How Much Do Moving Company Owners Make?

Why the job mix decides the income

Every move looks the same from the curb: a truck, a crew, boxes going in. What differs is who booked it, how it was priced, how far it travels, and who is liable when something breaks — and those four things account for most of the variation in owner earnings.

Local hourly residential is the volume base of the category. Priced by the hour with a crew and truck minimum, typically $140–$260 an hour for two movers and a truck depending on market. Margin is decent when the crew is efficient and the schedule is dense, and it evaporates on a day with one job and four idle hours. Local work is also intensely seasonal: the summer months and month-ends carry the year, and January through March can run at a loss in cold markets. When you look at a seller's monthly revenue, you should see that shape — if you do not, ask why.

Long-distance and interstate looks lucrative on a per-job basis and often is not. It requires federal operating authority, ties a truck and crew up for days, and exposes the company to fuel and deadhead risk on the return leg. Many small companies broker their long-distance jobs to carriers, keeping a commission and passing the work along — profitable, but it is a brokerage margin, not a moving margin, and it should be valued as one. Confirm which model the company actually runs.

Commercial and office moves are the most valuable work in the category. Scheduled in advance, often evenings and weekends at premium rates, repeat business from property managers, facilities teams, and corporate relocation programs, and paid on invoice by a business rather than collected from a stressed homeowner. Commercial accounts are also the closest thing to contractual revenue a moving company has. Get the actual agreements or the purchase-order history — not a logo wall.

Packing, materials, and specialty services carry the best gross margin in the business. Packing labor is billed at a full crew rate, boxes and materials are sold at two to four times cost, and specialty items — pianos, safes, gun safes, hot tubs, fine art — command flat premiums that far exceed the incremental labor. A company with low packing attachment is leaving money on jobs it is already doing, which is one of the few genuine upside levers a buyer can pull.

Storage is not a job type but the accrual on top of them, and on companies that own warehouse space it is frequently the steadiest profit line. Vaulted or containerized storage bills monthly, requires no crew once loaded, and converts one-time moves into recurring revenue. It also raises the question of what you are actually buying: if the warehouse is owned, value the real estate separately from the operating business.

Earnings by mix and size

Bands below assume a stabilized business in a normal year, with market-rate dispatch and operations wages already deducted where the owner does not personally hold those roles.

• Owner-operator, one truck, $200K–$400K revenue. SDE of $50,000–$110,000, and the owner is on the truck, answers the phone, and does the estimates. You are buying a truck, a phone number, and a review profile. Expect 1.5 to 2.5× SDE.
• Local residential, two to four trucks, $600K–$1.5M revenue. SDE of $110,000–$310,000. The most common listing in the category. The same revenue is a good business or a bad one depending almost entirely on lead source and claims rate.
• Local plus commercial mix, $1M–$2.5M revenue. SDE of $200,000–$480,000. Commercial work fills the weekday and off-season gaps that kill residential-only margin, which is why this combination out-earns either alone.
• Storage-led with owned warehouse, $1.2M–$3M revenue. SDE of $250,000–$650,000, with a meaningful share from monthly storage rather than moves. The best risk-adjusted format, and the one where real estate should be priced separately.
• Interstate carrier with own authority, $2M–$6M revenue. Adjusted EBITDA of $300,000–$900,000. Higher capital base, real regulatory obligation, and a safety rating that is itself part of the asset — and part of the risk.
• Lead-purchase-led, any size. Band it only after you know the acquisition cost per completed move. Above roughly 12% of revenue, apply a lower multiple and model what happens if platform lead prices rise 20%, because they have.

The cost structure

As a share of gross revenue, a stabilized local moving company runs roughly:

• Crew wages and payroll taxes: 32–42%. The dominant cost. Movers are typically hourly plus tips, and the hard part is not the rate but the utilisation — you pay for a crew that shows up, whether the day holds two jobs or none. Overtime in peak season and show-up pay in slow months are both routinely understated in a seller's P&L.
• Fuel: 4–8%. Modest on local work, materially higher on long-distance, especially where deadhead return legs are common.
• Insurance: 6–12%. Commercial auto, cargo, general liability, and workers' compensation. Moving carries one of the higher workers' comp classifications in the trades because the injury rate is real. Priced off your loss history and your drivers' records — get your own quote in diligence.
• Lead acquisition and marketing: 4–14%. The widest-varying line in the category and the one that most often explains a disappointing bottom line. Purchased leads, paid search, and directory listings versus organic ranking, reviews, and referral. Ask for cost per booked job, not cost per lead.
• Truck maintenance, tires, and registration: 5–9%. Box trucks work hard and lift gates fail. Ask for maintenance records by unit and get an independent inspection of gates, ramps, and brakes, not just engines.
• Vehicle depreciation and financing: 4–9%. A used 26-foot box truck runs $25,000–$70,000. Most companies carry equipment notes; confirm which are assumed and which are paid at closing.
• Claims and damage: 1–4%. The quiet killer. Broken furniture, damaged walls and floors, and lost items. A disciplined company with trained crews and proper padding holds claims near 1%; a sloppy one runs 4% or more, and that difference alone can exceed the owner's profit.
• Warehouse rent or ownership cost: 3–8%. If the warehouse is leased from the seller personally, the rent in the P&L may be nominal. Restate it to market before computing SDE.
• Materials, dispatch software, and admin: 4–8%. Boxes, pads, shrink wrap, dispatch and estimating software, and the person booking jobs and chasing invoices on commercial accounts.

Worked example: a $1.15M three-truck company

Three 26-foot box trucks, nine movers across three crews plus seasonal help, one dispatcher who also books, and an owner who does estimates, handles the two commercial accounts, and jumps on a truck in peak season. Revenue $1,150,000 — $640,000 local residential hourly, $210,000 commercial and office, $140,000 packing and materials, $90,000 long-distance brokered to carriers, and $70,000 storage in leased warehouse space.

Crew wages and payroll taxes run $437,000 at 38%. Fuel $69,000 at 6%. Insurance and workers' comp $115,000 at 10%. Lead acquisition and marketing $126,000 at 11%. Truck maintenance and registration $80,000. Vehicle notes and depreciation $75,000. Warehouse rent $46,000. Materials, software, and admin $78,000. Claims paid $34,000 at 3%. Total $1,060,000, leaving about $90,000.

The owner takes a $78,000 draw and runs roughly $12,000 of vehicle and phone through the business, both of which add back. But one adjustment cuts the other way: the owner personally does all estimating and manages the commercial relationships, so a market-rate sales and operations wage of $65,000 stays in. SDE lands near $115,000. At a 2.4× multiple — held down by the lead-purchase dependency and the claims rate — that indicates a price around $276,000.

Two levers matter here and both are unusually concrete. The first is lead cost. $126,000 of marketing against roughly 340 completed residential moves is about $370 of acquisition cost per job, and the seller's own records show most of it going to two lead platforms at a booking rate near 22%. Companies that shift even a third of that spend into local organic ranking, a disciplined review-request process at job completion, and a referral incentive typically hold volume while cutting acquisition cost per job by 30% to 50% within two seasons — worth $35,000–$60,000 of SDE. But this only works if the review profile and Google Business Profile actually transfer, which is a diligence item, not an assumption. The second is claims. At 3% of revenue the company is paying $34,000 a year for damage, roughly triple a well-run operation. Crew training, a mandatory pre-move walkthrough with photos, and proper floor and door protection are cheap; the claims line responds within a quarter. Ask for the claims log by crew — it is usually one or two crews producing most of the payouts.

The earnings claims to discount

Moving-company diligence is about establishing which revenue is repeatable, which is bought, and what liability travels with it.

• Review profile and phone number assumed to transfer. Frequently the most valuable asset in the deal and frequently not addressed in the letter of intent. Confirm in writing that the Google Business Profile, reviews, domain, phone number, and business name are included, and transfer them at closing rather than afterward.
• Purchased-lead revenue treated as durable. It is rented demand at a price the platform sets. Compute acquisition cost per completed move, not per lead, and model a 20% platform price increase.
• Commercial accounts shown as a logo wall. Get the agreements, the purchase-order history, or at minimum 24 months of invoices per account. A property manager who has used the company for years can switch on a phone call.
• Claims history not disclosed in full. Ask for 36 months of claims with amounts paid and any open files, and ask specifically about litigation and unresolved disputes. Open claims can follow the business depending on how the deal is structured.
• Movers paid as 1099 contractors. Common in this category and usually wrong. Reclassification exposure plus understated payroll tax and workers' compensation, which in moving is an expensive classification. Reprice at true W-2 cost.
• Cash and tip revenue that is not on the books. If a seller hints at unreported cash, you cannot finance it, you cannot verify it, and you should not pay for it. Value only what reconciles to deposits and tax returns.
• Operating authority assumed to come with the entity. For interstate work, verify the USDOT and MC numbers, the safety rating, and the transfer rules; for intrastate work check state licensing and tariff filing requirements. Authority and safety rating are not automatically portable in an asset sale.
• Below-market warehouse rent from a related party. Restate to market before computing SDE. This single adjustment routinely moves a small mover's valuation by six figures.
• Peak-season numbers annualised. Moving is one of the most seasonal trades. Insist on 24 months by month, and check whether the trailing twelve months the seller is marketing happens to start in April.
• Deferred truck and lift-gate maintenance. A fleet that looks clean can carry $20,000–$50,000 of imminent brake, gate, and transmission work. Independent inspection, then reduce the price by the deferred amount.

Reconcile every revenue claim to the dispatch and booking system, then to bank deposits, then to three years of filed tax returns. Our due diligence checklist sets out which documents to request in what order, how to verify business financials covers the reconciliation itself, and red flags when buying a business lists the patterns that should end a conversation.

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