Most moving quotes price your stuff by volume or weight, not by room. "I have a 3-bedroom" tells your mover almost nothing: two 3-bedroom houses on the same street can hold very different amounts, and the quote follows what you own, not the bedroom count.
Below: what cubic feet actually measures, why the math is uglier than your geometry teacher promised, and the published tables surveyors use when they walk through your house with a clipboard.
The unit, plainly
A cubic foot is a 1 ft × 1 ft × 1 ft block of space. A standard moving box (medium size) is roughly 3 cubic feet. U-Haul rates its 26-foot truck at 1,682 cubic feet and recommends it for a 3 to 4 bedroom home. Mover guides put a furnished 3-bedroom house at 7,000 to 10,000 pounds, which is roughly 1,000 to 1,430 cubic feet once it's loaded (the pounds-to-cubic-feet conversion is below).
That last number is the one your mover is pricing against. Not the floorspace of your house. Not the number of bedrooms. The volume your stuff occupies after it's packed, wrapped in blankets, slotted into boxes, stacked on dollies, with all the weird voids real items create.
Why bedroom count is a bad proxy
Two houses with three bedrooms can hold very different amounts. The variables that drive the gap:
How long you've lived there. Stuff accumulates in basements, garages, attics, closets, and on the surfaces of every flat horizontal item. A family that's been in the house ten years usually owns more than one that moved in three years ago.
Hobbies that own gear. A peloton, a kayak, a workshop, a mid-sized art collection, a kid who plays an upright bass. Each one adds volume that won't show up in a "3-bedroom" estimate.
Furniture style. A minimalist's living room is two sofas, an ottoman, and a TV stand. The same room done in mid-century maximalism holds several times as much furniture before you even count books.
Storage outside the main rooms. Garage shelving, basement bins, outdoor sheds. Movers who quote off "3-bedroom" alone often miss these entirely. They show up on move day, see them, and the estimate has to be rewritten before loading.
This is why federal rules require an interstate mover to survey your goods, on site or by video, before writing an estimate, unless you waive the survey in writing (49 CFR 375.401). They need to see the house, not just hear about it.
How surveyors actually estimate
Surveyors walk room by room and assign per-item cubic-foot values from a table. No single industry table exists. Three published ones are the Defense Department's Weight Estimator, California's Maximum Rate Tariff 4 and the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission's cube sheet. They agree on many items and differ on others.
A small selection, as those tables publish them:
| Item | Cubic feet |
|---|---|
| King mattress + frame | 70 |
| Queen mattress + frame | 70 (the Defense table; California and Washington have no queen row) |
| 3-seat sofa | 50 |
| Dining table | 15 to 30, depending on the table and the source |
| Refrigerator (11 cu ft capacity or more) | 60 in California and Washington; 25 to 52 in the Defense table, by capacity |
| Bookcase | 20 |
| Floor lamp | 3 |
| Boxes (medium, 3 cu ft each) | n × 3 |
Each value already accounts for how the item packs, with the void space between rectangular surfaces. Pick one table for the whole house and say which one in anything you send a mover; a cube sheet from one source won't match one from another on the items where they differ.
Surveyors total all items in a room, then sum across rooms. California's tariff requires its estimators to use cubic measurements no less than its table's.
The 7-pound rule
Once you have cubic feet, weight estimation is straightforward. Estimators convert volume to weight at 7 pounds per cubic foot of properly loaded van space. It's a convention, not a measured density: the Defense Department's estimator and California's tariff use it, Washington's tariff sets 7 as the floor for a long-distance estimate, and the federal travel rule for government relocations (41 CFR 302-7.8) uses it when no adequate scale is available. Movers use it to convert a volume estimate into the weight-based rate they charge against. The final bill rests on the weighed shipment.
A 1,000 cu ft household is therefore roughly 7,000 lbs, and 1,430 cu ft is about 10,000 lbs. For long-distance moves charged per pound, this conversion drives the headline price.
Quick estimation by truck size
If you don't want to itemize, U-Haul publishes what each rental truck holds and the home it suggests it for:
| Truck | Cubic feet | U-Haul's suggested home |
|---|---|---|
| 10 ft | 402 | Small apartment to 1 bedroom |
| 15 ft | 764 | 1 bedroom home or 2 bedroom apartment |
| 20 ft | 1,016 | 2 bedroom home or 3 bedroom apartment |
| 26 ft | 1,682 | 3 to 4 bedroom home |
These are starting points. No mover or van line publishes a standard cubic-foot figure by bedroom count, so your real number depends on how long you've owned the place, your furniture profile, and how much you've accumulated in non-bedroom rooms.
The point of running an itemized estimate isn't to skip these averages, it's to figure out where in the range you actually fall.
Why this matters before you call a mover
Three concrete reasons.
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You can sanity-check quotes. If a mover quotes you 1,900 cubic feet and you've estimated 1,100 yourself, one of you is wrong, and now you can have that conversation. Without your own number, you're just trusting their math.
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You can pick the right service tier. A small studio shouldn't be paying full-service rates for a load that fits a 10-foot truck. A household that fills a 26-foot truck should not be DIY-ing a one-way truck rental without pricing the alternatives. Service tier is mostly a function of volume.
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You can plan packing. Volume tells you how many boxes, how many trips with the loader, whether your truck size is realistic. Without the number, "we'll figure it out" turns into a 14-hour move day.
How to estimate yours
Two paths:
By eye, room by room. Stand in each room. List the major furniture. Look up cubic feet per item from one of the tables above. Sum the total. This works fine if you're moving a small household.
With a tool, room by room. Walk through with the calculator, tap the items in each room, get the total in 10 minutes. Same logic, less arithmetic; the calculator adds a 15% allowance of its own for awkward shapes and the things you forgot. The output is yours, copy the URL, take it to any mover.
Either way, you walk into the quote conversation with a number that's already been itemized and isn't going to drift on move day. That's what cubic feet actually buys you: a defensible position before the contract gets signed.