Whether you’re moving a couch or an entire household to Apopka or to another suburb, moving is a costly, exhausting, and time-consuming event that you must do once or twice in your life — that’s why hiring a moving helper (or two) is more attractive.
But there’s a catch when hiring movers in Apopka which is the labor costs. If it’s your first time moving, you might not have the slightest clue about how much your move typically costs and the several factors that might influence the final price.
In this article, we’ll help you get started on that journey by discussing every type of service professional movers offer in Apopka, as well as the ballpark of how much it costs.
How Much Do Professional Movers Cost?
Depending on where you move in Apopka or to other part of the country and what type of move, you’re going for, you might have to pay more than the national average costs for hiring movers, which is around $800-$2,500 for local moves or $2,000-$5,500 for long-distance moves — excluding the several factors that can influence the final price.
There are several factors that will determine how much you’ll pay for your moving service, but most of the time they depend on the total quantity of your items (plus extra for bulky and specialty items), as well as the number of movers you’ll hire.
If you opt for a no-hassle, full-service moving company, this service will usually run you around $2,000; they usually include the following services in the moving process:
- packing and unpacking
- loading and unloading
- moving truck transport
- furniture reassembly and disassembly
- junk removal
For Local Moves
When hiring local movers, you should know that most of the local moving companies charge by the hour. This cost-per-hour basis usually starts the moment they leave the office, or the movers arrive at your property and will run regardless of whether the movers are packing, hauling, or in transit to your new location.
Local moves typically cost $90-$120 per hour. This computation is based on hiring 2 movers as well as renting a moving truck from the same company or another. If you opt for a moving labor-only service, it will cost you about $60-80 per hour depending on your location.
Other factors can also influence the final moving cost — factors such as travel fees, packing materials, and property size play a big role in determining your estimate.
The leading factor that will severely inflate the cost of your local move automatically is the overall size of your home.
For people staying in a studio apartment, 2 local movers for 4 hours are enough to clear out your home and load, transport, and unload your furniture into your new home. All in all, this should cost you around $450 or more depending on other smaller factors like weather, traffic delays, or even the amount of bulky furniture you have in your apartment.
For 2-bedroom homes or flats, 3 local movers are enough to complete the moving job in under 6 hours or less. This service can burn you a $1,000+ hole in your pocket.
For 3-bedroom homes, you can expect to pay about $1,600+ for a 4-man moving crew. If you don’t have any delays, setbacks, or issues during your moving process, your team should finish the job in about 7 hours or less.
For homes with 4 bedrooms or more, your total bill should be around at least $2,100 or more. This is assuming you have a 4-man moving crew lugging your stuff around for a full day, possibly even longer.
Travel fees can also enter the equation depending on your location and distance that you will travel. However, for most customers, this fee can be loosely negotiated with the moving company, so this is not a deal-breaker for most people.
Plus, remember that most local moving companies offer customers like you extra moving services like packing and unpacking your stuff to free up more of your time. If you decide to avail yourself of those services, you can expect your moving estimate to go up to double the rate for the additional work.
Also, keep in mind that when you hire local movers, or any movers in general, they can charge you for packing materials during your estimate. It’s better to recycle packing materials or even get free ones by asking friends and family for spare cardboard, packing tape or peanuts that collects dust at their home. However, moving companies pre-include these costs when availing extra services.
Finally, this is totally optional and not required, but always appreciated. If you’re happy with the service and you want to express gratitude to the movers who handled your move, you can always tip each of them 10-15% of the total moving cost. Tipping movers is a kind gesture and will mean the world to them since their hard work is compensated.
For Interstate Moves
An interstate move is any move done that crosses state lines, regardless of whether it took 9 miles or 90 miles to transport your furniture.
These types of moves work differently than local moves since they are calculated based on the total weight of all your belongings. On average, the total cost for interstate moves can amount to $4,890 depending on the weight of your furniture and size of your property.
Other influencing factors can be labor costs, additional services (packing services and insurance), as well as distance traveled.
For Long-Distance Moves
Any move done that runs over 100 miles or more is considered a long-distance move. Long distance moving companies charge you mainly based on weight, distance, and extra services rendered during your moving process.
For people interested in doing this move, you should expect your long-distance moving cost to be calculated by weight or cubic feet. To give you an example, most people shell out a ratio of around $0.7: 1 lb. for their belongings — this may or may not include additional services such as packing and unpacking.
However, most long-distance moves are tailor-made according to the client’s needs because there are too many factors to consider when estimating the moving price; that’s why it’s always placed at a fixed rate.
To provide a more accurate estimate, reputable moving companies encourage sending a representative to conduct an in-house inspection and assess the costs and risks altogether to form a quote that will make both the customer and company happy.
To get the best value for money when deciding to move long distances, it’s best to reach out to several long-distance movers in your area and ask them for in-house inspections. If they refuse to do so, move on, and look for another mover.
Another thing to watch out for is to ask for a binding estimate instead. This estimate protects you and your chosen moving company since these estimates work as a safeguard and will guarantee that your final cost stays as it is during the moving process.
Here is a list of estimated moving costs intended to give you a ballpark about the cost of a long-distance move:
For a studio apartment/1-bedroom house, the estimated cost should fall between $1,500-$3,200. This is assuming you have around 1,800-3,200 pounds of stuff to move and a thousand-mile distance to your new location.
For 2–3-bedroom homes, your estimate should cost somewhere between $3,500 to $7,800 or more. This is assuming you have an approximate weight of 5,000-9,000 pounds of stuff to move and a thousand-mile distance to your new location.
For 4-bedroom homes and up, your estimate should run you $8,000 or more in the red.
Of course, these prices are just an educated guess, and you should treat it like one. To learn more about your approximate long-distance moving costs, the best way to do that is to request a visual inspection from your mover that will write the estimate in front of you or look up a moving cost calculator on several websites.
How Do I Estimate Moving Costs?
As stated above, your final moving cost depends on several factors– like the distance of your old home to you knew one, the total volume of your belongings, and the services your movers may render during your process. Some minor factors are the travel fees, rental truck fee, insurance costs, packing material costs, storage fees, etc.
Here are the significant factors affecting the cost of hiring movers:
Size of your move
Movers calculate cost by the total volume of your belongings as well as considering the overall size of your property and then classifying it as either a small move or a big move.
In simpler terms, the more stuff you have the more money you’ll have to shell out and stuff into the moving truck. You can save money by taking only what you need now and, in the future, and leaving the rest — a garage sale really comes in handy when getting rid of unwanted items for a small profit.
Specialty items
Specialty items are pieces of furniture that are too important, fragile, old, or bulky to fit along with the rest of your items in the moving truck.
Items like a piano, pool table, hot tub, heirlooms, or car shipping costs require special care that moving companies bring in specialized movers to pack and handle those items, which can significantly drive up the final price of your moving cost.
Move distance
Simply put, the greater the distance you must travel from your old home to your new one, the heftier the price tag will be on your end. This is because moving distance is largely influenced by another factor — which is the size of your move (and fuel costs).
For example, moving an apartment’s worth of furniture is vastly different from moving a four-bedroom house’s worth of furniture since the load is heavier and may take more than one truck to move altogether.
Extra services. Each add-on service that you request from your moving company will cost you extra money. As you can guess, packing is the most frequent additional moving service, and the good news is that you can and should pack most of your things by yourself to save money when moving.
Packing supplies
While this factor is covered in most moving companies, some companies still charge this to customers. If you opt to get moving and packing services to save time and energy, you’ll also have to shoulder the necessary packing materials, which can affect your final moving costs a little.
Moving date
Choosing your moving date can add or subtract a significant chunk of your moving costs due to supply and demand. If you’re moving during the peak moving season, which is May to September, you’ll have to fork over more cash than usual since demand for professional moving companies is high.
The opposite can be said during the off-season (or during the winter months) since most people aren’t too keen on spending their winter packing up and moving to another country.
Accessibility
Accessibility influences a minor, yet integral part of the moving expenses. If you live in an apartment and are located on the higher floors, your moving company will charge you more (long carry fee, stair carry fee, and elevator fee) since inconveniences to your movers will either slow them down or require more extra pair of hands to achieve the same result.
Inconveniences such as climbing multiple flights of stairs, out-of-order elevators, or inadequate parking spaces can bring the final price up more than you think. In this case, we highly suggest having an in-house inspection with your moving company before your contract’s written in stone to find out about the inconveniences you might face.
Tipping
While this is not necessarily required to do, many people do tip movers to show their gratitude. For local moves, we found out that homeowners tipped at least 10-20% of the final moving cost to exceptional movers.
How to Save Money During a Move
If you want to save every penny you can during a move, we suggest scheduling your move as early as you can so you can take your time comparing estimates from several moving companies in your area.
We recommend scheduling your move a few months ahead so that way, your mover gets all the time they need to prepare and give you a service that’s worth every bang for your buck.
To help you choose a moving company, you can check out how well they perform through crowd-sourced review websites like Yelp and see if they have the quality you seek in their moving services.
How to Maximize Space and Pack Efficiently for Your Move
Always remember that packing and unpacking services aren’t automatically included in your moving service and by having it, it would cost you a thousand dollars on average (possibly less if you have fewer belongings), so you can save a bit more while maximizing space when doing it yourself.
You can affordably pack your belongings by buying moving boxes from local businesses or retailers — or even better, recycling free moving boxes that you can otherwise get from friends and family.
Conclusion
While a professional moving company may certainly not be cheap to employ, you can bring that cost down altogether by knowing how much the average moving cost of every move is as well as the cost factors influencing it.
That way, you are fully aware of the moving company costs, and you can begin to systematically reduce said costs by lowering the amount of each factor. One way to significantly lower the final price is by hiring professional movers in Apopka at a fraction of the original cost.
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