Booking a removals company means handing a stranger your furniture, your paperwork, and the keys to two addresses. Moving house is one of a small number of life events people consistently rate as among the most stressful things they'll go through, in the same territory as changing jobs or planning a wedding — and who's carrying your belongings on the day is one of the few parts of that stress that's actually within your control before it happens. A star rating alone doesn't tell you much about how that's going to go: a company can average 4.5 stars while still being the wrong fit for your specific move, because an average is a summary of thousands of different jobs, and yours hasn't happened yet. This is what's actually worth checking, and why each one matters more than the headline number.
Why the average rating isn't the whole answer
Star ratings are useful for ruling companies out — a mover sitting at 2.5 stars across a meaningful number of reviews has a real, visible problem — but they're much weaker at ruling one in. A 4.7 built from a thousand reviews over eight years and a 4.7 built from forty reviews over eight months are not the same kind of evidence, even though they show the same number on the page. The first has been tested at volume and under pressure; the second might just not have had a bad week yet. Neither figure tells you anything about whether the specific service you need — a piano, a difficult stairwell, a long-distance job — is something that company has actually handled well, which is why the criteria below matter more than the number at the top of the page.
Employed crews or subcontracted ones
Ask directly whether the people loading your van work for the company or are brought in for the day. Neither answer disqualifies a mover, but it changes what you're buying: an employed crew usually means more consistent training, a direct line of accountability if something goes wrong, and a crew who've likely worked together before and know each other's habits under a heavy sofa on a narrow staircase. A subcontracted model — common among online marketplaces that match customers to independent drivers — can still be entirely reliable, and it often comes with lower prices and more flexible availability, but it's worth knowing which one you're getting before the day, not during it, because it changes who you'd actually be dealing with if something needed resolving afterwards.
Accreditation, and what it actually covers
Membership of a trade body such as the British Association of Removers (BAR) brings a code of practice and, with some memberships, an Advance Payment Guarantee if the company stops trading before your move — a real, practical protection if a firm takes a deposit and then ceases trading before moving day. FIDI membership serves a similar function for international moves specifically. It's a genuinely useful thing to check for, and worth doing properly: check it directly against the trade body's own published member list, not just a logo displayed on a website, since a logo is easy to display and can be slow to remove after a membership has actually lapsed.
It's also worth being realistic about what accreditation doesn't tell you. A BAR member can still have a bad day, and a company without any accreditation at all can still do excellent work — plenty of good, small, local firms have never applied for trade body membership because the cost and paperwork don't make sense at their scale. Accreditation is one useful signal among several, not a substitute for the rest of this list.
Whether the price is published or requested
A lot of removals pricing only appears after you've handed over your phone number. That's not automatically a red flag — some jobs genuinely need a survey to price properly, particularly large or unusual moves — but a company that publishes at least its hourly structure lets you rule itself in or out in two minutes instead of after a phone call. If a site shows you nothing until you submit a form, it's reasonable to ask why before filling it in, and reasonable to be more cautious with your contact details if the answer isn't satisfying.
Fixed quote vs verbal estimate
Get anything you're told in writing. A phone estimate can move once a crew sees the actual volume; a written quote, ideally given after someone has actually seen or heard a proper description of what's being moved, is what you want to be holding if the final invoice doesn't match what was expected. This matters more than it sounds: the single most common complaint about removals companies, across the industry generally rather than about any one firm, isn't a bad crew — it's a final bill that didn't match the number originally given. A written quote is the paper trail that resolves that dispute in your favour if it ever comes to one.
Insurance, specifically
"We're insured" is not an answer. Ask what Goods in Transit and Public Liability cover actually means for your move — what it covers, what it excludes, and what the excess is if there is one — and what the process is if something is damaged: who you contact, how quickly, and what evidence they'll want. A mover that can answer this without hesitation has probably had to use the process before, which is a reasonable thing to want in a company you're trusting with everything you own.
It's also worth asking specifically about anything of unusually high value — art, antiques, a musical instrument, expensive electronics — since standard Goods in Transit cover sometimes caps the amount payable per item, and a single high-value piece can exceed that cap without anyone realising until it's too late to matter.
Recent reviews, not the historic average
A company's overall rating can be built on years of reviews and say very little about how it's run today. Sort review platforms by most recent and read the last three to six months specifically — service quality can shift after a change of ownership, a rapid expansion, a change of depot, or simply a bad quarter, and the headline average is usually the last thing on the page to reflect that. A company with a strong historic average and a rough last two months is telling you something the star rating alone won't.
Read a handful of the negative reviews too, not just to count them but to see what they're actually about. A cluster of complaints about the same specific thing — a particular branch, a particular type of job, communication around delays — is far more informative than the number of stars attached to them. A single detailed one-star review describing a missed collection date tells you more about what could go wrong than fifty five-star reviews saying "great service" with no detail at all.
Questions worth asking on the first call
A short list, in the order they tend to matter: how the crew is sized for a job like yours and whether that's based on what you've actually described or a generic assumption from your bedroom count; whether the quote is an estimate or a fixed figure, and if it's an estimate, what would cause it to change; what happens if the completion date moves, particularly on a chain-dependent house sale; whether packing materials are included or charged separately; and what the actual claims process looks like if something is damaged. How directly and specifically a company answers these — rather than whether the answer is favourable — is often the most useful signal in the whole conversation.
Booking lead time and availability
The final weekend of any given month is consistently the busiest time to move house across the UK, since that's when the majority of tenancies end and many house sales complete. If your date falls near the end of a month, particularly in summer, booking earlier rather than later matters more than it would for a mid-month, midweek move — not because prices necessarily rise, but because the vehicle and crew size you actually want may simply not be available at short notice once that window fills up.
Red flags worth taking seriously
A few patterns are worth being genuinely cautious about, more so than any single one of the criteria above on its own: a company that pressures a large deposit before providing any written confirmation of the job; one that can't or won't say whether crews are employed or subcontracted; a quote that seems significantly below every other one you've received for what should be the same job, with no clear explanation for the gap; and a company with no verifiable trading history at all — not necessarily a new company, since every company was new once, but one with no reviews, no address, and no way to check anything about it beyond its own website.
Where AFS stands against this list
In the interest of being checkable rather than just stating it: AFS Removals was incorporated in February 2020 (Companies House number 12460159), so it doesn't have decades of trading history to point to. The rate card is published in full rather than requested — hourly rates by vehicle and crew, per-mile charges, stair charges and per-item furniture prices are all online. Goods in Transit and Public Liability cover, packing materials and a named move coordinator are included as standard on every job, not sold separately. As of 2 September 2026, AFS held 4.8 out of 5 from 335 Google reviews and 4.5 out of 5 from 259 Trustpilot reviews. Trade accreditation is not something we hold today, and we'd rather say that plainly than leave a logo doing the talking.
None of that makes AFS the right fit for every move — the point of the checklist above is that it can be run against any mover, including this one, and get a straight answer either way. A company willing to be measured against its own advice is, at minimum, not hiding from the questions.
What to actually check on moving day itself
Choosing the company well is most of the work, but a handful of things are worth confirming on the day, before the van is loaded rather than after. Confirm the crew has the correct addresses and any access notes that were discussed at booking — a note made three weeks earlier during a phone call doesn't always make it to the people actually on site. Walk the property with whoever is leading the crew before anything moves, so both sides agree on what's going and what's staying, and flag anything fragile, unusually heavy, or sentimentally important at that point rather than partway through loading. Keep a phone number for your coordinator or point of contact somewhere other than in the removals firm's app, in case anything needs resolving quickly.
The difference between a mover and a broker
It's worth understanding one distinction that isn't always obvious from a company's marketing: some businesses that look like removals companies are actually brokers, taking a booking and passing it on to a third-party crew, sometimes one they've never worked with before and won't work with again. This isn't inherently dishonest — some brokers are transparent about the model and it can genuinely widen availability — but it changes who's actually accountable if something goes wrong, and it's a reasonable, direct question to ask: is the crew that turns up on the day employed or contracted by the company being booked, or has the job been passed to somebody else entirely?
How much this decision is actually worth getting right
It's easy to treat the choice of mover as a minor logistics decision compared to everything else involved in a move — the property itself, the finances, the school catchment, the timing. But the removals company is the only part of the process with direct physical custody of everything owned, for several hours, on one of the more chaotic days in a household's calendar. Time spent checking the criteria above before booking is disproportionately well spent relative to how little most people actually spend on it, and it's the one part of a house move that genuinely can be de-risked in advance, with a phone call and a few direct questions, rather than simply hoped for on the day.
Local firms versus national brands
There's no universally correct answer to whether a small local firm or a large national one is the better choice — each trades off against the other in fairly predictable ways. A national brand typically has more depth: more vehicles if one breaks down, more crew if someone's off sick, and often a longer, more established complaints process if something needs escalating. A local, independent firm often has more flexibility on scheduling, a more personal relationship with the same few coordinators handling your job start to finish, and sometimes sharper pricing, since there's less overhead to support. Neither structure guarantees quality on its own; the criteria earlier in this guide — employed crews, published pricing, recent reviews — apply just as much to a five-van local firm as to a household name.
What a reasonable deposit looks like, and what doesn't
It's common and normal for a removals company to ask for some form of deposit or advance payment to secure a date, particularly for a larger job booked well in advance. What's worth being more careful about is the scale and the timing of that request relative to the size of the job: a modest deposit to hold a date is standard practice across the industry; a request for the full amount weeks before the move, with no written confirmation of what's been booked, is a pattern worth being more cautious about, regardless of how the company otherwise presents itself. If a BAR-accredited firm is being used, the Advance Payment Guarantee scheme mentioned earlier exists specifically to protect exactly this kind of payment.
Getting more than one quote without wasting a day on it
Comparing two or three quotes properly, using the like-for-like approach described earlier in this guide, is worth doing even when one company already feels like the obvious choice, because it calibrates what a normal price and a normal answer to the questions above actually looks like. It doesn't need to take long: the same short list of details — both postcodes, an honest description of what's moving, and any access complications — given to each company being considered is enough for a fair comparison, and most of that information only needs to be worked out once.
The one question that cuts through most of the above
If only one question could be asked of a removals company before booking, the most efficient one is simply: what happens if something goes wrong. Not whether something will go wrong — every mover, however good, occasionally has a bad day — but specifically what the company's own process is when it does: who takes the call, how quickly, and what they actually do about it. A confident, specific answer to that single question tends to correlate with good answers to everything else in this guide, because a company that has genuinely thought through its own failure modes has usually also thought through the crew training, the insurance, and the communication that prevent most of those failures happening in the first place.
Timing the booking itself
There's a balance to strike between booking early enough to secure the date and crew you want, and booking too early to have an accurate picture of what's actually being moved. For most house moves, four to six weeks ahead is a reasonable window to have a company confirmed, with the exact inventory and access details refined closer to the day as plans firm up. For a move tied to a house sale completion, where the date itself can move at short notice, it's worth discussing with any company under consideration how flexible they can be if completion slips by a few days either way — some are considerably more accommodating of that uncertainty than others, and it's a fair thing to ask about before booking rather than discovering under pressure when a completion date changes.
Bringing it all together
None of the criteria in this guide are complicated on their own, and most of them boil down to the same underlying idea: prefer companies that are specific and checkable over ones that are vague and reassuring. A specific answer about crew structure, a specific published rate, a specific claims process, a specific recent review with real detail in it — each of those can be verified, and each of them says more than a general impression of friendliness on the phone. Run through the list once, for whichever companies are genuinely being considered, and the choice tends to become obvious well before the booking itself needs to happen.
