Moving Questions, Answered

Nobody likes hearing "it depends", so here are real numbers. These are 2026 rates in Canadian dollars, and they cover the move itself. Packing and specialty items sit on top.

Local moves, by the size of the home

• Studio Apartment: $450 to $850
• One Bedroom Apartment: $600 to $1,150
• Two Bedroom Apartment or Condo: $850 to $1,700
• Three Bedroom House: $1,450 to $2,850
• Four Bedroom House or Bigger: $2,550 to $4,950 and up

Long hauls out of Vancouver, priced on a typical two or three bedroom home

• Vancouver to Victoria or Nanaimo: $2,150 to $6,350, plus the ferry
• Vancouver to Kelowna: $3,550 to $9,200
• Vancouver to Calgary: $4,950 to $11,300 and up

Ferry fares and a hotel for the crew get added on top. A bigger home pushes it up, and so do specialty items and full packing. We also run up and down Vancouver Island, over to the Sunshine Coast, and out to Bowen Island and the Gulf Islands. Ask and we'll price it.

By the hour, when that suits the job better, we start at $95/hr for two movers and run to $285+/hr. That low end is two movers for a load only, an unload only, or shuffling furniture around inside one building. Crew size and the time of year set your rate. More movers cost more per hour and finish sooner, which usually works out cheaper. Every hourly job has a three hour minimum plus travel time.

Packing, if you'd rather we did it. Full packing on a two bedroom adds $600 to $1,400 and up, plus materials. Materials on a two bedroom run $200 to $650 and up: The low end is boxes, packing paper and some bubble wrap. The high end is the full armour, with glassine paper, plenty more bubble wrap and so on.

Free on every move: Mattress bags, packing tape, shrink wrap, and a TV box we loan you.

Every move is its own animal, so a range is the honest best we can do here. Two identical condos can be hours apart depending on the stairs, the parking and how far along the packing really is. We're putting the numbers up anyway, because you deserve somewhere to start. Treat them as a map rather than a law, and for a real number send us the details and one of our operations managers works it out with you.

Both. The job picks which one fits.

By the hour suits a straightforward move close to home. You pay for the hours we work plus travel time, and your estimate shows the rate, the crew size, how many hours we expect and what's included. Hourly starts at $95/hr for two movers, with a three hour minimum plus travel.

A flat rate suits you if you'd rather have one number and nobody watching a clock. We build it from your list of items and the access at both ends: Stairs, elevators, parking, and how far the truck has to sit from the door. A flat rate is a handshake, and it holds as long as both sides hold up their end. If the list or the access changes, the price changes with it. That's fair both ways.

Either way you see the numbers before we pull up.

There's a booking fee when you confirm, and it does one job: It holds your date. It starts at $50 for a small move and climbs with the size of the job, so a four bedroom heading to Calgary carries more than a studio going across town. Your estimate tells you the exact amount before you commit to anything.

It isn't an extra charge. It comes straight off your final bill as a credit. If you cancel, we keep it, because that date sat in our calendar while somebody else could have had it.

The rest is due in full once the move is done. Settle up with the crew on site, or we'll send you a payment link, or we can take it over the phone. Whichever is easiest for you.

Just about anything you can hand us, honestly.

• Cash. Canadian or American.
• E-transfer.
• Cards. Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, JCB and UnionPay.
• Tap to pay. Apple Pay and Google Pay.
• Crypto. Bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero.
• Gold and silver. Yes, really.

Got something to trade instead? Ask us. If it makes sense, we're open to it.

Our truck turns up stocked. Every move comes with:

• Moving pads/blankets. Hockey padding for your furniture.
• Shrink wrap. The raincoat that goes on over the padding.
• Packing tape.
• Mattress bags, free. Just tell us the sizes.
• A TV box, loaned free. Tell us the size and how many, and send a photo if you can.
• Tools. To take a bed frame apart and put it back together at the other end.
• Dollies and straps. Dollies to carry the heavy things, straps to tie the load down so nothing shifts on the drive.

Boxes, packing paper and bubble wrap are the exception, because those only come into it if we're doing your packing. They're included in a flat rate and cost extra on an hourly job.

One catch on the TV box: It's a loan, so it has to find its way back to us. On a load only job, where you drive the truck yourself, buy one from U-Haul instead. Same goes for blankets, straps and dollies on those jobs, since ours are going home with us.

We'll take all the used wrapping material away when we're done.

Your date, your movers and your elevator all fill up first, so they all get booked first.

• A local move: Two to four weeks out, and about a month out in summer.
• A long haul: One to three months out.
• Weekends, holidays and month-end: These go before anything else, and they may include a surcharge. Mid-week and mid-month are easier to book and easier on the bill.

We do work weekends and holidays, so don't talk yourself out of asking. Just ask early.

Last minute is welcome too. We take those calls all the time and we'd sooner squeeze you in than leave you stuck, but availability is availability, and a tight turnaround may include a surcharge for the scramble. Call us and we'll tell you straight whether we have a crew for your date.

Local moves

• Studio Apartment: 2 movers, 2 to 4 hours
• One Bedroom Apartment: 2 movers, 3 to 6 hours
• Two Bedroom Apartment or Condo: 2 to 3 movers, 4 to 7 hours
• Three Bedroom House: 3 to 4 movers, 6 to 11 hours
• Four Bedroom House or Bigger: 4 to 5 movers, 8 to 14 hours

Those are estimates, not a stopwatch. Stairs, elevators, parking and how finished your packing really is all move the number. A booked elevator instead of a shared one can be the difference between a load that takes an hour or two and one that takes four.

If we have an extra mover free that day, we'll often put them on your job to get you finished sooner. On a flat rate that's simply a faster day for you, at no extra cost, so we do it whenever the numbers work. On an hourly job we'd talk it through with you first, since more movers means a higher rate per hour even though the job wraps up earlier.

Long hauls take at least two days, and the distance decides the shape of it.

• To Vancouver Island. Day one we load. Day two we're on the first ferry, we unload at your new place, and the crew sails home.
• To the Interior, up to about six hours out. Day one we load and drive, and the crew sleeps over. Day two we unload and drive back.
• Farther than that, Alberta for instance. Day one we load. Day two we drive. Day three we unload.

Want us to pack as well? If you've got a lot, that's a day of its own. If it can be done quicker, we'll do it quicker. There are always exceptions, so treat this as a map rather than a law.

Yes, please. The drawers themselves can stay in the dresser. They just have to be empty.

A loaded dresser is a safe with socks in it. All that weight shifts around while it's being carried, and the dresser flexes along with it. The hardware was built to hold your clothes while the thing stands still in a bedroom, not while two movers walk it down a flight of stairs on an angle. Flat-pack furniture is the worst for it. Those cam locks and the particle board around them give up fast, and they give up all at once.

Work smarter, not harder. Empty drawers mean a lighter piece, a safer carry, and a dresser that still has its back panel on when it reaches the new place.

We work rain or shine. In Vancouver we'd never get anything done otherwise, because rain here isn't bad luck, it's the forecast.

Cardboard is a sponge and a plastic bin is a boat. A wet box goes soft like a cereal box left out on the porch, and a soft box at the bottom of a stack gets squashed by everything above it. So if you're moving in the rainy season, put anything that can't get wet into lidded bins: Papers, electronics, photos, bedding. Frogbox will drop reusable bins at your door and collect them once you've unpacked, or buy your own totes and keep them for next time.

Your furniture gets a raincoat from us. Moving pads/blankets taped on tight, then shrink wrap all the way around with no gaps. The pad is the padding and the wrap is what keeps the water out. Mattresses go in bags every time, rain or not, because a mattress drinks water like nothing else you own and it's miserable to dry out.

There's a whole chapter on this in our moving playbook, rain being a local speciality. Grab the playbook free and read Chapter 4 before you tape up a single box.

You do, and it's the most valuable phone call of your whole move.

Think of the elevator as Mr. Elevator, and know that he's a busy guy. The whole building needs him, and on moving day he decides how fast your move goes. Booked, the crew fills him up like a little truck and sends him down. Not booked, your belongings sit in the hallway while he answers a call from the 14th floor, and a load that should have taken an hour or two turns into 4+ hours. Movers charge by the hour, so that's your money going up and down in there.

So: Call the building, ask who books it, book it, and get it in writing. Do that at both ends if it applies, the place you're leaving and the place you're going. Then send us the details. The hours you've got him for, who puts the protective pads up, how the key or fob works, any fee, and where the truck is meant to park.

One trick worth knowing. Where we're loading, book him to start 30 to 60 minutes after we arrive, and tell the building we're coming early. We use that head start to wrap and prep, so he isn't sitting idle on your dime. Where we're unloading, no head start needed. Ask us and we'll tell you what time to put down.

Some buildings with only one elevator won't let you book it at all. That's fine, just tell us and we'll plan around sharing him.

No, and we'd rather tell you that to your face than let you find out the hard way. Here's the whole picture, including the part of it the industry would rather you didn't look at.

The coverage most movers include as standard is called released value, and it pays by weight rather than by worth. The Canadian Association of Movers, the industry's own body, puts the rate at 60 cents a pound. Their own worked example is a table weighing 100 pounds, written off, settled at $60, when replacing it costs $1,000. By that arithmetic your 25 pound television is worth $15.

There is a replacement value version that does pay what your things are actually worth. To buy it you declare your whole shipment, and CAM puts the minimum at $10 a pound, so a five thousand pound household has to be covered to $50,000, and you pay a premium on that figure.

And here's the part almost nobody reads. Those policies don't cover a box you packed yourself. CAM's own advice to customers is blunter about it than we'd dare be: If you packed the box, damage inside it is inadmissible in a claim. So when a company tells you it's fully insured, the useful question isn't whether it holds a policy. It's what that policy pays out on the things you'd actually be upset to lose.

What we do instead starts long before moving day, and it's the boring answer rather than the clever one. We pad and wrap your furniture properly. We load the truck so nothing can shift on the drive. Our owner has spent over a decade in moving and logistics, and experience is most of what you're paying for when you hire movers at all. Guys who know how to move, who know what breaks, and who pack for it before anyone lifts a thing. We rarely damage anything. When we do, we own it: We'll find you a replacement, or we'll take it off the price of the move. Within reason and within common sense, but we'd sooner make it right than hand you a calculator.

The one place we can't help is a box we didn't pack, and for the same reason the insurers won't touch it. We have no way of knowing what went in there or how. The rule of thumb is to shake the box: If you hear anything move, it isn't packed yet. The box needs to be snug, with packing paper filling the gaps, and that goes double for anything fragile. The packing chapter of our playbook walks through how we do it, box by box, and it's free to download.

Three things, and we'd rather say no now than on the morning of your move.

Pianos. We don't move them, and if there's a piano in the job we hand the whole move over rather than work around it. It goes to Up Down Movers out of North Vancouver, who are properly good at it. Ask us and we'll pass you their number, and tell them Daniel from Fire Movers sent you. We get nothing out of it. It's just the right phone number.

Anything that can leak, spill or burn. A moving truck is a closed box packed tight, so one leak or one spark reaches everything around it. These stay off:

• Propane and other bottled gas. We'll happily take the barbecue. We won't take its tank.
• Gasoline and any other fuel.
• Paint and solvents, plus anything else flammable.
• Cleaning chemicals.
• Ammunition, fireworks and explosives.

Liquids in general are better off out of the truck, because one bottle of olive oil can soak a whole stack of boxes the way a juice box soaks a backpack. Use up what you can before moving day. We're not afraid to move liquids though, non-flammable ones mind you. Just make sure they're packed properly, that's all we ask.

Biohazards. Bed bugs, mould and asbestos. We aren't equipped for that work, and taking it on would mean carrying it into somebody else's home next week.

Everything else is fair game, the heavy awkward stuff very much included. Safes, treadmills, washers, fridges, we move all of it. Just tell us what it is, the make and model, and roughly what it weighs, so the right crew and the right gear turn up.

We're based in Vancouver, and the truck goes a long way from it.

Day to day, around the Lower Mainland: Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond, North Vancouver, West Vancouver, New Westminster, Coquitlam, Surrey, Delta, White Rock, Abbotsford, Mission and Chilliwack. Squamish and Whistler too.

Long haul, out past the Lower Mainland:

• Vancouver Island. Victoria, Duncan, Nanaimo and Courtenay.
• The Sunshine Coast. Sechelt and Gibsons, and on up the coast.
• Bowen Island.
• The Gulf Islands.
• The Interior and the Kootenays. Kelowna, Kamloops, Nelson and Cranbrook.
• Alberta. Calgary and Edmonton.

If your move starts or finishes somewhere that isn't on that list, ask anyway. The answer is usually yes, and when it's no we'll tell you who to call instead.