Moving Company Prices per Hour: How to Price a Local Move
If you run a moving company, your price per hour is the cost of an hour of truck and crew divided by one minus the margin you want. The cost of that hour is your yearly fixed costs, owner pay included, spread over the hours you bill, plus the crew’s wages with payroll costs. A local move is then that rate times the loading and unloading hours, plus a truck fee for travel, surcharges for stairs, long carries and heavy items, and packing. In the illustrative example below a 3-mover crew bills $165.00 an hour ($55.00 per mover), and a 5-room local move with packing comes to $2,485.75.
None of these are market prices. The truck, wages, crew speeds and box costs belong to one made-up one-truck company. Use your own, and time your own crew on a job you know.
The moving company pricing formula
cost per crew-hour = (truck + insurance + overhead + owner pay) / billed hours
+ movers x wage x (1 + payroll costs)
crew rate = cost per crew-hour / (1 - margin)
load and unload = (cubic feet / load speed + cubic feet / unload speed)
rounded up to the quarter hour, x crew rate
local move price = load and unload + truck fee + drive between homes
+ surcharges + packing
Step 1: how much movers charge per hour, from your costs
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Truck a year | $15,000 |
| Insurance a year | $7,200 |
| Office, phone, advertising, software, licenses | $12,000 |
| Owner pay a year | $45,000 |
| Fixed costs a year | $79,200 |
| Fixed cost per billed hour (1,200 hours) | $66.00 |
| Crew: 3 movers x $22.00 + 25% payroll costs | $82.50 |
| Cost per crew-hour | $148.50 |
| Crew rate at a 10% margin | $165.00 |
A crew-hour costs $148.50, and the rate keeps 10% of every billed dollar after the $45,000 of owner pay is already counted as a cost. Adding or dropping one mover changes the hourly rate by $30.56. The plan assumes 1,200 billed hours a year; the fixed costs are covered at 960 billed hours. Fewer billed hours raise the fixed share of every hour, the same arithmetic as in the break-even analysis formula.
Step 2: the local move estimate
Price the move from its volume and your crew’s speed, not from a guess at hours. The example estimates cubic feet per room, adds the garage and loose boxes, and uses the crew’s own loading and unloading speeds.
| Line | Working | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Cubic feet | 5 rooms x 150 + 200 extra | 950 |
| Loading | at 250 cubic feet an hour | 3.80 hours |
| Unloading | at 380 cubic feet an hour | 2.50 hours |
| Billed hours | 6.30, rounded up to the quarter hour | 6.50 |
| Load and unload | 6.50 x $165.00 | $1,072.50 |
The 950 cubic feet fit in one load of a 1,000-cubic-foot truck. A move that needs a second load also needs a second round of driving.
Step 3: travel time and the truck fee
The crew rides in the truck and is paid for every minute of it. The example takes 25 minutes from the yard to the pickup, 30 between the homes and 20 back, 38 miles in all at $1.10 a mile in truck costs.
- Drive between homes, billed as crew time: $82.50.
- Truck fee: the legs to and from the yard, $123.75 of crew time, plus $41.80 of mileage, rounded up to $170.
Travel on this invoice is $252.50. Leave it off the quote and 19.1% of the crew time and truck cost for loading, unloading and driving goes unpaid. Working out your own cost per mile is covered in the trucking cost per mile post.
Step 4: stairs, long carries and heavy items
Stairs slow the end of the job they are at. A long carry from the truck to the door slows unloading. Heavy items take extra crew minutes and wear on equipment. Each is priced as extra hours at the crew rate.
| Surcharge | Working | Hours | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stairs | 1 flight at pickup, 2 at delivery, 10% of that end’s hours per flight | 0.88 | $145.20 |
| Long carry | 75 feet in 50-foot blocks = 2, 5% of unload hours each | 0.25 | $41.25 |
| Heavy items | 2 x 30 crew minutes, plus $25 equipment each | 1.00 | $215.00 |
| All surcharges | 2.13 | $401.45 |
Together that is $401.45, 38.6% on top of the load and unload price. A quote built from rooms alone would give that away.
How much do movers charge for packing?
Packing is two lines: the materials and the time. The example packs 58 boxes. Boxes, tape, paper and wrap cost $216.00 and go on the invoice at a 30% markup: $280.80. At 9 minutes for one mover to pack one box, that is 8.7 mover-hours, billed at the per-mover rate: $478.50. Full packing adds $759.30, $13.09 a box.
Bill packing per mover-hour, not per crew-hour. Then the packing crew can be any size and the total stays the same; with all 3 movers packing, it is 2.9 hours on site.
The full invoice, and the insight
| Invoice line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Load and unload | $1,072.50 |
| Travel: truck fee and drive between homes | $252.50 |
| Stairs, long carry, heavy items | $401.45 |
| Packing, materials and labor | $759.30 |
| Invoice | $2,485.75 |
The load and unload price, the part a customer thinks of as “the hourly rate”, is $1,072.50, 43% of the invoice. Travel, surcharges and packing are the rest. A company that quotes rate x hours and nothing else is not underpricing the hour; it is giving away the rest of the job.
Flat rate vs hourly: who carries the overrun
A flat price moves the risk of a long day from the customer to you, so it needs padding. The example prices an illustrative 8.5-hour move. Hourly, it bills $1,572.50. Flat, with 15% padding and the truck fee, it is $1,790.
| Hours the move takes | Hourly profit | Flat profit |
|---|---|---|
| 8.50 | $140.25 | $357.75 |
| 9.82 | $162.00 | $162.00 |
| 10.50 | $173.25 | $60.75 |
| 10.91 | $180.00 | $0.00 |
If the move runs to the estimate, the flat price earns $357.75 against $140.25 hourly. Past 9.82 hours, hourly earns more. At 10.5 hours the flat quote keeps $60.75 while hourly would have made $173.25, and at 10.91 hours, 28% over the estimate, the flat quote loses money. Flat pricing is a bet on your estimate. Overtime pay past a set hour would make it lose money sooner than this shows.
The job check: did the move make money?
Once the timesheets are in, check the job. The example crew was paid 10.75 hours door to door. Their wages, the packing wages, the truck’s share of fixed costs, mileage, boxes at cost and $60 of damage paid out cost $2,153.43. The $2,485.75 invoice leaves $332.32, a 13.4% margin, above the 10% target. The same move would have made nothing at 12.99 hours door to door. A related check for hauling work is in junk removal pricing.
How these were calculated
The crew rate is (truck + insurance + overhead + owner pay) / billed hours + movers x wage x (1 + payroll costs), divided by (1 - margin). Load and unload hours are cubic feet / load speed + cubic feet / unload speed, rounded up to the quarter hour. The truck fee is the yard legs at the crew rate plus miles x truck cost a mile, rounded up to the next $5. Stairs add a share of each end’s hours per flight, the long carry a share of unload hours per block, and heavy items crew minutes plus equipment. Packing is materials x (1 + markup) + boxes x minutes a box / 60 x the per-mover rate. Flat profit is flat price - truck fee - hours x cost per crew-hour. Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program, and the two agree to the cent. All inputs are illustrative, not market rates, measured crew speeds or supplier prices. None of this is financial, legal, tax or insurance advice.
To run this on your own truck, crew and moves, the pack below has the same seven calculators linked together, from the crew rate to the job check.