Moving Cost Data: What 2,300 Modeled Corridors Show

What this dataset is

Moving cost figures published elsewhere are usually a handful of quotes, a survey of a few hundred consumers, or a national average with no route attached. This is a different object: one deterministic model applied identically to 2,300 corridors, so a corridor in the tenth percentile and one in the ninetieth differ because of distance, weight and local labor cost — not because two different companies answered two different surveys. Comparability is the whole value here, and it is also the limit: these are modeled costs, not transaction records. We do not hold carrier invoices and we do not claim to.

Distribution of the modeled 3-bedroom cost

Every published corridor priced for a full-service 3-bedroom move, no packing, no storage, no month selected. Percentiles are across corridors, not across quotes.

By distance band

The ten distance bands the model prices against, each showing the 3-bedroom range at a national-baseline labor market and how many published corridors sit nearest that band. The cost-per-mile column is an output of the model — the midpoint divided by the distance. No carrier charges that rate, and it falls as distance rises because origin and destination service is a fixed cost spread over more miles.

By home size

The same corridor set priced for each of the six home size profiles. Shipment weight is the single largest driver in the model, and the spread between the smallest and largest profile is wider than the spread between the cheapest and most expensive corridor at a fixed size.

Corpus and model provenance

The labor index, and how little it matters

The local labor index is a declared modelling assumption, not measured market data. We do not license metro-level moving-labor wage data, so we assign each of the 81 priced metros an index describing relative crew and access cost against a 1.00 national baseline, from 1.35 in Honolulu down to 0.90 in Little Rock.

Here is the number that assumption is worth. Swept across its full range on an otherwise identical move, the labor index moves the estimate by about $450. Home size moves it by $10,150 and distance by $8,300 across their ranges. The softest input in the model is also the one that changes your number least, by roughly an order of magnitude — which is why we publish it openly rather than presenting it as sourced data. The full ranked sensitivity sweep for all eight inputs is on the calculator page.

Download and reuse

The aggregate table is published at /data/moving-cost-model-summary.csv — distributions, band summaries, the labor index table and the sensitivity sweep. It contains aggregates only; the full corridor set is not distributed. Reuse is licensed CC BY 4.0: attribute Moving Cost Advisor and link to this page. If you cite a figure, cite the model version with it: the numbers change when the rate table is reviewed.

How each input is derived is documented on the pricing methodology page, and you can price a single move against the same model on the moving cost calculator. The same corridor set read by moving method — which of full-service, container and rental truck prices lowest, and what labour the cheaper columns transfer to you — is published in our cheapest-way-to-move analysis.