Crew tiers are step changes, not a sliding scale. Here's how to price the jobs that sit on the edge

Most removal companies price crew size from volume, and most do it roughly right. Small job, two people. Medium job, three. Big job, four.

The problem isn't the middle of each band. It's the edges. A job that sits within a couple of cubic metres of a tier boundary is the riskiest quote you will write that week, and almost no quoting process treats it differently from any other job.

This is about why that is, and what to do about it.

Crew size is a step change, not a slope

Adding a person to a job doesn't add a proportional amount of cost. It adds a whole person for the whole day.

A representative UK structure looks something like:

Volume	Crew	Crew rate
Up to 20 m³	2	£60/hr
20–40 m³	3	£85/hr
40–60 m³	4	£110/hr

Calibrate those to your own costs — the shape is the point, not the figures.

Look at what happens either side of 40 m³. A 39 m³ job runs at £85/hour. A 41 m³ job runs at £110/hour. That's a 29% jump in your hourly cost for a 5% change in the amount being moved.

And it doesn't come back. The fourth person is on the job all day, including the drive, including the lunch break, including the twenty minutes at the end when three of them are finishing and one is loading the last boxes.

Why more crew doesn't mean proportionally less time

The intuitive fix — "we'll send four and it'll be quicker, so it evens out" — is only partly true, and understanding why is what makes boundary jobs pricable.

What scales with crew: the carrying. Two people carry roughly twice as much per hour as one, across most of a load.

What doesn't:

The drive. Transit takes the same time with four people in the van as with two. You're now paying four wages for it.
Access bottlenecks. A staircase takes two people. A lift takes one cycle regardless of how many are waiting for it. A narrow hallway that only fits one person carrying is a hard limit on throughput — extra crew queue behind it.
The last item. Loads have a tail. The final wardrobe needs two people and everyone else is standing by the van.
Coordination. More people means more direction, more waiting on decisions, more "where does this go".

So the time saving from an extra crew member is real but sub-linear. Going from three to four might cut the working day by 15–20% on a clean job with good access — and by almost nothing on a job with a single tight staircase, where the staircase is the constraint and you've just added a person to stand at the bottom of it.

That's the rule worth internalising: extra crew helps most where access is good, and least where access is bad. Which is unfortunate, because bad access is exactly when you're tempted to send more people.

The boundary problem

Now put the two together.

You quote a 3-bed at 38 m³. Three crew, £85/hour, eight hours, £2,040 of labour. On the day, it's 43 m³ — the customer's garage had more in it than they said.

You now have two bad options:

Send three anyway. The job takes ten hours instead of eight. You've eaten two hours of overtime, the afternoon job is late, and the crew finishes in the dark. Cost to you: roughly £510, plus the knock-on.

Send four. You're at £110/hour on a job you priced at £85/hour. Even if the day comes in at 8.5 hours, that's £935 against the £2,040 you quoted — before the extra person's travel and the fact that you had to pull them off something else that morning.

Both outcomes come from the same root cause: the quote was priced at a tier the job wasn't in, and nothing in the process flagged that it was close.

What to do about it

1. Know where your boundaries are, numerically

Not "about 40 cubic metres". The actual number, written down, that your pricing uses. If you can't state your tier thresholds precisely, you can't identify a job that's near one.

2. Flag jobs within a band of a boundary

Define a margin — 10% is a reasonable starting point — and flag any job that falls inside it. A 38 m³ job with a 40 m³ boundary is a boundary job. It should not be quoted the same way as a 30 m³ job, even though both are "three crew".

⚠ This is the single highest-value change most firms could make to their quoting process, and it costs nothing. It doesn't require better volume estimates. It just requires noticing.

3. On a flagged job, do one of three things

Survey it properly. If the job is big enough for the tier gap to matter, the cost of getting it wrong exceeds the cost of a visit or a video walkthrough.

Quote the higher tier and say why. "This job is on the boundary between a three- and four-person crew. We've quoted for four so the day is certain." Customers understand this far better than movers expect, and it is honest — you are describing the job, not manufacturing urgency.

Quote the lower tier with a stated condition. "Priced for three crew based on 38 m³. If the volume on the day exceeds 40 m³ we'll need a fourth, which is £X." The condition has to be in writing on the quote, or it isn't a condition — it's an argument you'll have on the doorstep and lose.

4. Watch the day length, not just the crew count

A crew day is typically eight hours. A job that needs 9.5 hours with three crew is not a three-crew job that runs a bit late — it's a job whose shape you've got wrong, and the overtime is a symptom.

If your quotes routinely produce eight-and-a-bit-hour days, your load-time assumptions are optimistic and the boundary problem is worse than it looks, because a boundary job with an optimistic time estimate fails twice.

The bit that makes it fixable

Every number in the above is checkable.

You quoted three crew and eight hours. The job took three crew and ten hours. That's not a vague sense that the quote was light — it's a specific, falsifiable claim that was wrong by a specific amount, on a job whose volume and access you recorded.

Do that for twenty jobs and you don't have opinions about your crew thresholds any more. You have evidence: either your load-hours-per-cubic-metre is off, or your tier boundary is in the wrong place, or your access adjustments are too small. Each of those is a different fix, and the data tells you which.

The reason most firms can't do this isn't unwillingness. It's that the quote didn't record what it assumed, so there's nothing to compare the outcome against. A price that's just a number can only ever be "about right" or "a bit light". A price built from stated components can be wrong in a specific place, which is the only kind of wrong you can fix.

Cerrax

Cerrax is pricing software for UK removal companies. It derives crew size from volume against your own tier thresholds, flags jobs sitting near a boundary rather than silently picking a side, and records what each quote assumed — so when a job runs long, you can see whether it was the volume, the access, or the crew plan, and correct that one thing.

See how it prices a job →