What a local move costs in Quincy and the South Shore
Greater Boston is an expensive market, so most of the cheery phone quotes you hear for a local move are simply made up. Here is the real shape of it. Around here a local job is billed by the hour: a crew, a truck, and the door-to-door clock. Our base two-mover team works at $159 an hour with a truck, and we put another mover on as the home grows. But the line item that actually runs your bill up on the South Shore is not the miles. It is the stairs. A third-floor three-decker walk-up in Wollaston eats far more clock than a single-floor condo with an elevator, and any mover worth hiring prices that gap in honestly.
Where we part ways with the lowball crowd is the next step: we take that hourly math and lock it into one flat rate in writing after a walk-through, so there is no phone teaser and no fattened bill once the truck is loaded. The ranges below are what a typical local job runs across Quincy, Braintree, Weymouth, Hingham, and the rest of the South Shore.
| Home size | Crew & truck | Typical flat rate | Usual time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Studio / 1-bedroom condo | 2 movers, 1 truck | $600 – $1,500 | 3 – 5 hours |
| 2-bedroom apartment or three-decker floor | 2 – 3 movers, 1 truck | $1,500 – $2,500 | 5 – 7 hours |
| 3-bedroom house | 3 – 4 movers, 1 truck | $2,500 – $4,100 | 7 – 9 hours |
| 4+ bedroom house | 4 movers, 1 – 2 trucks | $2,900 – $4,800 | Full day |
Where your figure lands inside the range
A handful of things nudge the price one way or the other, and every one of them is settled inside the flat rate before move day so none of it ambushes you:
- The staircase. A triple-decker walk-up through Wollaston, Quincy Center, or Houghs Neck is the heaviest lever of all; three flights up burns serious time.
- Where the truck can sit. Resident-permit blocks and no-double-park streets blanket Quincy, so we reserve the permit ahead rather than park two streets off and rack up a long carry.
- Who does the packing. Hand us the boxes and that is added crew time; box it yourself and you keep that money.
- The heavy and the unusual. Pianos, gun safes, and oversized appliances coming down three flights need a specialist and the proper gear.
The lines we will not cross
We will not quote cheap on the phone and then pad the bill on move day, and we will not send day-labor or a subcontractor; every job runs on our own W-2 crew and our own truck. On coverage we stick to the plain federal facts and nothing invented: by default your goods carry basic released-value protection at the federal $0.60 per pound, and full-value protection, which covers replacement cost, is available for roughly 1 to 3 percent of the declared value if you want it. Ready for a real figure on your own place? A short walk-through gets you one flat rate in writing.