How to price a 2-bedroom move: setting flat-rate tiers that hold up

A 2-bedroom apartment, two men and a truck, a Saturday in June. The customer wants a number before they hang up. What do you quote?

Most operators answer that from memory, which works right up until the third-floor walk-up with no parking and nothing packed. The number is not really about bedrooms. It is about hours.

What actually drives the number

Every one of these is worth converting into hours on the day, because hours are what you are actually selling:

• Crew hours. Two movers on a straightforward 2-bedroom is a half day. Add a third and you buy back time, but you pay for it — the question is whether the access problems make the third man cheaper than the overtime.
• Flights of stairs, at both ends. Stairs cost time per trip, not once. A third-floor pickup and a second-floor drop is the same load moved twice as slowly.
• Long carry or no truck parking. Parking a hundred feet down the street, or across a courtyard, changes every single trip to the truck. This is the item movers most often eat.
• Packing vs. customer-packed. Loose items in open drawers is not a packed home. If you are boxing the kitchen on the day, that is hours plus materials.
• Elevators, COIs and building time windows. A reserved service elevator is fine. A shared elevator, or a building that only allows moves 9am–4pm, caps how much of the day you actually get.
• Drive time and distance. Both legs, plus the return to the yard, plus fuel and tolls.
• Disposal or a storage stop. Any extra stop is a second load-and-unload.

Building the number from cost up

Do this once with your own figures and you will never guess again. The structure is:

Illustrative example — replace every number with yours. Say a 2-bedroom you expect to run 6 hours, a two-man crew at a loaded cost of $45/hr each (wage, payroll tax, comp, not just the wage), $70 for truck and fuel on the day, and an hour of unpaid drive time you still have to cover.

1. Crew: 6 hrs × 2 × $45 = $540
2. Truck and fuel: $70
3. Drive time: 1 hr × 2 × $45 = $90
4. Direct cost: $700
5. At a 40% gross margin, price = $700 ÷ 0.6 ≈ $1,165

That is the middle of a 2-bedroom for that set of assumptions. Change the hours and you have the two ends of your range. The number itself means nothing until you plug in your own wage, your own insurance, and your own fuel — but the method holds regardless of the market.

Where a range comes from

A range is not indecision. It is the honest span between "packed, ground floor, driveway parking" and "third-floor walk-up, half-packed, park down the block." These are the tiers MoversQ ships with, and they are set by hours, not by square footage:

These are defaults to overwrite, not going rates. A crew in a dense city with permit parking and walk-ups is not priced like a crew working suburban driveways.

Flat rate vs. hourly: pick per job type

Flat rate wins when

• Local, single-day, and you know the access at both ends.
• The home is packed, or you are packing it and have quoted that separately.
• You are competing on booking speed — a customer will book a number, not a "we'll see".
• Your crew is experienced enough that your hour estimates are usually right.

Hourly still wins when

• You cannot see the access — no photos, no walkthrough, vague answers about stairs.
• Hoarder-volume or garage-and-basement jobs where the volume is genuinely unknown.
• Packing-heavy jobs where the customer's readiness decides the day length.
• Long-distance, where weight and mileage rules apply anyway.

Mixing them is normal: flat rate on the standard local moves that fill your calendar, hourly on the ones you cannot see. If you have not settled that question yet, the background argument is here: flat rate vs hourly, and which one your company should quote.

The honest risk of a range

A quote of "$800 to $2,000" with no explanation is where disputes and chargebacks come from. The customer heard $800. You planned for $1,600. Someone is angry by 4pm.

What fixes it, in order of how much it matters:

1. Say what moves the price inside the range, up front. Flights of stairs, long carry, packing, whether things are boxed and ready to load. Four items, plain language, before they book.
2. Name the typical case. "Most 2-bedroom moves like this land near $1,400." A midpoint gives the customer something concrete to hold on to and quietly sets expectations away from the bottom of the range.
3. Put the same wording in the confirmation. Whatever you said on the phone has to appear in writing in the booking confirmation, or it did not happen.
4. Confirm before the truck rolls. If the walkthrough changes the picture, say the new number then, not on the invoice.

Pre-quote checklist

Five things to confirm before you commit to a flat number:

1. Flights of stairs at pickup and at drop — and whether either has a usable elevator.
2. Where the truck can actually park at both ends.
3. Whether the home is fully packed, and who is packing what is left.
4. The heavy or awkward items: piano, safe, treadmill, oversized sectional, appliances.
5. Building rules: move-in windows, COI requirement, elevator reservation.

A booking form that asks these before the customer submits does the same job as the phone call, and does it at 11pm while you are asleep.

Next

If you want these tiers live on your own site so customers see the number without calling, the install is one snippet: how to add online booking to your WordPress site.