How We CalculateMoving Costs
My Fast Movers is an independent moving cost calculator and directory. We do not own trucks, employ crews or take payment to rank one company above another. Every price on this site is produced by the model described below.
We publish it because a moving cost estimate is only worth something if you can see how it was reached. If you disagree with an assumption here, you can say exactly which one.
1. Two moves, two formulas
The single most common mistake in an online moving calculator is pricing every move on distance. Movers do not work that way. Under about 100 miles the job is billed by the hour, so cost follows crew size and time on site. Past that, it is billed on weight and mileage.
Use a mileage formula on a 30-mile move and a studio prices identically to a five-bedroom house, because the mileage term swamps everything else and the result collapses to the minimum charge. So we switch basis at 100 miles and label which one produced your number.
2. Local moves — crew, hours and a travel fee
A local move is crew size × hourly rate × hours on site, plus a flat travel fee of $75 covering the drive to you and back. Full-service crews bill $40–$50per mover per hour. The crew sizes and hour bands below are the model's assumptions in full.
| Home size | Crew | Hours on site | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Studio | 2 movers | 2–3 hrs | $235 – $375 |
| 1 bedroom | 2 movers | 3–5 hrs | $315 – $575 |
| 2 bedrooms | 2 movers | 5–7 hrs | $475 – $775 |
| 3 bedrooms | 3 movers | 6–9 hrs | $795 – $1,425 |
| 4 bedrooms | 4 movers | 8–10 hrs | $1,355 – $2,075 |
| 5+ bedrooms | 4 movers | 10–12 hrs | $1,675 – $2,475 |
3. Long distance — mileage × home size × service
Beyond the local band the formula isdriving miles × home-size factor × service rate, floored at a per-service minimum. Home size stands in for weight, which is what carriers actually bill on: a studio is treated as roughly 1.5, a five-bedroom house 3.0. The right column shows what each factor produces on a 1,000-mile full-service move.
| Home size | Factor | 1,000 miles, full service |
|---|---|---|
| Studio | ×1.5 | $3,375 – $4,500 |
| 1 bedroom | ×1.8 | $4,050 – $5,400 |
| 2 bedrooms | ×2.0 | $4,500 – $6,000 |
| 3 bedrooms | ×2.3 | $5,175 – $6,900 |
| 4 bedrooms | ×2.6 | $5,850 – $7,800 |
| 5+ bedrooms | ×3.0 | $6,750 – $9,000 |
The published range runs from 10% below to 20% above the modelled figure. It is deliberately asymmetric: moves overrun far more often than they come in under.
4. Service type is the biggest lever you control
How you move matters more than who you hire. These three rates are what separate them in the model.
| Service | Per mile | Hourly (local) | Minimum |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full-service moversCrew loads, drives and unloads. Packing usually costs extra. | ×2.5 | $40–$50/mover | $500 |
| Moving containerYou load, a carrier drives the container to the destination. | ×1.8 | $30–$40/mover | $350 |
| Freight trailerYou load a share of a shared trailer. Cheapest and least convenient. | ×1.2 | $25–$35/mover | $250 |
5. Where the distances come from
Mileage is real driving distance between the two addresses, resolved by geocoding, not straight-line distance. The 141 published route pages carry a measured figure for that corridor. Straight-line mileage undercounts most real routes badly, and no carrier prices on it, so using it would make every estimate on the site read low.
City pages also show approximate distances to nearby cities, and those are estimated rather than measured: we take the great-circle distance between the two cities' coordinates and multiply by 1.166. That factor is not a guess either — it is the median ratio of measured driving miles to great-circle miles across the 141 routes we publish, with an interquartile range of 1.13 to 1.19. Anywhere a figure comes from that estimate rather than a measured route, it is labelled approximate.
6. Where the carrier listings come from
Every mover and auto-transporter listed on this site comes from the same public record: the FMCSA Motor Carrier Census via data.transportation.gov (az4n-8mr2), a federal register of every company that has filed with the Department of Transportation to legally operate as a carrier. We do not survey companies, accept submissions, or take payment to add or remove a listing — a company appears here because it appears on the federal register, in the state and city its own filing gives.
The household-goods directory (movers) keeps active registrations that declare household goods as cargo and give the company a moving-industry name, snapshotted September 24, 2026 — 16,215 carriers nationwide before we drop dormant filings with no trucks and no drivers on record. The auto-transport directory (car shipping) applies the same register filtered to companies that declare motor vehicles as cargo, snapshotted September 24, 2026 (5,830 nationwide before the same dormant-filing filter). Every listing carries its USDOT number, which opens that carrier's own record on the federal register so you can check it yourself rather than take our word for it.
Two things the register does not give us: it does not verify a company still operates at the address or phone number on file, and a fleet or driver count is whatever the company itself last reported, not something we measured. That is why every profile links to the live federal record instead of only printing our snapshot, and why we say "registered" rather than "recommended" throughout the site. City-page business listings (name, address, phone, rating) are a separate source — Google's own business data, ordered by review count, not re-ranked or verified by us.
6b. Roadside inspections and migration figures
Roadside inspections. Carrier profiles and route pages read FMCSA's Safety Measurement System carrier summary (file of September 13, 2026): the number of roadside inspections in the last 24 months, how many of the driver and vehicle inspections ended with an out-of-service order, and how many found a violation in each of FMCSA's public safety categories. A carrier's out-of-service rate is out-of-service inspections divided by inspections. The comparison figure is the same division over every listed mover with an SMS row (15,477 carriers, 4,462 of them inspected): 19.0% for vehicles, 13.0% for drivers. Inspections are roadside events, not a review of the company; a carrier with none has no record either way. The driver radius, CDL holders, owned or leased trucks and cargo classes come from the carrier's own MCS-150 filing in the Motor Carrier Census (file of October 7, 2026). City, long-distance, cost-guide and state-to-state pages sum the same rows over the carriers they list: inspected carriers, total inspections, and out-of-service inspections divided by inspections, printed with the counts behind each rate. Car-shipping pages compare their auto transporters with every listed auto transporter that has an SMS row (32.4% for vehicles, 10.3% for drivers).
How many people make a move. Route pages quote the Census Bureau's American Community Survey: the 2016–2020 county-to-county migration flows for the two cities' counties, and the 2024 state-to-state flows for interstate routes. Each city is placed in its county with the Census Geocoder. The figures are people a year, aged one and over, with the 90% margin of error the Census Bureau publishes; where the margin is as large as the estimate the page says so, and where the survey sampled nobody making a move the page says that rather than printing a zero. City, cost-guide and car-shipping pages use the same county table for the county the city sits in (Connecticut cities in their 2020 counties, which the 2016–2020 table uses): movers a year arriving from other states and from abroad, the five largest origin and destination counties, and the states most people leave for. The yearly total leaving for other states is a sum of county-to-county estimates, which has no published margin, so it is given as approximate. Destination prices in those tables are the model's two-bedroom figure for the estimated distance from the city to the largest place we cover in that county. State-to-state pages add the five largest county-to-county flows between the two states.
7. What the estimate deliberately excludes
The figure is transport. These sit on top of it, and we leave them out rather than invent an average that would be wrong for most people:
- Packing labour and materials, which scale with how much of the home a crew packs
- Storage between pickup and delivery
- Specialty items — pianos, safes, gun cabinets, large aquariums
- Vehicle shipping
- Long-carry, stair-carry and shuttle fees, which depend on access at both ends
- Full-value protection, the default valuation on interstate moves, which carries a charge
- Tips, which are customary but never quoted
8. What this model cannot tell you
A model built from distance, home size and service type is blind to everything else, and the rest is not small. It does not know that your new place is a third-floor walk-up, that the truck cannot park within 200 feet of the door, that you are moving on the last Saturday in July, or that one carrier in your area is short a crew that week.
So this is a planning range, not a quote, and only a licensed carrier can give you a binding estimate. Use the midpoint to set a budget and to sanity-check what you are quoted. If a quote lands far outside the range, that is not proof it is wrong — it is a reason to ask what it includes that the others do not.
9. Independence and corrections
No company pays to be included in this directory, to rank higher in it, or to be described favourably. Nothing here is an advertorial. Mover listings on city pages are Google Maps business data ordered by review count; we do not re-rank them and we have not verified their licensing, which is why every listing points you at the USDOT lookup.
Because every figure is generated from one model, a correction to the model corrects the whole site at once. If a price, distance or listing looks wrong, tell us and we will fix it rather than patch a single page.
Questions about our method
Where do your moving cost figures come from?
From a single pricing model published in this site's source, not from quotes we were given and not from carrier advertising. Local moves are priced on crew size, hours on site and an hourly rate. Long distance moves are priced on real driving mileage multiplied by a home-size factor and a service-type rate. The same module produces the calculator's answer, the tables on this page and every figure on a state, city or route page, so they cannot disagree.
Why do local and long distance moves use different formulas?
Because the industry bills them differently. Under about 100 miles, movers charge by the hour, so the price depends on how long the job takes and how many movers show up. Beyond that, they charge on weight and mileage. Applying a mileage formula to a short move produces the same number for a studio and a five-bedroom house, which is wrong, so we switch basis at 100 miles.
How accurate is the estimate?
It is a planning range, not a quote, and we would rather say that plainly. It is built to be right about the order of magnitude and the relative cost of your options — hourly versus mileage, container versus full service, 2 bedrooms versus 4. It cannot know about a third-floor walk-up, a truck that cannot park within 200 feet, or what one carrier's capacity looks like on your date. Use the midpoint to budget, then get three written estimates.
Where do the distances come from?
Route mileage is real driving distance between the two places, not straight-line distance. Straight-line mileage understates most corridors badly, and no carrier prices on it.
Are you paid to rank or include moving companies?
No. We take no payment for inclusion, position or favourable description. We also do not operate trucks or employ crews, so there is no carrier whose numbers we would have a reason to flatter. That independence is the only thing that makes a cost estimate here worth reading.
How do I report a figure that looks wrong?
Email us the inputs you used and the number you got. If the model is wrong we change the model, which corrects every page at once rather than patching one. If a distance or a listing is out of date, tell us and we fix the data.