How to Price a Removals Job Properly

Why most removals quotes are wrong

There are two ways to arrive at a price. You can start with the market, look at what the job is probably worth, and quote a number that feels competitive. Or you can start with your costs, work out what the job will actually consume, and add your margin on top.

Almost everyone in this industry does the first one. It is faster, it draws on real experience, and it usually wins about the number of jobs you expect to win. The problem is that it tells you nothing about whether the job made money. You find that out at year end, in aggregate, when it is far too late to do anything about it.

The second method takes longer the first time you do it and takes almost no time after that, because once you have built your cost model you are only ever substituting the specifics of the job.

The four costs that make up a removals job

1. Vehicle cost per day

This is not fuel. Fuel is the visible part and usually the smaller part.

The real daily cost of a vehicle is its finance or depreciation, insurance, road tax, MOT and servicing, tyres, repairs, and the operator licence cost apportioned across the fleet. Add fuel on top based on the actual mileage of the job, not an average.

Work this out annually per vehicle, then divide by the number of working days you realistically get out of it. Not 365. Not 250. The number of days that vehicle actually earns, after weekends, holidays, maintenance and the days it sits idle because there was no work for it.

That last adjustment is the one most firms skip, and it is the one that matters most. A van that costs you thirty thousand pounds a year and works two hundred days costs you a hundred and fifty pounds a day. The same van working a hundred and forty days costs you over two hundred. Same van, same costs, forty per cent difference in what it needs to earn.

2. Crew cost per hour

Take the hourly rate you pay, then add everything that sits on top of it.

Employer National Insurance. Pension contributions. Holiday pay, which is not free time, it is paid time you are not earning from. Sick pay, which since April 2026 is payable from day one of absence rather than day four, and now reaches part-time and casual staff who were previously below the earnings threshold. Training, PPE, and the cost of the time your crew spend not on jobs.

The number you arrive at is materially higher than the wage. For most operators the true cost of an hour of crew time is somewhere between a third and a half more than the hourly rate on the payslip.

Then apply it to the whole day, not the job. A crew booked for a day costs you the day, whether the job takes five hours or nine.

3. Overhead recovery

Your warehouse, your office, your insurance, your software, your phones, your accountant, your marketing, and your own time running the business.

Total it annually. Divide by the number of jobs you do in a year. That is what every single job needs to contribute before it has made you anything.

Firms that skip this step are the ones that finish a busy year wondering where the money went. The jobs were profitable at the margin and unprofitable once the building was paid for.

4. Materials

Boxes, tape, blankets, wrap, mattress covers, wardrobe cartons, crates. Straightforward to cost and easy to underestimate, because materials get used generously when nobody is counting them against a specific job.

Then, and only then, apply margin

Add your four costs together and you have the floor. Below that number the job loses money.

Your price is that floor plus the margin you have decided your business needs to operate, invest and survive a bad quarter.

The mistake is treating the margin as the flexible part when you are negotiating. If a customer pushes you and the only thing that moves is your margin, you are not discounting your profit, you are discounting the only part of the price that was ever yours.

What this looks like in practice

Take a two-crew local job with one vehicle, half a day.

You need the vehicle at its true daily rate, apportioned to the time used. You need two crew at their true hourly cost for the full booked period. You need the job's share of your annual overhead. You need the materials the job will actually consume.

Add them. That is your cost. Add your margin. That is your price.

The whole exercise takes minutes once your rates are set, and it produces a number you can defend, explain and stand behind when someone asks you to come down.

The four things that quietly destroy margin

Underestimating volume at survey. The single biggest cause of a job going wrong. If your survey says two hundred and fifty cubic feet and the reality is three hundred and twenty, you have priced a job that no longer exists and you will absorb the difference in overtime, a second trip, or a second day. This is covered in detail in our guide to running a removals survey that does not lose you money.

Not pricing access. Third floor with no lift, a two hundred metre carry, restricted parking, a narrow lane the seven and a half tonne cannot get down. Each one adds time, and time is your most expensive input.

Weekend and out of hours work at weekday rates. If your crew cost more on a Saturday and your price does not, you are paying for the privilege of working the weekend.

Not knowing what happened. If you never compare what you estimated against what the job actually consumed, you cannot improve your pricing. This is the discipline of measuring estimate against actual, and it is the fastest route to better quoting there is.

Where the industry actually sits

The professional end of the UK removals market operates on margins of around 1.5 per cent. That is not a market that can absorb pricing mistakes. It is a market where a handful of badly quoted jobs a month is the difference between a profitable year and a difficult one.

The structural reason is that this industry sells two things as one. It sells a service, which is skilled, and it sells logistics capacity, which is expensive. The customer sees a price for a house move. The operator carries the cost of vehicles, crews, a warehouse and compliance whether the phone rings or not.

Pricing from cost rather than from feel is the only reliable defence.

Frequently asked questions

How do you calculate the cost of a removals job?

Add four things: the true daily cost of the vehicle apportioned to the job, the true hourly cost of each crew member including employer National Insurance, pension and holiday pay, the job's share of your annual overhead, and the materials consumed. That total is your cost floor. Your price is that figure plus your margin.

What margin should a removals company aim for?

There is no universal figure, and it depends heavily on job mix and overhead structure. What is known is that the professional end of the UK market operates at around 1.5 per cent, which means pricing errors are not absorbable. The practical answer is to know your true cost first, because a margin applied to an unknown cost is a guess.

Why do removals jobs lose money?

Four causes account for most of it: volume underestimated at survey, access not properly assessed, weekend or out of hours work priced at weekday rates, and no measurement of estimate against actual so the same errors repeat.

Should I charge by the hour or by the job?

Either works commercially. What matters is that whichever you quote, you have calculated it from your actual cost base. An hourly rate that does not cover your true crew cost including on-costs loses money at every hour worked.

How do I work out my vehicle cost per day?

Total the annual cost of the vehicle: finance or depreciation, insurance, road tax, servicing, MOT, tyres, repairs and its share of the operator licence. Divide by the number of days that vehicle actually earns in a year, not the number of days in the year. The difference between those two numbers is where most vehicle costing goes wrong.

Sources and further reading

• Moovi Regulatory Review, July 2026 edition, for 2026 employment cost changes including statutory sick pay from day one and the National Living Wage
• HMRC guidance on employer National Insurance contributions
• The Pensions Regulator, on employer automatic enrolment duties

Figures current as at July 2026. Rates and thresholds are revised periodically and should be checked before use.