Moving Boxes and Supplies Calculator

The list, by home size

The mix matters more than the count. Small boxes are for books and tools, the dense things that make a large box a two-person lift and a spine complaint; mediums are the kitchen and general workhorse; larges are for linens, pillows, and the light bulky things that eat truck volume. Wardrobe boxes carry hanging clothes on a bar and double as the easiest unpacking win on the first night. The counts above follow the standards mover supply guides publish, weighted toward mediums, because a household's true box signature is mostly kitchen.

Buy the blankets or rent them: the one comparison with a clean answer

A 3-bedroom home needs about two dozen furniture blankets. Renting them from the truck company runs about $28 for the rental period. Buying two dozen at about $16 each costs $384, which buys you blankets you will use twice a decade and store forever. Unless you are a landlord, a frequent mover, or furnishing a workshop, rent the blankets. The exception proves the rule at scale: above four dozen, or on a one-way where the rental blankets cannot be returned to the same fleet cheaply, buying (or buying used moving blankets, which resell at half price in every city with a military base) starts to win. Everything else on the list is a purchase: tape and paper are consumables, and used boxes, free from liquor stores and community groups, are the single largest legitimate saving in this entire section, worth $148 on the 3-bedroom list above if every box were sourced free, at the cost of an afternoon and a tolerance for mismatched sizes.

The supplies nobody lists

Three items earn their place on every move and appear on no retailer's checklist. A box of gallon zip bags, for the screws and brackets of every disassembled shelf and bed, labeled in marker, one bag per piece of furniture, taped to it. A basic tool roll, kept out of the truck and in your car, because the Allen keys are always in the last box loaded. And a first-night box, packed last and opened first: bedding, towels, toilet paper, phone chargers, the coffee maker, and the documents folder, including the mover's paperwork from our verification guide, which you will want in your hands and not in the truck if anything goes sideways on delivery day.

Sourcing boxes like a professional

Retail is the most expensive way to fill the table above. In descending order of value: used boxes from community marketplaces and moving-box exchanges, where a full household set commonly trades at a third of retail in the week after someone else's move; liquor store boxes, free, small, and strong, ideal for books and glassware because they were engineered for bottles; grocery and big-box store discards, free but variable, best for linens and soft goods; and new boxes for the fragile and the heavy, where crush strength is a specification rather than a hope. The professional habit worth copying is standardization: a household packed in three sizes stacks predictably in the truck, tetris-style, while a menagerie of scavenged shapes wastes a quarter of the cube you paid for. Scavenge within sizes, not across them.

Packing order is a logistics decision

Pack in the order the truck should be loaded, which is the reverse of the order rooms feel urgent. Books and dense goods first (they anchor the load and tolerate weeks boxed), then the kitchen (heavy, fragile, and needed last at the old place and first at the new, which is why two kitchen boxes should be marked to travel in your car), then furniture-adjacent soft goods, and keep the truck's front wall in mind: whatever loads there unloads last, so it should be the furniture the new home needs positioned first, typically beds. The supplies list on this page is a quantity; this ordering is what turns the quantity into a one-day load instead of a two-day argument.

Label discipline is the last supply, and it is free: two sides of every box, room plus one-line contents plus the single word that matters at the far end, OPEN FIRST, HEAVY, or FRAGILE, in that vocabulary only. An inventory this simple unloads a truck into the right rooms on the first pass, which is worth more on delivery day than any item in the table above.