. Released value is included at no charge and pays by weight, at sixty cents per pound per article. A television weighing forty pounds is covered for twenty-four dollars regardless of what it cost. Full value protection is the paid option under which the mover repairs, replaces or pays the current value of a damaged item, subject to a deductible you choose.
The valuation field on this page is for the cost of that upgrade. It is worth pricing rather than skipping: the released-value calculation produces figures that read as absurd the first time you see them applied to something you actually own. Check separately whether your homeowners or renters policy covers goods in transit, since some do and it changes the arithmetic.
Reading the labor comparison
The optional fields at the bottom take an hourly value for your own time and an estimate of the hours a self-move would consume, and compare that against the price gap between full service and the cheapest do-it-yourself option. The result is never added to any total, because your own hours are not a cash cost and treating them as one produces a number you cannot pay a bill with.
Two things it cannot price. The first is the difference in risk: a professional crew that damages a wall has a claims process, and a friend who damages a wall has an apology. The second is that moving hours are not ordinary hours; they land in a week that already contains a lease ending, a utility transfer and a job starting, and the marginal hour in that week is worth considerably more than an average one. If the two totals come out close, that asymmetry is the tiebreaker.
The paperwork worth keeping
Photograph every room before anything is packed and every high-value item close up, with the date. Keep the written estimate, the inventory sheet the crew fills in at pickup, and the bill of lading, which is the contract. At delivery, check the inventory numbers off as items come in rather than afterwards, and note any damage on the delivery paperwork before signing it, because a signature with nothing noted is difficult to argue with later. None of this takes long, and all of it is only ever needed on the day it turns out to have been necessary.
Questions people ask
Is a binding estimate always better than a non-binding one?
It is more predictable, which is usually what you want. A binding estimate fixes the price for the inventory and services listed, so extra items added later change it, but the weight coming in higher does not. A non-binding estimate is an educated figure and the final charge is based on actual weight, which can land below the estimate as well as above it. There are also binding not-to-exceed estimates, where you pay the lower of the estimate and the actual weight-based charge, and if one is offered it is strictly better than a plain binding estimate.
How many miles should I put in the truck mileage field?
More than the distance of the move. A one-way rental is driven from the origin to the destination, but the real total also includes getting the truck from the rental lot, any detour for a storage stop, and driving it to the drop-off location at the far end. On a local move where the truck goes back to the same lot, the round trip is at least double the one-way distance and often several trips. The mileage figure drives the fuel calculation, so guessing it low understates the option that is already easiest to understate.
Do I tip the crew, and how much?
It is customary in the United States for a full service move and it is not built into the quoted price, which is why there is a field for it. There is no fixed rate; people commonly work from a per-mover amount scaled to the length and difficulty of the day, and a crew that carried a piano up three flights in August has done something different from one that loaded a ground-floor apartment. Deciding the figure in advance and putting it in the budget avoids the moment at the end of a long day when nobody has cash.