The unit of a move is the trip, not the mile
A move is a number of journeys between a room and a truck, repeated until the room is empty. Everything that makes a move long is something that gets paid for on every one of those journeys. Volume sets how many journeys there are. Stairs and the walk to the truck set what each one costs. Distance between the two addresses gets paid once.
Put numbers on it. Eight hundred cubic feet at six cubic feet a trip is 133 trips, and every trip happens twice — once out of the old place and once into the new one. Add sixty feet of extra carry at one end and you have added about 33 seconds of walking to each of 133 trips, which is an hour and a quarter of crew time. Add two flights of stairs at 75 seconds a flight and you have added two and a half minutes to each trip, which is five and a half hours of crew time. The drive across town, meanwhile, is 40 minutes and it happens once.
This is why an estimate given over the phone from a bedroom count goes wrong in one direction. The bedroom count captures the volume, which is the part that was never in dispute. It captures nothing about the third floor and the loading bay round the corner.
What the numbers in the model mean
| Input | What it represents | How to get a better figure |
|---|---|---|
| Cubic feet per trip | The average size of one carried load across boxes and furniture | Boxes are 1.3 to 4.5 cu ft; a sofa carried by two is 30 or more. Six is a middling blend. |
| Handling seconds per trip | Picking up, getting through a door, setting down or stacking | Time yourself carrying four boxes out to a car and divide. |
| Seconds per flight | One flight down carrying something, and back up empty | Walk it with a loaded box and a stopwatch. Half landings and a tight turn matter more than the step count. |
| Carry distance | Door to where a truck can actually stop | Pace it. A stride is roughly 2.5 feet, so count paces and multiply. |
| Elevator round trip | Call, wait, load, ride, unload, send it back | Ride it twice at the time of day the move will happen, and double it if the building shares one lift. |
The elevator figure is divided by how many items go in one ride, which is the whole reason a lift beats stairs. Six boxes sharing a 160 second cycle is 27 seconds a box. The same six boxes down two flights is 150 seconds each. That ratio is why a fifth-floor move with a working lift can finish earlier than a second-floor walk-up.
Adding people has a ceiling
The crew size table divides the crew hours by the number of people, which is the optimistic reading and is roughly true up to a point. What it does not model is that a stairwell is a single lane, a truck bed takes two people packing before the third starts waiting, and a front door does not widen. On a normal house the returns flatten somewhere around four or five carriers, after which the extra person is useful for something else — dismantling beds ahead of the crew, packing the last boxes, clearing a path — but is not adding a full share of the carrying.
The other thing a bigger crew does not fix is the elevator. If the building has one lift and it is shared, the lift is the constraint and eight people will stand in a corridor waiting for it exactly as three would.
Reading the contingency honestly
The default contingency is 15 percent, and on a move with stairs it is the least speculative number on the page. The things it covers are not unlikely: one item that will not turn on the landing and has to be dismantled, a delivery van parked where the truck was going to sit, the lift out of service, rain, a neighbour who wants a conversation about the truck. Any single one of those costs half an hour to an hour.
If the day has a hard edge on it — a lease that ends, a closing, a building that switches its service elevator off at six — the contingency is not padding, it is the only thing standing between the plan and a second day. Push it up rather than down, and if the resulting finish time is late, move the start time rather than shrinking the estimate.
Questions people ask
How many movers do I need?
Work backwards from the hours rather than from the number of bedrooms. Put your volume, stairs and carry distance in above and read the crew size table: it shows the elapsed day for two through six carriers. Then pick the smallest crew that finishes inside the window you actually have, which is usually set by something external such as a building's elevator hours or a handover time. Three carriers is the common answer for an apartment and four to five for a house, but a third-floor walk-up with a long carry can want more people than a larger house at ground level, because the constraint is the trip, not the square footage.
Why do stairs cost so much more than distance?
Because they are charged per trip and the drive is charged once. Two flights at 75 seconds each adds two and a half minutes to every journey between the room and the truck, and a two-bedroom move is well over a hundred journeys in each direction. That is hours. The drive between two addresses across the same town is under an hour and it happens a single time. This is also why movers price stair carry and long carry as separate line items rather than folding them into the hourly rate — they are genuinely a different cost, and a crew that was not told about them arrives with the wrong number of people.
What is a long carry and how far is too far?
It is the distance from the entrance to wherever the truck can actually stop, and companies that charge for it set a threshold in their own tariff, so ask what yours is rather than assuming a figure. What this page does is show what the distance costs in hours regardless of whether anybody bills you for it. Sixty feet of extra carry at each end on a hundred-and-thirty-trip move is over two hours of crew time. The fix is usually not to accept it: reserving the space in front of the building, moving cars the night before, or getting whatever permit your city issues for a moving truck all cost less than the hours do.
Is it cheaper to hire a crew or to do it with friends?
The money-only answer is almost always friends, and the money-only answer is the one that keeps the myth alive. Put an hourly value on your own time in the field above and the comparison usually inverts, because a self-move is not the crew's eight hours — it is your eight hours plus the packing, the truck collection, the return, and a day afterwards where you are not much use to anybody. The page shows both figures deliberately: what leaves your account, and what the day costs you. Neither one prices the parts that are not hours, such as carrying a wardrobe down stairs with someone who does this once a decade.
Does this include packing time?
No. The hours here start when the boxes are sealed and end when the last item is in a room at the other end. Packing is a separate and usually larger block of time, spread over evenings rather than concentrated into a day, and it is sized by what you own rather than by the access at either end. The packing supplies calculator on this site works out the materials room by room, and if a crew is packing for you the hours belong in their quote rather than in this model.