How Long Does a London House Move Take?

"How long will it take?" matters almost as much as the price, because in London the answer decides whether you can collect keys the same afternoon, whether the lift slot is long enough, and whether a parking suspension needs one day or two. It is also the number that the price is built on: every removal is charged by the hour, from the moment the team arrives at your door.

This guide sets out the hours our quote form books for each size of home, sets them beside the time slots we actually booked for earlier London jobs, and walks through what makes a London move run long, when it becomes a two-day job, and what you can do so the day finishes on time.

These are the hours our quote form books when you tell it the size of your home. Each one uses the vehicle and crew the form suggests for that size, the loading and unloading hours set for that vehicle, and the form's own driving model for a 6-mile trip, roughly a move between neighbouring boroughs. The total is rounded up to the next half hour and never falls below the vehicle's minimum.

Three things stand out. First, the drive is 15 min on every row, because a 6-mile trip is short whatever you are moving. Second, the time grows with the home because the load grows, and with it the vehicle: a Small Transit (SWB) for a studio flat, a Luton Box Van for a 1-bedroom home, a 5.5 Tonne Lorry for a 2-bedroom home, a 7.5 Tonne Lorry for a 3-bedroom house, a 10 Tonne Lorry for a 4-bedroom house. Third, the crew grows too, from 2 movers for the smaller homes to 4 movers for a 4-bedroom house, which is how a bigger home stays as close as possible to a working day.

A 4-bedroom house is where a single day starts to run out: 10 hr 30 min on the form, before stairs or packing. Large homes vary more than small ones, too. A full loft and garage can need more vehicle space than the bedroom count suggests, so the team plans a larger house from your inventory or a video survey, and may suggest two days or a second vehicle.

These are planning figures for a home of average contents. Your quote is built from your own inventory and access, and the team confirms the hours and the final price in writing before the move.

Before our current rate card, we sold most moves as a fixed time slot, "up to 3 hours" or "up to 5 hours", with any overtime charged on top. Our job records keep the slot each customer booked. The chart sets those slots beside today's quote-form hours for the same size of home. Few of our London records state a bedroom count, so the earlier bookings in the chart come from local single-day home moves in all the areas we cover, leaving out long-distance runs and jobs with packing on the day.

The two measures are not the same thing, and it helps to know why they differ. A time slot was the window a customer booked and paid for in advance; if the job finished early, the slot was still the slot, and if it ran over, overtime was added. Today's hours are the allowance the quote form plans for a typical home of that size, and the written quote then adjusts it to your inventory and access. The earlier 2-bedroom bookings centred on 5 hours and the 3-bedroom ones on 6 hours, against 6 hr 30 min and 8 hr 30 min on the form today.

Read the historic slots as evidence of how long real jobs were booked for, not as a promise that yours will take the same. The quote you receive uses the current hours.

What our earlier London jobs were booked for

These are the local London jobs in our records with a time slot: at least one end in London, under 30 miles apart in a straight line. They are anonymised to the area. Prices are left out here because they were set under the earlier pricing; our London removal costs guide covers what moves cost.

Across these 19 jobs, the slots ran from 2 hours to 8 hours, with a median of 3 hr 30 min. 13 of the 19 were booked for 4 hours or less. The short ones are small moves and single items with one or two people; the long ones are the exceptions worth reading closely. A boxes-only move between Purley and Coulsdon was booked for 8 hours with three movers, which shows that the number of items, not the size of the furniture, can set the length. The 2 office moves were also among the longer bookings, at 5 hours and 6 hours, for trips of a few miles.

The table above assumes the easiest London move there is: ground floor at both ends, the van outside the door, everything packed. Most London moves are not like that. Each of these adds time, and each is something we ask about when you request a quote, so it can be planned rather than discovered on the day.

Stairs and lifts

Carrying a load up or down stairs is slower than carrying it along a hallway, and many London homes are flats above the ground floor. Our rate card charges stairs as a separate line for that reason, by the hours spent at that address, and the man and van price guide shows what it costs. For time, the point is simpler: a working lift that takes the furniture saves more time than anything else you can arrange, and a lift that only takes boxes still saves most of the trips. Our guide to booking a goods lift explains how long a slot to ask the building for.

The distance from the van to the door

Every minute spent walking between the van and your front door is part of the job. A van parked outside on a single yellow line, in a loading bay or in a suspended bay keeps the walk to a few metres. A van parked round the corner, across a busy road or at the far end of an estate turns each trip into several minutes, and a 2-bedroom home is a lot of trips. If your street is in a controlled parking zone, a parking suspension is often the difference between a short day and a long one. You apply to the council and pay its fee; our parking suspension guide explains how.

Building rules

Mansion blocks, new builds and managed estates can set rules for removals, such as a lift booked for a fixed window, set hours for moves, a concierge who signs the crew in, or protection to be laid in the common areas first. None of these is a problem if the crew knows in advance. Each one is a delay if they find out at the door.

Traffic and the drive

The quote form counts 15 min for a 6-mile drive and 30 min for 15 miles. A loaded lorry crossing London at rush hour can take longer than that. Because the time between your addresses is part of the job, a later start that misses the morning peak can shorten the day even though the crew starts later. Ask us when you book if your route crosses the centre.

Packing left for the morning

The most common reason a move runs over is packing that was meant to be finished and was not. A crew can load sealed boxes far faster than it can wait while drawers are emptied or a kitchen is wrapped. If you are not going to be finished, say so before the day, and either book packing or ask for more time in the quote.

Furniture that has to come apart

Beds, wardrobes and large flat-pack units often will not go through a London doorway or round a stair turn in one piece. Taking them apart and putting them back together is skilled work and takes time at both ends. Booked in advance it is priced per item; discovered on the day it eats into the hours. Tell us what needs dismantling when you ask for a quote.

If you are buying or selling, the time of completion can matter more than the size of the move. GOV.UK explains that completion is when the buyer's solicitor or conveyancer transfers the money, and that the seller must leave the property in the state agreed in the contract when they move out. In practice, that means the keys to your new home are released only once the money has arrived down the chain.

How late in the day that can be depends on your contract. Blandy & Blandy Solicitors explains that the Standard Conditions of Sale call for completion to take place before 2pm, and that the time is often amended to an earlier one, especially where there is a long chain. So completion can happen at any point up to the contract time, and the keys follow.

For the move itself, the safest plan on a completion day is to do the loading first. The crew loads your old home in the morning, the van is ready to leave the moment you hear the money has gone through, and unloading starts as soon as the keys are in your hand. If the keys are late, the loaded van waits rather than the whole job.

Waiting is the one part of the day that you pay for without anything moving. Our rate card charges it at £40 per crew member per hour. That is £80 an hour for a 2-person crew and £120 an hour for 3. If your chain is long, tell us when you book: we can plan the timing around it, and an earlier completion time written into the contract helps everyone.

Renters have a version of the same problem. GOV.UK's How to Rent checklist says to agree an inventory, or check-in report, with your landlord before you move in and to take photos, and to return all sets of keys when you leave. Both are appointments with an agent, and both can hold up the van. Book the check-in for the morning of move day, or the day before, and the check-out for after the van has left. Our guide to moving out of a rented flat in London covers the rest.

Most people think of a move as "a morning" or "a whole day", and the quote-form hours map onto that fairly cleanly. A studio flat (2 hr 30 min) or a 1-bedroom home (4 hr 30 min) is a half-day job, which is why small moves can often be done the same day: if you book a move of up to 2 bedrooms by 2pm, we can often do it that afternoon, subject to a free crew and vehicle, with no extra charge for short notice. A 2-bedroom home (6 hr 30 min) and a 3-bedroom house (8 hr 30 min) take most of a working day. Anything that adds hours on top of that, such as packing, a long drive or a difficult building, starts to push the move into a second day.

There is a hard limit as well as a practical one. GOV.UK's drivers' hours rules set how long the person driving the van can work. For goods vehicles under 3.5 tonnes, the GB domestic rules allow no more than 10 hours' driving and no more than 11 hours on duty in a working day. Vehicles over 3.5 tonnes, which include the lorries most family homes need, follow the assimilated rules: no more than 9 hours' driving a day (10 hours twice a week), a break of at least 45 minutes after no more than 4 hours 30 minutes of driving, and at least 11 hours' rest every day.

Those rules are why a large house, packed on the day and driven a long way, cannot be squeezed into one long shift. They also explain why a removal company plans a long move around breaks rather than around a straight run.

A two-day move separates the packing from the moving. On day one, packers wrap and box everything while you carry on living in the home. On day two, the crew loads, drives and unloads, with nothing left to do but carry. Our packing packages show how much time packing needs on its own: 2 packers for up to 4 hours for a 2-bedroom home, and 3 packers for up to 6 hours for a 3-bedroom home. Add that to a 6 hr 30 min move and the day no longer fits.

Our records include exactly this kind of job in London. A 2-bedroom flat moving 1 mile in a straight line, from Shoreditch to Bethnal Green, was booked as two days: up to 5 hours on day one, then up to 7 hours on day two, with 3–4 movers, using a 7.5-tonne lorry or 2 × Luton box vans. The short distance did not shorten it; the packing and unpacking did the stretching.

The quotation reflects the split. When packing is booked with the move, term 3 of our quotation gives the move and the packing separate allowances. For a 2-bedroom home it would read: "The quoted move (loading, transport and unloading) includes up to 6.5 hours from the team's arrival at your collection address. Packing is allowed separately, up to four hours. Overtime is charged per additional hour only where the service exceeds the time allocation because of additional items, customer-requested work, waiting, access restrictions or delays outside the agreed scope."

A two-day move also helps with the parking and the building. The lorry is only needed on the move day, so that is the day a parking suspension matters most. And if the new home completes in the morning of day two, the van is already loaded and ready to go.

Here is the same 2-bedroom home from the first table, moved 6 miles across London in the 5.5 Tonne Lorry with 3 movers, as clock times. The arrival time is an example; yours is agreed when you book.

On a completion day, put the waiting point between loading and driving: the van is loaded by 11:00am and leaves when the keys are released. If the keys come two hours later, at 1:00pm, a 2-person crew waits for two hours at £80 an hour, £160 in all. That is the case for asking your solicitor about the completion time before you book the van's arrival.

The hours in your quote are the allowance the price is built on. If the job runs over, our quotation is specific about when extra hours are charged. Term 3 reads, for a 2-bedroom home quoted at 6 hr 30 min: "The quoted service includes up to 6.5 hours from the team's arrival at your collection address. Overtime is charged per additional hour only where the service exceeds the time allocation because of additional items, customer-requested work, waiting, access restrictions or delays outside the agreed scope."

In plain terms, the overtime is for the job growing, not for the crew working slowly. The five causes in that sentence are the ones to plan around:

• Additional items. A shed, a loft or a second wardrobe that was not on the inventory adds loading and unloading time
• Customer-requested work. Asking the crew to move furniture between rooms, take down shelves or make a stop on the way
• Waiting. For keys, a lift, a concierge or a parking bay to be cleared
• Access restrictions. A lift out of service, a blocked road, a building that will not let the crew in until 10am
• Delays outside the agreed scope. Anything else the quote did not cover, such as packing that was not finished

Waiting is also charged on its own, at £40 per crew member per hour. Most of it can be prevented by a confirmation call two days before, with the concierge's number and the key arrangements in the crew's hands.

Our quotation asks you, in its access terms, to tell us before the moving date about oversized furniture, narrow or uneven staircases, restricted doorways, tight corridors and other access difficulties. That is not paperwork for its own sake. It is what turns a long day into a planned one. Moving heavy items is also manual handling, and HSE says employers must avoid hazardous manual handling where they reasonably can, assess what cannot be avoided, and reduce the risk. The law sets no specific weight limit, which is why the crew decides how to move each heavy item, and why a surprise piano or American fridge freezer can change the plan.

Before the day, check each of these:

• Everything packed and sealed, with boxes stacked near the door or in one room
• An honest inventory, including the loft, shed, garage and anything under the stairs
• Measurements of the big items and the narrowest door, stair turn or lift on the route
• Parking arranged at both ends, with the suspension details sent to us if you have one
• The lift booked at both buildings, with the booking confirmation on your phone
• Key arrangements confirmed with your agent or solicitor, and the completion time known
• The fridge freezer emptied, defrosted and dry, which our quotation asks for before collection
• Someone at each address, or a clear plan for who meets the crew at the new home

If you want a fuller countdown, our London moving checklist sets out what to do week by week from eight weeks before, and moving a flat in London covers concierge and building rules in detail.

On a move across London, the drive is a few minutes of a long day. On a move to or from another part of the country, it can be the biggest single part of it. The quote form's driving model counts about 2 hours for a 110-mile trip, and that time sits between the loading and unloading, so the whole day grows by the length of the journey.

These are earlier bookings with one end in London and the other more than 30 miles away, under our earlier pricing. Road miles are longer than the straight-line figures shown. All of them were booked as a single day. Add packing or a late completion to a move of that length and a second day, or an overnight stop, becomes the safer plan. Our guide to moving out of London covers the rest of that decision.

The quickest way to know how long your move will take is to ask for a quote with the details that change it: the number of rooms, anything large, the floor and lift at each address, where the van can stop, and whether you need packing. Our London house removals page takes you to the quote form, which shows the hours, vehicle and crew for your home as you fill it in. If you are moving a flat, the London flat removals page covers stairs, lifts and building rules in one place.

You get an itemised written quote with the allowance in hours, and the team confirms the final price and timing in writing before the move. If your date depends on a completion, tell us; we would rather plan the day around your chain than charge you for waiting. For a whole home, start from house removals in London.