How a removal price is worked out.
Not an opinion about what a move “should” cost. The quantities a price is derived from, and what each one does to the number.
The four quantities
1. Volume
How much there is to move, in cubic metres. Volume is the quantity everything else hangs off: it decides how much van the job needs, and therefore how many trips, and it is the main input to how long loading takes. It is measured from an inventory of items rather than estimated from the number of bedrooms — two three-bedroom houses can differ by half again.
2. Time
Crew hours, not clock hours. Loading, unloading, and the driving between them, plus the time access adds at each end. Time is where most quoting error lives, because it is the quantity people estimate rather than derive — and it is the one that decides whether a day runs over.
3. Distance
Road distance between the addresses, and the driving time it implies. Below a certain range this is simply mileage. Above it, the job stops fitting in a lawful driving day and needs an overnight or a second crew day — so cost steps rather than sliding. Drivers’ hours are a legal ceiling; the arithmetic has to respect it whether or not the customer wants it to.
4. Access
What the property does to the work. Stairs without a lift, the carry distance from the door to where the van can legally stand, narrow doorways an item may not physically pass through, parking restrictions. Access is the quantity most often missed at survey, which is why it is the most common reason a job overruns the price that was quoted.
What the firm supplies, and what it must not
A firm declares the things it can state as facts about its own business: its charge-out rates, its crew sizes, its vehicles, its depot. Those are numbers a mover would defend on an invoice.
It does not supply the coefficients underneath — how many minutes a flight of stairs really adds, how much a difficult carry slows a crew. No mover knows those as facts, and asking them to guess would rebuild the very thing a derived price exists to replace. Those come from what actually happened on real jobs, and until enough of that exists they are stated as ranges rather than pretended to be precise.
Common questions
- How do removals companies work out their prices?
- Most price from experience: someone looks at the job and produces a number. The consistent way is to derive it — measure the volume being moved, the distance between addresses, how hard the property is to work in, and how long the work will take, then apply the firm's own rates to those quantities. The difference matters because a derived price can be explained line by line, and a remembered one cannot.
- Are removals priced by volume or by the hour in the UK?
- Both, and they are not alternatives. Volume decides how much van and how many crew the job needs; hours decide what that crew costs once it is on site. A firm quoting hourly is still using volume to work out how many hours to expect. Every market researched so far prices on volume, or hourly with volume deciding the crew and vehicle.
- Why do two removals firms quote very different prices for the same job?
- Usually because they are pricing different things. One may have counted a flight of stairs the other did not see, assumed a different crew size, or included packing materials. Genuine cost differences — depot location, wage rates, vehicle economics — explain part of it, but a large share of the spread is the same job measured differently, which is why the same firm can quote the same job twice and not match itself.
- What actually drives the cost of a house move?
- Four things, in roughly this order: the volume of goods, the crew hours needed to load and unload them, the distance and the driving time it implies, and the access at both ends — stairs without a lift, a long carry from the door to the van, restricted parking. Access is the one most often missed at survey and the one that most often makes a job overrun.
- Why does a 200-mile move cost more than twice a 50-mile one?
- Because distance changes the shape of the job, not just the mileage. Beyond a certain range the crew cannot load, drive, unload and return within a lawful driving day, so the move needs an overnight stay or a second day — and the cost steps up rather than sliding up. Duty-time limits are a legal ceiling, not a preference, so this is arithmetic rather than pricing policy.