Stairs, Carries & Shuttles:
Fees, Decoded

Stairs

Carrying a household up three flights is real work. The only question is whether it’s billed as honest time (hourly moves), an honest line in a flat quote, or a delivery-day “surprise.” The first two are legitimate; the third is a quoting failure. On our hourly rate, stairs are just minutes; on flat rates, disclosed stairs are priced before we load.

Long carries

Distance from truck to door is the same story: labor. A downtown block where the truck parks 300 feet away, a garden complex with interior paths, hourly absorbs it as time; flat-rate quotes it when known. This is why we plan truck position so obsessively in tight neighborhoods: the cheapest fee is the carry that never got long.

Shuttles

Some addresses simply refuse a 26-foot truck: historic lanes, posted rural roads, tree canopies. The fix is a smaller shuttle vehicle for the last stretch: genuinely more equipment and handling. On a local move a second vehicle is $150 plus its own $75 fuel fee, and it is completely predictable when the access questions get asked up front. Coronado alleys, narrow historic lanes, posted rural roads: all shuttle country, all plannable.

Movers did not invent these terms. Federal household goods rules define them, and the definitions are narrower than most quotes imply.

The FMCSA’s Protect Your Move glossary puts a long carry plainly: a charge for carrying articles excessive distances between the mover’s vehicle and your residence. No footage appears in that definition, which is exactly why the distance belongs in writing before anything is loaded rather than argued about after.

A shuttle is tighter. It is “the use of a smaller vehicle to provide service to residences not accessible to the mover’s normal line-haul vehicles,” and the federal handbook, which calls it auxiliary service, names what qualifies: “a road or driveway that is too narrow, a bridge unable to support the weight of the van, and the inability to park the moving van within a reasonable distance of the pickup or the delivery residence.” Parking that is merely inconvenient is not on that list. Both sit inside a wider category of accessorial services, and where access defeats the road-haul truck the rules call it an impracticable operation, with the qualifying services “defined in your mover’s tariff.” That last phrase is the useful one: ask to see the list.

Those are the federal definitions, which govern an interstate move. A move that begins and ends inside California runs under the state’s own maximum rate tariff instead, but the vocabulary on every quote you will be handed comes from the federal side.

Stairs, an elevator and a long carry are not lines on it. None of the three is on our price list, because on an hourly rate all three are simply minutes on the clock.

A local move carries crew hours at the published hourly rate and a flat $75 fuel fee per truck. The reason access turns into hours rather than into line items is in the state tariff’s own rule for computing time under the hourly rates, Item 36: the time counted is loading, unloading and double the driving time from the point of origin to the point of destination. Stairs and a long carry land inside loading and unloading, so they lengthen the first two numbers and change nothing else. The drive itself has its own worked page on this site.

A shuttle is the one access condition on this page that can add a charge, and only because it takes a second vehicle. On a local move a second vehicle is $150 plus its own $75 fuel fee, so a two-vehicle job carries $300 in fees rather than $75. That is quoted before you book. A hoist is quoted before the day and in writing too. What none of them is, on our bill or anyone else’s worth hiring, is a number that appears for the first time after the truck is loaded.