How much do movers actually make? Crew wages, owner pay, and the math between them

What we pay our movers, what a helper on your first jobs should cost, and what the owner of a two-man moving company actually keeps on a $900 job. Real numbers from upstate New York, not a salary website.

Search "how much do movers make" and you get a salary site telling you the national average is somewhere around $18 an hour, and nothing about what the person who owns the truck takes home. That number is useless to you for two reasons. It is an average of every mover in the country, from a nineteen-year-old on his first day to a foreman who has done two thousand jobs. And it tells you nothing about the only number that matters if you are starting a company: what is left after you pay the crew.

So here are ours. What we pay, what a helper should cost you on your first jobs, and what the owner actually keeps on an ordinary job, worked through with real figures.

What we pay our movers

Our movers make between $22 and $30 an hour depending on experience, and we pay time and a half over forty hours in a week. A first-week mover with no experience starts at the bottom of that range. Someone who has done this for years, can run a job without us, and can back a 26-foot truck into a driveway with a stone wall on both sides is at the top, and we would pay more than that to keep him, because a good foreman is the single reason we are not on the truck ourselves.

There are no tips in our numbers above. Tips happen, and on a good job with a happy customer they can add $20 to $50 a mover, but we never count on them and we tell new hires the same. If a customer wants to tip, great. The wage is the wage.

What a helper should cost you on your first job

If you are starting, you are not paying $30 an hour. You are paying one person, probably someone you know, for a day of lifting. In most of the country that is $20 to $25 an hour cash-equivalent for a strong person who shows up on time, and the calculator on this site defaults to $22 for exactly that reason.

Two rules about that helper. Pay him for the whole day, portal to portal, the same way the customer pays you. If the truck leaves at 8 and gets back at 2, he gets six hours, not the four he spent carrying things. And pay yourself the same rate on paper, even if the cash stays in the business, because the day you hire a second helper you need to know what your own labor costs.

The number nobody puts on a salary site: what the owner keeps

Take the two-bedroom job from the pricing post. Two movers, five hours on site, an hour and a half of drive and rental pickup, a rented truck, $25 of tape and wrap. You quote it flat at $900.

Here is where the $900 goes when you are one of the two movers.

Your helper, six and a half hours at $22, is $143. The truck rental with fuel is $140. Supplies are $25. That is $308 out the door. What is left is $592, and that is your pay for the day, before three things you have not paid yet: your insurance, the phone and the ad, and taxes. Call it $500 after the first two. Six and a half hours of your own labor plus the hour you spent quoting it, so roughly $65 an hour for your time, on a day you also carried a couch.

That is the honest shape of the business in the first year. It is not $200 an hour, whatever the guy on YouTube says. It is also not $18. It is somewhere between two and three times what the helper made, on the same day, for the same lifting, because you own the phone number and you did the quoting.

Why the number goes up, and why it stalls

Two things move that $65. The first is the price. If you are quoting $600 for that job instead of $900 because you are scared of losing it, what is left drops to about $290, and to about $200 once insurance and the phone are paid, which is under $30 an hour for the identical day of work. Underpricing does not cost you a little. It costs you half your pay. That is the mistake I made for my whole first year, and it is why the calculator makes you double your cost instead of adding a margin.

The second is the truck. Once you are doing enough jobs that owning beats renting, the $140 a day turns into a payment and insurance spread across every job, and on a busy month that line drops by half. Do not buy one to get there. The truck is the last thing you buy. Get the price right first, because the price is worth more than the truck.

What stalls it is the ceiling on your own hours. At $500 a job and three jobs a week, you are at about $75,000 a year and you are exhausted, because you quoted every job, drove every mile and carried every couch. My first full year was $85,000 gross doing exactly that. The second was $120,000, and most of that gain was me working more Saturdays, because there was no more of me to sell.

How it changes when you are not on the truck

The day you send a crew you are not on, the math flips. Now every mover on the job is a cost, and your pay comes from the gap between what the job bills and what the crew and the truck cost. On a three-man local move billed at $250 an hour for six hours, that is $1,500 in, roughly $500 in wages and $150 in truck costs out, and the rest is the company's, before insurance, marketing, and everything else that comes with employees. You are no longer paid for lifting. You are paid for the phone ringing and the crew showing up.

That is what our $82,000 August looks like from the inside: fifty-two jobs, none of them carried by us, every one of them quoted, priced and staffed from a phone and a laptop. The crews made good money. The company made more. Nobody involved was at the $18-an-hour national average, and if you set the business up right, nobody in yours will be either.

Three things to take from this

Price the job first, then worry about wages. A helper at $22 or $25 an hour is not what makes or breaks a job. Quoting $600 instead of $900 is.

Pay your helper portal to portal and pay yourself on paper. The day you have two crews, you will already know what labor costs. If you have not taken the first job yet, how to start a moving company is the whole order, from the first phone call to the foreman.

The ceiling is you. The first $85,000 is one person's arms. Everything past it is systems, and that is the part we teach. If you want to walk your own numbers through this, the strategy call is an hour with both of us, on your market, with your rates.