What a move actually costs, and why quotes are so hard to compare
A move has two prices and they are almost never expressed in the same units. A truck rental company sells you days, miles and gallons. A moving company sells you either crew hours or hundredweight. You cannot compare $89 a day against $55 per mover per hour against $85 per hundred pounds by looking at them, which is why so many people pick the option whose headline number is smallest and discover the real total on the far end.
This calculator resolves both quotes down to a single figure — total dollars out of pocket for this move — and then re-expresses each in the units that make competing bids comparable: dollars per mile for the truck, dollars per hundredweight for the carrier. Those two derived numbers are the ones professionals actually quote to each other, and they are the ones that let you tell a good bid from a bad one.
The third figure it produces is the one people forget. The gap between the two totals is not free money: it is payment for your own labour, measured in hours. Loading a two-bedroom apartment, driving it, and unloading it is not a Saturday afternoon. Dividing the gap by what an hour of your time is worth turns an abstract saving into a number you can weigh against a weekend, a strained back, and the risk of doing the driving yourself.
The formula, term by term
The DIY side is a sum of five things you will pay separately. d·R is rental days times the daily rate, and the mistake here is counting only driving days — you need the truck the evening before you load and the morning after you unload. m·c is the mileage charge, which matters for a local in-town rental billed per mile and is usually zero on a one-way long-distance rental where mileage is bundled into the rate. (m/e)·f is fuel: distance divided by the truck's miles per gallon gives gallons, gallons times pump price gives dollars. A loaded 26-foot box truck is a heavy, square, gasoline-powered vehicle, and its economy is nothing like your car's. S covers cartons, tape, mattress bags, pads and a dolly. T covers tolls, hotels and food on the road, plus the fuel for a second vehicle if someone follows the truck.
The professional side has two mutually exclusive shapes. For a local move, carriers bill k·h·w — crew size times billable hours times the rate per mover per hour — plus a travel fee that covers getting the truck to you and back. Many states let carriers charge "double drive time", meaning the driving portion of the job is billed twice; if your quote has a line you do not recognise, that is often it.
For an interstate move, the carrier prices the shipment on weight and distance: (W/100)·L, where W is the net weight of your goods in pounds and L is the line-haul rate for your mileage band, quoted per hundred pounds. Hundredweight, abbreviated cwt, is the tariff unit the household-goods industry has used for a century. Weight comes from a certified scale ticket — the truck is weighed empty and loaded — or, before the move, from a surveyor's estimate. If you have neither, the rule of thumb van lines use is roughly 1,000 to 1,500 pounds per furnished room, which is what the home-size selector applies here.
X is where quotes diverge most. It holds the fuel surcharge, the valuation coverage, and the accessorial charges: stairs, long carry, elevator, shuttle truck when a tractor-trailer cannot reach your street, and packing labour or materials. Two bids with identical hundredweight rates can differ by four figures once accessorials are counted, so ask for them itemised before you compare. If you also need a truck size, work that out with the moving truck size calculator and the carton count with the moving boxes needed calculator.
Worked example: a two-bedroom move of 800 miles
You are moving a two-bedroom apartment 800 miles. The home-size selector puts the shipment at 5,000 lb. A one-way truck rental is quoted at $120 a day for four days with mileage included, the truck returns about 10 mpg, and fuel is $3.50 a gallon. You budget $250 for cartons and pads and $350 for tolls, one hotel night and food. A van line quotes $85 per hundredweight with $400 of fuel surcharge, valuation and accessorials. You value your own time at $30 an hour.
- Truck rental. 4 days × $120 = $480. The mileage charge is zero because this is a one-way rental.
- Fuel. 800 mi ÷ 10 mpg = 80 gallons. 80 × $3.50 = $280.
- DIY total. $480 + $280 + $250 + $350 = $1,360.
- Hundredweight. 5,000 lb ÷ 100 = 50 cwt.
- Line-haul. 50 × $85 = $4,250.
- Professional total. $4,250 + $400 = $4,650.
- Gap. $4,650 − $1,360 = $3,290 in favour of the DIY option.
- DIY cost per mile. $1,360 ÷ 800 = $1.70 per mile.
- Mover cost per hundredweight, all in. $4,650 ÷ 50 = $93.00 per cwt, against the $85 headline rate. That difference is the accessorials, and it is the number to quote back when you compare bids.
- Gap in your hours. $3,290 ÷ $30 = 109.7 hours.
Those 109.7 hours are the whole decision. Loading, driving and unloading 5,000 lb across 800 miles is two people working about ten hours a day for three days: 2 × 10 × 3 = 60 person-hours. The gap buys nearly twice that, which is why DIY wins on this move. Change the distance to 2,400 miles and the arithmetic moves: rental days climb, fuel triples, and the driving alone eats most of the gap.
How to read the two totals
Read the per-unit figures before the totals. Dollars per hundredweight is the only clean way to rank interstate bids, because it strips out shipment size. When you compute it from the all-in total rather than the quoted line-haul rate, a bid with a low headline rate and heavy accessorials stops looking cheap. Ask every carrier for the same thing: total price, total estimated weight, and the accessorial list.
Dollars per mile does the same job for the truck side, and it has a useful property: it falls as distance rises, because supplies and the daily rate are largely fixed while only fuel scales with distance. A short local move can easily land above $5 a mile and still be the cheapest option in absolute terms. Do not compare your dollars-per-mile figure to somebody else's unless the distances are similar.
Then look at the gap in hours. There is no universal threshold, but there is a clear test: estimate the person-hours the DIY move genuinely takes — loading, driving, unloading, cleaning, and returning the truck — and compare that to the hours figure. If the gap buys fewer hours than the job takes, the movers are the better trade even before you count risk. If the gap buys several times the hours, DIY has real margin, and that margin is what absorbs the flat tyre, the extra hotel night, or the sofa that does not fit through the door.
Two factors sit outside the arithmetic entirely. Liability is one: under federal rules an interstate carrier's default liability is released value at 60 cents per pound per article, which pays about $30 for a 50-pound television. Full-value protection costs real money and is worth pricing. Injury is the other: you are lifting heavy objects on stairs, and the arithmetic does not price a hurt back.
Fuel cost of driving the truck yourself
| Distance | 8 mpg | 10 mpg | 12 mpg | 15 mpg |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100 mi | $43.75 | $35.00 | $29.17 | $23.33 |
| 300 mi | $131.25 | $105.00 | $87.50 | $70.00 |
| 500 mi | $218.75 | $175.00 | $145.83 | $116.67 |
| 800 mi | $350.00 | $280.00 | $233.33 | $186.67 |
| 1,200 mi | $525.00 | $420.00 | $350.00 | $280.00 |
| 1,800 mi | $787.50 | $630.00 | $525.00 | $420.00 |
| 2,800 mi | $1,225.00 | $980.00 | $816.67 | $653.33 |
A loaded box truck sits at the left of this table, not the right. If you are towing a car behind it, drop one column.
What this estimate does not include
- The deposit and the return. A one-way rental ends where you unload it, but a round-trip local rental means driving back — count that distance in the mileage and the fuel.
- Utility connection and disconnection fees. Deposits at the new address, final bills at the old one, and any mail forwarding or address-change charges.
- Cleaning at both ends. A move-out clean is frequently a lease condition; price it with the house cleaning cost calculator rather than guessing.
- The overlap. Paying rent or a mortgage on two homes for part of a month is often the single largest hidden line in a move.
- Storage between dates. If your delivery window and your lease do not line up, you are paying for a unit — size it with the self-storage unit size calculator.
- Tips. Crews are customarily tipped, and on a full-day job with a three-person crew that is a real number.
- Time off work. Unpaid days are a direct cost of the DIY option that the hours figure captures only if you set your hourly value to your actual wage.
- Replacement of what does not survive. The gap is not a saving if it is smaller than what you break.
Estimates on an interstate move are regulated
Interstate household-goods moves are governed by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration under 49 CFR Part 375. Two provisions change how you should read a quote. First, an estimate is either binding — a fixed price for the described shipment and services — or non-binding, an estimate of what the tariff will produce once your shipment is weighed. Under a non-binding estimate the carrier may collect no more than 110% of the estimated charges at delivery, with any balance billed to you afterwards, which is why the industry calls it the 110% rule. Second, the default liability level is released value at 60 cents per pound per article, which is not insurance and will not replace anything. Full value protection is the alternative, and it is priced separately.
Ask any interstate carrier for its USDOT number and check it against the FMCSA's registration records before you sign. A legitimate mover will also give you the FMCSA booklet Your Rights and Responsibilities When You Move, which they are required to provide.
Where this sits among the alternatives
Between renting a truck and hiring a full-service van line there is a middle tier this calculator can also price. A portable container — you load it, a carrier drives it — is priced as a flat delivery fee plus monthly rent, so enter it on the professional side with the whole amount in the accessorials field and zero everywhere else. Hybrid moves, where you rent the truck but hire labour to load and unload it, sit on the DIY side with the crew cost added to supplies.
Freight-trailer moves, where you buy a linear-foot block of space in a shared trailer, are priced per linear foot rather than per hundredweight. Convert before comparing: divide the quoted total by your estimated hundredweight and you can rank it against a van line bid directly.
Timing changes every number here. Summer, month-end and the last weekend before a lease turnover are the peak of the peak for both rentals and crews. Moving mid-month and mid-week moves rates in your favour on both sides of the comparison, and it is the single easiest lever most people have. If your move includes a long drive, the road trip drive time calculator will tell you how many days the driving genuinely takes before you commit to a rental period, and the rental car total cost calculator covers the second vehicle if someone is following the truck.
Terms on a moving quote
- Hundredweight (cwt)
- One hundred pounds. Long-distance household-goods rates are quoted per hundredweight, so a 6,400 lb shipment is 64 cwt.
- Line haul
- The core transportation charge for moving the shipment from origin to destination, before surcharges and accessorials.
- Accessorial
- Any charge for a service beyond loading, hauling and unloading: stair carry, long carry, shuttle, elevator, packing, appliance servicing, storage in transit.
- Shuttle
- A smaller truck used when the tractor-trailer cannot legally or physically reach your door. It is billed separately and is a common surprise on narrow city streets.
- Released value
- The federal default liability level for an interstate move: 60 cents per pound per article, at no extra charge. It is a liability limit, not insurance.
- Double drive time
- A local-move billing practice, permitted in some states, in which the time spent driving between the two addresses is billed twice.