How Much Is a Moving Company Worth?

How movers are priced

Normalize the earnings, then apply a multiple that reflects risk. For a moving company, normalizing has one dominant step: cost in a market wage for every role the owner personally fills. Owners of small movers routinely sell, estimate, dispatch, and run a truck on busy Saturdays. If none of that is expensed, the reported SDE is overstated by the cost of two or three real jobs. Do that arithmetic before you argue about the multiple — it moves the price further than the multiple does.

The general mechanics — what qualifies as an add-back, how SDE differs from EBITDA, how working capital is handled at close — are covered in how to value a business. Below is what is specific to movers.

What moves the multiple

• Where the leads come from — This is the single biggest driver. A mover ranking organically for its metro's moving searches, or holding a strong review profile that produces inbound calls, owns a durable asset. A mover buying every job from a lead broker owns a cost line, and its earnings can be competed away the month after you close.
• Whether a dispatcher exists — Dispatch and estimating are the two functions that decide whether crews are utilized. If both live in the seller's head, the buyer is acquiring a job. A trained dispatcher who stays is worth real multiple.
• Fleet age and DOT inspection history — A fleet averaging under about eight years with clean roadside inspection records means no near-term capital call and no compliance overhang. Trucks past useful life, or a poor CSA safety profile, both push toward the bottom of the range — the second one also affects insurance pricing.
• Local versus interstate — Interstate authority widens the addressable market and supports a premium, but only if it transfers cleanly. Verify the path before you pay for it.
• Commercial and repeat accounts — Office moves, apartment-complex relationships, and corporate relocation contracts are higher-margin and schedulable. Verified, transferable contracts raise the multiple; handshake relationships with the seller do not.
• Crew retention — Movers compete for labor constantly. A company with tenured crew leads and a real hiring pipeline is worth more than one that rebuilds its roster every spring.
• Seasonality — Most residential movers earn a majority of annual profit between May and September. That is normal and already priced in, but it means the buyer needs working capital for the winter and should never underwrite off a peak-quarter annualization.

What pulls the price down

These are the findings that most often reprice a moving-company deal between the letter of intent and the closing table. Each one is a reason to bid below the mid-range, or to shift part of the price into a seller note or an earnout rather than paying it at close.

• Owner selling, estimating, and dispatching with none of it expensed as wages.
• Most jobs sourced from a purchased lead marketplace with no owned web or review asset.
• More than about a third of the fleet past useful life, or trucks financed with balances above their market value.
• A weak FMCSA safety profile, open out-of-service violations, or an insurance renewal already quoted materially higher.
• An asset-purchase structure with interstate authority that will not transfer, leaving a licensing gap after close.
• Unresolved damage claims, or a claims history the seller has been settling personally and off the books.
• Warehouse or yard space on a short lease — a mover with nowhere to park is not an operating business.

Worked example: a $185,000 SDE local mover

A three-truck local mover reports $1.1M of revenue and $185,000 of SDE. The owner estimates and dispatches full time and has not expensed it; a working general manager for that role costs $70,000 fully loaded, so normalized owner earnings are closer to $115,000. At a mid-range 2.5x, that is roughly $290,000. Now adjust: about 70% of jobs come from the company's own site and a strong local review profile rather than purchased leads (up), two apartment-complex referral relationships are documented and have run three years (up), but one of the three trucks is thirteen years old with roughly $55,000 of replacement due and the yard lease has two years left (down). A realistic bid lands near $280,000–$310,000, with the truck replacement negotiated as a price reduction and the yard lease extended as a closing condition.

Run the same arithmetic on any listing you are considering. Restate the earnings with every owner role paid at market, divide the asking price by that number, and then ask what in this specific business justifies its position relative to the 2.0x–3.0x range. If the honest answer is the trucks, you are being asked to pay an operating multiple for used equipment.

Before you rely on any of this

Market ranges orient a first conversation; they do not price a deal. Once you are past the initial screen, get three years of tax returns and reconcile them to the job-management software's booking history rather than to the summary the broker sent. For movers specifically, also pull the FMCSA public record for the USDOT number — inspection results, crash history, and safety rating are all free to look up and will tell you in ten minutes what the seller may take three meetings to disclose. Working through our due diligence checklist before you sign a letter of intent is the cheapest money you will spend on the transaction.

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