Is the Moving Business Slow Right Now? Read the Market, Then the Company’s Own Numbers

What the public numbers cannot tell an owner

The Census mover rate counts people who moved, including people who moved themselves with a rented truck and friends. The BLS series counts payroll employees at moving companies; it does not count moves booked, revenue, 1099 helpers or owners who drive. A national rate also hides the local market: a metro area gaining residents and one losing them sit inside the same national figure.

So the useful question is narrower than whether the moving business is slow. It is whether this company’s slow months came from fewer households asking, from fewer of them booking, or from booked moves that kept less money. Each has a different fix, and only the first is mostly out of the company’s hands.

Is the moving business slow, or is it this company? Three numbers decide

Pull the same months from this year and last year, from the moving software and the accounting system. The season swings too hard for month-to-month comparisons, so compare each month with the same month a year earlier.

• Inquiries per month: every call, web form and purchased lead, counted once per household.
• Booked share: moves booked divided by inquiries, with estimates sent divided by inquiries reached as a check on where the drop sits.
• Kept per move: revenue per booked move minus crew hours at the loaded rate (drive time included), truck cost, materials and claims paid.

The pattern points to the cause. If inquiries fell and the booked share held, the market or the lead sources shrank, and the work is on where inquiries come from and on fixed costs. If inquiries held and the booked share fell, the leak is inside: slow first calls, estimates that went quiet, or a price that stopped matching what households were quoted elsewhere. If both held and the cash still fell, the money is leaking after the booking, in crew hours past the estimate, discounts, or balances never billed.

A worked count, one month a year apart

Illustrative example: a moving company compares last August with this August, using its own records.

• Inquiries: 400 last year, 340 this year, down 15 percent.
• Reached within the first hour: 300 last year, 210 this year.
• Booked: 100 last year, 68 this year, so the booked share fell from 25 to 20 percent.
• Kept per booked move: $450 last year, $380 this year, after a rate cut and longer crew hours.

The market explains part of it: 60 fewer inquiries. But at last year’s booked share, 340 inquiries would have booked 85 moves, not 68, and at last year’s $450 those 17 moves are about $7,650. Kept per move fell $70 on 68 moves, another $4,760. The slower first call is a candidate cause the records can test, by comparing the booked share of inquiries reached in the first hour with those reached later. Some of the slow month is the market. This one also shows about $12,400 that came from inside the company, and that is the part an owner can work on.

Rate cuts, slow months and the week-of-the-month pattern

When the phones go quiet, the first lever within reach is price, and the arithmetic deserves a line before the rate sheet changes. Illustrative example: a local move priced at $1,000 with $700 of crew, truck and materials keeps $300. Cut the price 20 percent to $800 and the same move keeps $100, so it takes three moves to keep what one kept before, with three times the crew hours and the claims exposure that comes with them. A cut can still be the right call when crews would otherwise sit idle on wages paid either way; the count above says which case the company is in.

The calendar matters inside the month as well as across the year. The BLS series swings every year from a winter low to a June or July high: in 2025 it ran from 86,200 employees in January to 101,100 in July. Inside a month, bookings can bunch around the dates leases turn over. Counting bookings and crew-days by week of the month shows whether the slow stretch is the season, the middle of the month or the whole year, and each answer leads somewhere different: off-season maintenance and training, mid-month dates offered to flexible customers, or a lead and booking problem.

What to do in a slow season without guessing

A slow season is when the records from peak are complete and the office has time to read them. Five pieces of work cost no new lead spend.

• Call back every estimate from the last 90 days that has no recorded outcome. Each one ends with a result: booked, lost with a reason, or not moving.
• Read the lost reasons. Price, timing and “went with whoever called first” point to different fixes.
• Trace each lead source to booked and paid moves, not to leads delivered.
• Bill what is owed: interstate balances after delivery and storage lots past their paid-through date.
• Rank last season’s moves by what they kept, and set next season’s booking rules from the ranking.

When not to hire anyone

If the count shows inquiries down while the booked share and the kept per move held steady, the company is doing its part in a smaller market. No consultant changes how many households move, and a fee in a slow year should earn its place. The work then is fixed costs, cash and lead sources, and the owner and the company’s accountant can do it.

It is worth an outside look when the count shows the booked share or the kept per move falling, or when the records cannot produce the three numbers at all. The page on moving company consulting lays out where a moving and storage company’s money leaks, from the first call to collected cash. The Revenue Review is a read-only engagement of two weeks: we read the company’s own leads, estimates, crew hours, invoices and storage ledger, and put a monthly dollar figure on each leak in a written report with a 90-day plan. A free 20-minute call is enough to tell whether a Review fits, including when it does not.