A few pieces, a single room, or a studio apartment. Small jobs get the same crew, the same trucks and the same care as a four-bedroom house. They just take less of the day.
There is no official definition, so here is ours. If everything you are moving would fit in part of a truck rather than all of it, it is a small move. In practice that means a studio or a one-bedroom apartment, a single room out of a larger house, a dorm or student room, or a short list of large items — a bedroom set, a sofa and a table, a treadmill, a piano on its own.
Small does not mean simple. A studio on the fourth floor of a walk-up in Hoboken is a harder day than a three-bedroom ranch with a driveway. What decides the crew and the hours is access, not square footage.
We would rather say this out loud than have you find out the expensive way. If it is a studio or a small one-bedroom, everything small is already boxed, it is ground floor at both ends, and you have two willing friends and a rented truck, you are fine. Save the money.
Where it stops being worth it: stairs at either end, anything that takes two people to carry safely, a long walk from the door to the truck, or a building that wants the elevator reserved and a certificate of insurance. That is the point where a crew who does this every day finishes the day and nothing gets wrecked.
On local moves in New Jersey, these are part of the job and not billed separately:
By the hour. This is how most local moves are priced. You pay for the hours the job actually takes: if it runs long you pay more, and if it goes quickly you pay less. Our written estimate tells you the crew we would send and the hours we expect the job to take, so you know what you are planning around.
At a flat rate. If you would rather not think about the clock at all, ask us to lock in the price. On local moves in New Jersey we can quote a flat rate for the job as scoped, agreed in writing before move day. A flat rate is fixed in both directions: it does not go up if the day runs long, and it does not come down if we finish early. We carry the risk on the hours, and that certainty is what you are paying for.
One or the other, not both. Tell us which you would prefer when you ask for your estimate and we will price it that way.
Anything genuinely extra — packing materials, a crate for a marble top, long-term storage — is discussed with you before the day, never added afterwards.
A small local move does not need someone to visit your apartment before you can be told what it costs. Tell us the size, the floor and access at each end, and the two addresses, and we can give you a written estimate the same day. For most studios and one-bedrooms it takes minutes, not days.
Larger homes and anything going long distance are different, and we will say so — those we walk through properly, in person or on video. For a small local job, speed is the point.
We run small local jobs out of our own yard in Rahway across Union, Essex, Middlesex, Morris and Somerset counties, and into and out of New York City. Some of the towns we write about separately: Rahway, Cranford, Westfield, Summit, Elizabeth, Hoboken, Jersey City, Edison and Montclair.
Related: studio and one-bedroom moves, same-building moves, student and dorm moves, and what actually affects the cost of a move.