What each one actually is
Full service means the moving company brings the truck and the crew and handles the move end to end. They wrap the furniture, load it, drive it, unload it and put it in the rooms you want. Packing can be added on top, either for the whole house or just the kitchen and the fragile things.
Labour-only means you supply the vehicle — a rental truck, or a portable container dropped in your driveway — and the crew does the physical work. They wrap and load it properly at one end, or meet it and unload it at the other, or both. What you are buying is the handling, not the transport.
Side by side
| Full service | Labour-only | |
|---|---|---|
| Truck | Provided, with fuel and mileage in the rate | Yours to rent, drive and fuel |
| Driving | The crew does it | You do it |
| Wrapping and equipment | Included | Included — the crew brings blankets, straps and dollies |
| Priced on | Crew size and total time, door to door | Crew size and time at your address only |
| Your day | You direct, you do not lift | You lift nothing, but you drive and you own the schedule |
| Coverage on your goods | The mover's cargo liability applies throughout | Applies to the handling. Transit in your own rented truck is on you |
| Best for | Houses, offices, fixed dates, valuable or awkward items | Containers, one-way rentals, tight budgets, short distances |
The coverage difference matters most
This is the part that is genuinely different, and it is worth understanding before you choose on price. When a mover carries your goods in their truck, those goods are covered by their cargo liability for the whole journey. When you rent a truck and drive it yourself, the crew's responsibility covers how the load was handled and secured — not what happens on the interstate.
In practice, a well-loaded truck driven carefully is a low-risk thing. But if you are moving something genuinely valuable and the coverage matters to you, that argues for full service, and it argues for it more strongly than any hourly rate does.
Choose labour-only if
You already have a portable container in the driveway, or you have decided to rent and drive a truck anyway. You are moving a short distance. Your budget is the binding constraint. What you actually need is for the heavy, awkward, damage-prone part to be done by people who know how — and you are happy to own the rest of the day.
Choose full service if
You are moving a whole house or an office. There are stairs, a walk-up, or a long carry. Your date is fixed by a lease or a closing and cannot slip. You own things you would be upset to damage. Or you simply do not have two days to give this, which is the most common and most legitimate reason of all.
The in-between nobody advertises
You can also book labour at one end only. Loading is the harder half — it is where the weight, the stairs and the packing puzzle all are — so paying for a crew to load and then unloading yourself at the other end, slowly, over a few evenings, is a genuinely sensible split. It is common with container moves, where the container sits in the new driveway for a week anyway.
If that sounds like your move, say so when you ask for a quote and we will price it that way rather than pushing the full job.
What it costs
Both are priced by the hour, on crew size and time. Labour-only is usually the smaller invoice simply because there is less of it: no driving time, no second address, no truck. But the hourly rate itself is not dramatically different, because the same trained people are doing the same physical work with the same equipment.
How we price a move explains what the hourly rate covers, what is charged separately, and what makes the number move either way.
Read next
Still deciding whether to hire anyone at all? Hiring movers vs renting a truck covers that comparison honestly, including when doing the whole thing yourself is the right call. Or look at the two services directly: residential moving and loading and unloading.
