Free moving calculators and tools

Six moving rules to know before you use any tool

The findings that recur across these tools, gathered once. Each is sourced on the page it belongs to.

1. The ceiling at your door is 110 percent, on a non-binding interstate estimate. "Under a non-binding estimate, the mover cannot require you to pay more than 110 percent of the non-binding estimate at the time of delivery."

And withholding your goods after you have tendered that has a consequence: Withholding a shipment after the shipper has offered proper payment is a failure to transport with reasonable dispatch and exposes the carrier to liability for the delay (49 CFR 375.407(b)).

On a binding estimate the ceiling is the estimate itself — "If you make only a partial delivery of the shipment, you may not demand upon delivery full payment of the binding estimate."

2. A physical survey is the rule, not a courtesy. 49 CFR 375.401(a): "You must conduct a physical survey of the household goods to be transported and provide the prospective individual shipper with a written estimate, based on the physical survey, of the charges for the transportation and all related services."

A shipper may waive the survey, but only by written and signed consent given before the shipment is loaded, a copy of which the mover keeps with the bill of lading.

A telephone quote given with no survey and no signed waiver is not the process the rule describes — and the survey is what finds the stairs, the long carry and the shuttle before they become charges.

3. Released value pays 60 cents per pound per article. "Under this option, the mover assumes liability for no more than 60 cents per pound, per article."

It costs nothing extra, but it is a written waiver of full value protection, which is the default under Appendix A. The unit is the article, not the shipment.

A 35 lb television and a 35 lb box of books are settled the same way under released value, which is why the released rate is punishing on dense electronics and close to irrelevant on a mattress.

And neither option is insurance. Both are the carrier’s own liability under its tariff.

Insurance is a separate product sold by an insurer, and a mover that calls valuation "insurance" is describing its own liability limit in someone else’s vocabulary.

4. A USDOT number is an identifier, not a credential. The check that works is a match — legal name and address in the federal record against the estimate in your hand.

FMCSA’s own booklet: "You should know if the company you are dealing with is a household goods motor carrier (mover) or household goods broker, and if they are registered with FMCSA. Go to www.protectyourmove.gov for this information." fmcsa.dot.gov returned HTTP 403 to automated retrieval on September 5, 2026.

The quotations on this page come from Appendix A to 49 CFR Part 375, the codified text of the FMCSA booklet, read at Cornell LII.

5. Roughly four in five people who move stay in one state. ACS 1-year estimates: 8.9 percent of people moved to a different residence within the same state in 2024, down from 9.1 percent in 2023; 2.1 percent moved to a different state, down from 2.3 percent.

Retrieved via Census Bureau ACS migration/geographic mobility guidance, September 5, 2026. HyreMover analysis: roughly four in five people who move stay inside one state, which means most moves are governed by state rules rather than by the federal rules that dominate every article written about moving.

That mismatch is the single biggest reason people arrive at a local move expecting protections that do not apply to it.

6. You may ask for a free reweigh, before unloading. "If your shipment is weighed at origin and you believe that the weight may not be accurate, you have the right to request that the shipment be reweighed before it is unloaded. The mover is not permitted to charge you for the reweighing."

Once the goods are unloaded, the right is gone.

What is HyreMover?

We do not move household goods. No trucks, no crews, no packing, no storage. Nothing on this site may claim or imply otherwise.

We do not rank or refer movers. No list, no sponsored placement, no referral fee, and no mover profiles.

That matters more in this trade than in most, because the entire commercial ecosystem around moving quotes is built on lead fees — and a site paid per quote request cannot easily tell you that the quote you have is the wrong shape.

We hold no dataset of prices, tariffs or complaints. Every regulatory figure across these nine tools is a named third party’s published text, or arithmetic we performed on one and labeled as ours. Where a chart shows relative magnitude rather than data, its caption says so.

Why that matters to you. It determines what these tools are able to conclude.

A calculator built by a moving company cannot comfortably tell you to walk away from a booking, to demand a survey before discussing price, or that the cheapest bid is cheapest because it was built on the least information. These can, and several of them do.

Is your move federal or state?

Whether your move crosses a state line is the first question and the one most often skipped.

The federal trigger is the shipment moving between states — not a mileage threshold that a website invented. When it applies, the whole of 49 CFR Part 375 attaches: the survey, the estimate types, the ceilings, the packet, the valuation election, the weighing rights, the claim windows and the arbitration program.

And it is not quite absolute. Appendix A records that moves inside a defined commercial zone spanning a state boundary are "exempt from FMCSA’s commercial jurisdiction and, therefore, the moves are not subject to FMCSA household goods regulations". A short hop across a river in one metropolitan area may not be federal.

Inside one state, a state agency governs. Appendix A governs interstate moves. A move inside one state is regulated by that state — a public utilities commission, a transportation department, a consumer-protection office, or in some states nothing trade-specific at all.

And crossing a state line is not always enough: a move that stays inside a defined commercial zone which happens to span a state boundary is exempt from FMCSA commercial jurisdiction.

What we will not do. HyreMover has not built a fifty-state table of intrastate moving regulation and will not publish one it has not verified.

What we can say is which question to ask: name the regulator, then ask that regulator what it requires. That is a five-minute search and it is the only reliable answer.

The two questions to put to that regulator. Is a written estimate required, and is there a ceiling on what may be collected at delivery? Those are the two federal protections that do the most work.

A state with both is nearly as safe as an interstate move; a state with neither leaves you relying entirely on the contract you sign — which is worth knowing beforehand.