Moving house is regularly ranked among the most stressful things a person does, and money is a big part of why: surveys of UK movers consistently find that not knowing the final cost in advance is one of the biggest sources of anxiety about the day itself, ahead of the packing and the paperwork. A lot of removals pricing stays deliberately vague for exactly that reason — showing a number gives a customer something to compare and something to push back on, and plenty of firms would rather have the conversation on the phone, on their terms, than in a browser tab next to three competitors. AFS publishes what it can and says plainly where the rest is priced individually. This article is that structure, worked through properly, with the actual published figures rather than an industry-average guess.
Why removals pricing looks the way it does
Almost every removals company in the UK prices on some combination of the same four inputs — vehicle size, crew size, time, and distance — because those four things are what actually cost the company money: fuel and vehicle wear, wages, hours on the clock, and miles on the road. Where companies differ is not usually the inputs but how much of the resulting structure they're willing to show you before you've given them a phone number. A firm that only quotes after a phone call isn't necessarily hiding something — some jobs genuinely need a survey to price accurately, particularly large or unusual ones — but it does mean you can't rule a company in or out on price alone until you've had that call. Publishing the hourly structure, as this page does, changes that: you can work out whether a mover is even in your range before you pick up the phone.
What decides the price
Four things: the vehicle, the number of movers, the hours it takes, and the distance between the two addresses. Nothing else changes the base rate — a move is not priced differently by postcode, and there is no separate long-distance tariff hidden behind a different set of numbers. A 300-mile move is priced the same way a 3-mile one is, just with more time and more miles in the total. That's a genuinely different model from firms who quote long-distance work as a separate product; on this rate card, distance is just another line in the same sum.
Property size — the number of bedrooms — is not on that list, and that surprises people. Bedroom count is a reasonable starting point for guessing at a vehicle, but it's the volume of what's actually being moved that determines the real cost: a sparsely furnished three-bedroom house can need a smaller vehicle than a one-bedroom flat someone has lived in for fifteen years. Two people can request a quote for the 'same' size of house and get two different answers, and both can be correct.
The hourly rates that are published
The smallest vehicle, a Small Transit with 350 cubic feet of load space, is £55 an hour with a driver only, with a two-hour minimum booking. The largest, a 7.5 tonne lorry with 1,600 cubic feet, is £120 an hour with a driver only, with a three-hour minimum. Those are the two confirmed driver-only rates on the rate card. Rates with two, three or four movers are not yet published online for any vehicle — they exist, but you get the real number by phone rather than a guess here. That's a deliberate choice rather than an oversight: a website that states a crewed rate it can't actually honour on the day is worse than one that says plainly it needs a call.
Distance is charged per mile on top of the hourly rate, and it varies by vehicle: £1.20 a mile on the Small Transit, £2.40 a mile on the 7.5 tonne lorry. Larger vehicles cost more to run per mile — fuel economy, tyres, and wear all scale with size — so it would be misleading to quote one flat mileage rate across a fleet that ranges from a small van to a 7.5 tonne lorry.
Minimum bookings, and why they exist
Every vehicle has a minimum number of hours attached to it — two hours on the vans, three on the Luton and the two lorries. This isn't a way of padding the bill; it reflects the fact that a crew and vehicle committed to your job for the morning have a real cost even if the job itself takes forty minutes. Almost every removals company in the country works the same way, whatever the exact minimum they set. If your job is genuinely small — a single item, a short local hop — it's worth asking directly whether a smaller vehicle with a shorter minimum brings the total down, rather than assuming the biggest available van is the safe choice.
The fixed-price alternative
If you want the total settled before moving day rather than billed by the hour, a Pack & Move package covers packing and the move together at a fixed price by property size: £1,850 for a two-bedroom property, £2,450 for a three-bedroom one. Four bedrooms and up are priced individually rather than guessed at — the confirmed figures only go as far as two-bed and three-bed. A fixed price is the right choice for anyone who values certainty over the possibility of paying less: if the job runs long on an hourly rate, the meter keeps running; on a fixed price, it doesn't, but you're also not the one who benefits if the job goes quickly.
There's a genuine trade-off here, not just a marketing choice between the two. Hourly pricing rewards a fast, well-prepared move — if you've packed everything yourself and cleared a path to the van, an hourly job can come in well under what a fixed price would have charged for the same property size. Fixed pricing rewards the opposite: a complicated access situation, three flights of stairs at both ends, or a house that turns out to have far more in it than expected. Neither model is objectively cheaper; they simply put the risk in different places.
What gets charged separately
Two things sit outside the hourly rate so it stays accurate for people who don't need them. Furniture dismantling and reassembly is priced per item, starting at £15 for a single bed and rising for larger beds, wardrobes and desks. Stairs above the first floor are a flat charge per property: £20 for the second floor, £40 for the third, £60 for the fourth, and £20 per floor beyond that. Ground and first floor are included, and a working lift means no stair charge at all, at either address.
The logic behind separating these out is the same in both cases: bundling them into every hourly rate would mean everyone subsidises the jobs with lots of stairs and lots of flat-pack furniture, even the people moving from a ground-floor flat with nothing to take apart. Pricing them individually keeps the base rate honest for the majority of moves that don't need either.
What most quotes leave out, and why it matters
The most common complaint in removals reviews, across the industry rather than about any one firm, isn't the headline price — it's a final bill that doesn't match what was expected. Almost every case of that traces back to one of a small number of things: a verbal estimate given before anyone actually saw the volume being moved, a stair or access charge that wasn't mentioned until the day, or a job that ran well past the hours originally assumed because the estimate of "how long this will take" was optimistic rather than realistic. None of those are necessarily dishonesty — a phone estimate genuinely can't account for what a crew finds when they arrive — but they're all avoidable with a bit of preparation on the customer's side: an accurate inventory, a clear description of stairs and parking at both ends, and a written quote rather than a verbal one wherever the job is large enough to justify it.
A worked example, from the published rates only
The smallest job this site can price without a phone call: a Small Transit, driver only, for the two-hour minimum, with ten miles between the two addresses. That's 2 hours at £55 plus 10 miles at £1.20, which comes to £122. Add a second floor at the collection address and a single bed to dismantle, and it's £122 + £20 + £15 = £157. This is arithmetic on the published rates for illustration, not a quote — a real job needs a crew size, which is priced individually, and most jobs of any real size will need more than a driver working alone.
Scaling that same arithmetic up: a 7.5 tonne lorry, driver only, for the three-hour minimum, with twenty-five miles to cover, comes to 3 hours at £120 plus 25 miles at £2.40, which is £360 + £60 = £420. Again, that's the driver-only rate on the largest vehicle, not a crewed job — in practice a lorry that size is very rarely moved with one person, so treat this as the floor of what a job on that vehicle could cost, not a realistic estimate of what it will.
Things that change the number, even on a published rate card
A published hourly rate is not the same as a fixed prediction of your total, and it's worth being clear-eyed about what can still move the final figure even when every rate is known in advance. Access is the biggest one: a van that can park directly outside the front door costs less in labour than one that has to be loaded from a spot fifty metres away, because every trip back and forth is time on the clock. Lifts that are out of service, communal stairwells that are narrower than expected, and parking restrictions that only become clear on the day are the practical realities that separate an estimate from an invoice.
Timing matters too, in a way that's true across the removals industry generally rather than specific to any one firm: the final weekend of a month is consistently the busiest time to move house in the UK, because that's when most tenancies and many completions land, and demand at that point in the calendar can affect how much notice you need to give and, on some pricing models, what you pay. If your dates are flexible, a weekday move, or one in the middle of the month, tends to be easier to book at short notice.
What's included either way
Goods in Transit cover, Public Liability cover, packing materials and a named move coordinator come as standard on every move, hourly or fixed price. None of them are sold as an add-on, and none of them show up as a separate line on the invoice — they're baked into the rate, whichever pricing model you choose.
VAT and what isn't stated here
This guide is deliberately silent on VAT treatment for one reason: it varies by the specifics of the job and is confirmed at the point of quotation, not before. Any figure quoted above should be read as the labour and mileage cost as published, with VAT treatment to be confirmed rather than assumed either way. The same applies to anything not explicitly covered above — if a page or a person can't point you to where a cost is published, the honest answer is that it isn't yet, and the way to get a real number is to ask.
How to get an accurate number for your own move
The fastest way to a genuinely accurate figure, rather than an illustrative one like the examples above, is to be specific rather than approximate when you ask: the two full postcodes, roughly what's being moved (not just a bedroom count), and anything unusual about access at either end — stairs, a lift, restricted parking, a long carry from the road. A coordinator working from that information can match a vehicle and crew to the job properly, rather than working backwards from a guess.
Doing it yourself, and what that actually saves
Renting a van and doing the move without a removals company is almost always the cheapest option on paper, and it's worth being honest about why: you're paying for the vehicle rental and the fuel, and nothing else — no labour, no minimum booking, no insurance on the goods themselves beyond whatever your van hire and home contents policy already cover. What that comparison usually leaves out is everything a hired crew is actually being paid for: the physical work of carrying a three-piece suite down two flights of stairs, the judgement of how to load a van so nothing shifts on the motorway, and the time cost to you and anyone helping you, which rarely gets counted against the money saved. For a small, single-room move with willing friends and a free weekend, doing it yourself can be the right call. For anything larger, the comparison usually isn't as favourable as the headline van-hire price suggests, once a full day of two or three people's time is priced in honestly.
Regional and seasonal cost factors, generally
Removals pricing across the UK isn't set nationally, and a few broad patterns hold across most of the industry rather than being specific to any one company. Moves in and around major cities, and particularly London, tend to cost more than the same job would in a smaller town, largely because of parking restrictions, congestion charging, and the longer time it takes a crew to physically get a van close to the property. The summer months, especially July and August, are the busiest time of year to move house in the UK — driven partly by families timing a move around the school calendar — and demand at peak times can mean less availability at short notice, even where the underlying hourly rate doesn't change. None of that is a reason to assume you'll pay more; it's a reason to book earlier if your date falls in a busy period, so the vehicle and crew you actually want are still available.
Common questions about the price
Is the cheapest quote always the best one? Not necessarily. A quote that's noticeably lower than everyone else's for the same job is worth asking questions about — what vehicle and crew size it assumes, whether insurance is included, and whether the hours quoted are realistic for the volume involved. The cheapest number on the page and the cheapest total on the day are not always the same figure.
Do you need to tip the crew? This isn't a published policy on this site, or, as far as this guide can confirm, a universal industry standard — it's a personal decision, and reasonable people land on different answers. If it matters to you, it's a fair thing to ask a coordinator about directly rather than guess at.
Can the price go up after booking? On an hourly rate, the total is a function of how long the job actually takes, so yes, it can move from an estimate if the job runs longer than expected — which is exactly why an accurate inventory and an honest description of access matter before you book, not after. On a fixed-price package, the total is agreed in advance and shouldn't change unless the scope of the job itself changes.
Not sure which vehicle is needed? That's a normal position to be in, and it's what a coordinator is for — describing what's being moved, including the loft, the shed and anything easy to forget, is enough for someone experienced to recommend a vehicle and crew size without needing to know the cubic-foot capacities in advance.
The removals cost is rarely the whole moving budget
It's worth zooming out from the removals quote itself, because for most people it's one line in a bigger moving budget rather than the whole of it. A rented property typically comes with a deposit at the new address, sometimes before the old one's has been returned. An end-of-tenancy clean, whether done personally or paid for, is a near-universal expectation on a rented exit. Anyone buying rather than renting is dealing with solicitor's fees, and possibly Stamp Duty, on a completely separate timeline to the removal itself. None of those are removals costs, and none of them appear on a rate card — but budgeting for the move as if the van is the only expense is one of the more common ways people are caught out financially by the process, and it's worth listing everything out before assuming the removals quote is the number that matters.
Comparing more than one quote properly
If more than one company is being considered, the comparison is only meaningful when it's like for like. Two quotes for what looks like the same job can differ because one assumes a smaller vehicle than the job actually needs, one has priced in furniture dismantling and the other hasn't mentioned it, or one is a driver-only rate being compared against a fully crewed one. Before comparing a total, it's worth checking that both quotes cover the same vehicle size, the same crew, the same access assumptions, and the same list of what's included — cover, materials, and dismantling in particular. A lower total built on a smaller vehicle than the job needs isn't a better price; it's a different, incomplete job.
