Why the room type is the useful question
Most box estimates are one number multiplied by a room count, and that works until you look at which rooms. The variation between kinds of room is far larger than the variation between houses with the same number of rooms. A kitchen is the densest packing job in a house: crockery, glassware, tins, pans, small appliances and a spice cupboard, nearly all of it going into small boxes with a great deal of paper. A study or library is denser still by weight, because books are the heaviest thing most people own by volume. A spare bedroom, by contrast, is bedding and folded clothes, which is light bulk that fills large boxes fast and weighs nothing.
The practical consequence is the size mix rather than the total. Two houses can need the same hundred boxes and want a completely different split: one wants sixty smalls, the other wants forty larges. Ordering the wrong mix is worse than ordering slightly too few, because a large box you cannot safely fill is not a box, it is cardboard.
The weight rule, and why it decides everything
A small box is about 1.3 cubic feet and a large one about 4.5. Books run somewhere near 35 pounds per cubic foot once packed. That makes a small box of books around 45 pounds, which is a real lift but a possible one, and a large box of books around 160 pounds, which is not a lift at all — it is a box that gets dragged, dropped, or fails at the bottom seam halfway down a flight of stairs.
| Box | Volume | Filled with books | Filled with bedding | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | 1.33 cu ft | about 45 lb | about 7 lb | Books, tools, tins, crockery, records |
| Medium | 3.0 cu ft | about 105 lb | about 15 lb | General household, kitchen, files, toys |
| Large | 4.5 cu ft | about 160 lb | about 23 lb | Bedding, cushions, lampshades, coats |
Read the table across rather than down. The point is not that large boxes are bad; it is that a box has a sensible weight and its size determines what density can reach that weight. Lifting injuries are the most common injury on a moving day and no technique makes a hundred and sixty pound box into a manageable one. The decision that prevents it is made when the box is being filled, not when it is being carried.
Tape is the supply that stops the work
Boxes, paper and bubble all fail gracefully. Run short of boxes and you pack fewer boxes today. Run short of paper and you use towels and bedding, which is what half the paper was substituting for anyway. Run out of tape with three open boxes on the floor and everything stops, because there is no substitute and no way to close what you have started.
Tape is also the supply people estimate worst, because it is consumed continuously and nobody watches the roll. Taping a box properly is the bottom seam plus the two bottom edges, then the same again on the lid, which is around eight feet on a medium box. A 55 yard roll is 165 feet, so roughly twenty boxes. That means a hundred-box move is five rolls, and the person who bought two is not being careless, they are working from an intuition formed by parcels rather than by moves.
The top-up table above exists for exactly this. Take the higher tape figure at the start of the packing rather than the lower one.
Where the estimate goes wrong, and how to correct it early
Two multipliers sit on top of the room figures here: how much you own, and how long you have lived in the place. The second is the more predictable of the two. Volume accumulates with time in a home far more reliably than it does with floor area, because nothing gets thrown away in the ordinary run of things — it goes into the loft, the garage or the back of a closet, and it is all still there on moving day.
The correction that costs nothing is empirical. Pack one room first, ideally the one you use least, and count what it actually took. Compare that with its row in the table. If the room took thirty percent more than the estimate, so will the rest of the house, and you now know that before you have run out of anything rather than after. That single measurement is worth more than any adjustment you can make by picking a different multiplier from a dropdown.
Questions people ask
How many boxes does a kitchen need?
The figure used here is eight small, six medium and one large per kitchen before any adjustment, which is fifteen boxes, and kitchens routinely go over that. A kitchen is the room where the box count is set by density rather than by volume: crockery, glassware, tins, pans and a cupboard of small appliances all want small boxes, and the small boxes fill quickly. Two things push a kitchen well above the figure — a pantry, and anybody who cooks seriously. If either applies, pack the kitchen first and count what it took before ordering for the rest of the house.
How much packing paper do I actually need?
It depends entirely on what you are wrapping, which is why the figure here is per room type rather than per box. Kitchens and dining rooms dominate the total: glassware wrapped individually and plates stacked on edge with paper between them can take several pounds a box on their own. Bedrooms and closets need almost none, because folded clothes and bedding are their own padding. A useful substitution is that clean towels, bedding and clothes do the same job as paper for anything that is not sharp or heavy, and they have to be moved anyway, so the paper estimate is really an estimate of what you cannot pad with something you already own.
Do I need wardrobe boxes?
They solve one problem — hanging clothes that would otherwise be folded, packed, creased and then ironed at the other end — and they cost a lot of volume for the amount they hold, around thirteen cubic feet each. The rule of thumb is one box per two feet of hanging rail, and there is a field above to enter your rail footage directly if you have measured it. The middle option most people land on is to use wardrobe boxes for the clothes that matter and to fold the rest, which is a decision about ironing rather than about packing.
Are secondhand boxes worth using?
For most of a house, yes, with two conditions. They need to be dry and to have their original bottom flaps intact, because a box that has been stored damp or has a softened bottom seam is the one that fails on the stairs. And they should be a size you can identify, since mixed sizes make stacking in a truck much harder than uniform ones do. What secondhand boxes cost is time and car journeys, which is the trade the price comparison never shows. Buy new for anything heavy or fragile, and take free boxes for bedding, clothes and soft goods.
How is this different from the box count calculator?
The box count calculator works from a single number of furnished rooms and a size mix chosen by a dropdown, which is the fastest route to an order quantity. This page asks which rooms, because a kitchen, a study and a spare bedroom generate completely different mixes, and it produces the split room by room so you can see where the smalls are going and which room owns most of the paper. Use whichever matches what you know. If you have already boxed a room, use this page and correct the multipliers against what that room actually took.