The component most removal quotes get wrong — and the arithmetic that fixes it

Ask a removal company owner where their quotes leak margin and most will say volume. Volume is the one people worry about, because it's the number the customer gives you and the number you can most obviously get wrong.

But volume errors are usually visible. You turn up, there's more stuff than expected, and everyone can see it. Access errors are invisible. The van parks a hundred metres away, the lift takes four minutes a cycle, the stairs turn twice on a landing too tight for a wardrobe — and the job just takes longer, all day, in a way nobody writes down. At the end you've lost two hours and you can't point at the moment you lost them.

This guide is about pricing that properly.

The problem with round numbers

Most quoting systems price access as a fixed adjustment. £30 for stairs. £25 for a long carry. £40 for difficult parking.

Those numbers usually started as somebody's reasonable guess and then never moved. The trouble is that access doesn't cost you a fixed amount — it costs you crew time, and crew time has a price you already know.

Here's the test. Two flights of stairs on a 3-bed house, three crew, heavy furniture. If that adds 45 minutes to the load, and your crew costs £85/hour, the stairs cost you:

0.75 hours × £85 = £63.75

If you're charging £30, you're not making a small error. You're covering less than half of it, on every stairs job you quote, forever.

The fix isn't to raise £30 to £65. It's to stop using a fixed number at all, and price the time.

Start by pricing the time, not the condition

Every access condition should be expressed the same way:

Access cost = additional crew hours × crew size × hourly rate

That sounds obvious written down. It isn't what most quotes do, and the difference shows up hardest exactly where it costs most — big jobs with big crews. A condition that adds 30 minutes costs you £30 with a 2-person crew at £60/hour, and £55 with a 4-person crew at £110/hour. A flat £30 is roughly right in the first case and half the answer in the second.

Access adjustments have to scale with the crew, because that's what they actually consume.

Stairs

Stairs are the most common access condition and the most consistently underpriced.

What actually costs time. It isn't the climb. It's that stairs break the flow of a load. On a ground-floor job, two people can carry continuously — one loading the van, one bringing items out, meeting in the middle. Add a flight of stairs and the carry becomes serialised: heavy items need two people for the stairs alone, so the van-side work stops while they're on them.

That's why the cost per flight isn't linear in the number of flights, but it's much worse than nothing. A first-floor flat isn't 10% slower than a ground-floor one. It's often 25–40% slower on the load.

How to price it. Estimate the additional load and unload minutes per flight for a job of that size, then apply your crew rate. A reasonable starting frame:

Job size	Additional time per flight (load + unload)
Up to 20 m³	20–30 min
20–40 m³	35–50 min
40 m³+	50–75 min

These are a starting point, not a rate card. The point is to have a number derived from time that you then correct against real jobs — not to adopt mine.

Where it compounds. Stairs at both ends is not two separate adjustments that happen to occur together. The crew is slowed on the load and slowed again on the unload, on a day that's already long. Three or more flights across the job is a genuine throughput risk and worth flagging for a human look rather than quoting straight through.

Lifts

A lift is the condition most likely to be mispriced in the other direction — treated as though it makes access free.

It doesn't. It makes it different.

What a lift removes: the physical serialisation of the stairs. Heavy items no longer need two people committed to a staircase.

What a lift adds:

Cycle time. A lift has a round trip. In a residential block that's often three to five minutes with loading and unloading at both ends. On a 40 m³ move that's a lot of cycles.
Capacity limits. Most residential lifts won't take a sofa, a wardrobe, or a mattress upright. Those items go down the stairs anyway — so on a real job you're frequently paying for both conditions, not one.
Booking windows. Managed blocks often require the lift to be booked, sometimes with a protective blanket fit-out and a fixed slot. Overrun the slot and the job stops.
Shared use. A single lift serving twelve flats at 9am is not a lift you have.

So the right model isn't "lift, therefore no stairs charge". It's: the lift discounts the access cost rather than removing it, and it introduces its own time that doesn't exist on a ground-floor job.

If your current quote treats a lift as cancelling the stairs adjustment entirely, that's worth checking against a recent job. The cases that go wrong are the ones where the lift existed and half the load couldn't use it.

Long carry

Long carry is the distance between where the van can actually stop and the property door.

Why it's easy to miss. Nobody asks about it. The customer doesn't think to mention it, because to them the walk from the parking space is just what their street is like. You find out on the day.

Why it's expensive. It's per item, both ends, all day. Fifty metres each way sounds trivial until you multiply it by two hundred trips. At a walking pace with a load, fifty metres is roughly a minute each way — so a hundred carries costs you over three hours of crew time you didn't quote.

How to price it. Measure it in metres, band it, and price each band by time. Something like: under 20 m is normal and priced in the base; 20–50 m is a real adjustment; over 50 m is a significant one that changes the crew plan and probably the day.

⚠ The single most useful thing you can do is ask the question on the phone. "Where will a van actually be able to stop?" takes ten seconds and is the highest-value question on the call.

Parking

Parking is related to long carry but it's a distinct cost, and it can be the one that ruins a day.

Three separate things to price:

Restricted bay or loading limit. A 30-minute loading bay on a 4-hour load means repeatedly moving the van, which means a crew member is on the vehicle rather than on the job.
Permit or suspension. Some councils require a bay suspension booked days in advance, with a fee. That's a direct cost, and it needs to be in the quote as a cost rather than absorbed.
Uncertainty. A street where you might get a space outside and might be sixty metres away is not the same as one where you definitely won't. If the plan depends on luck, price the unlucky version or flag it.

Access is per end, not per job

This is the part most quoting spreadsheets can't express, and it matters more than it sounds.

A move from a ground-floor house with a driveway to a third-floor flat with a shared lift and permit parking is not "a job with access complications". It's an easy load and a hard unload — and those cost differently, because the unload happens at the end of the day with a tired crew and a fixed booking slot.

Price each end separately. Origin conditions affect load time; destination conditions affect unload time. Averaging them into one job-level adjustment loses exactly the asymmetry that decides whether the day runs over.

A worked comparison

The same 3-bed job, 38 m³, three crew at £85/hour, priced two ways.

Flat adjustments:

Stairs (2 flights, origin): £30 Long carry (destination): £25 Restricted parking (destination): £30 Access total: £85

Priced from time:

Stairs, 2 flights at origin, 38 m³ → ~45 min additional load Long carry 45 m at destination → ~70 min additional unload Restricted parking, destination → ~30 min of vehicle management Total additional crew time: 2.4 hours

2.4 × 3 crew × £85 = £612

That gap — £85 against £612 — is not a rounding difference. It's most of the margin on the job, and it recurs on every job with that shape. It is also, in my experience of how these conversations go, the number that makes owners go quiet.

The honest caveat: the second figure is only as good as those three time estimates. That's the point. A wrong time estimate is visible and fixable — you compare it against what the crew actually did and correct it. A flat £30 tells you nothing when the job overruns, because there was never a claim in it to check.

What to do this week

Take your last five jobs that overran. For each, write down which access conditions were present at each end.
For each, estimate how much of the overrun was access rather than volume.
Compare that to what you charged for access on those quotes.

If the gap is consistent and one-directional, you've found a rate that's wrong — and you now know roughly by how much.

That's the whole method. Price access as time, check the time against reality, correct the number. It's less satisfying than a rule of thumb and considerably more profitable.

Cerrax

Cerrax is pricing software for UK removal companies. It prices access as crew time rather than as flat adjustments, models each end of the move separately, and shows the contribution of every condition — so when a job overruns you can see which assumption was wrong and correct that specific figure rather than everything at once.

See how it prices a job →