What a moving company in Austin charges
Movers in Austin, TX run about $120 to $180 an hour for two movers and a truck. A one-bedroom is usually three to four hours, a two-bedroom four to six. Where you land in that band is almost never about how much stuff you own. It is four things: stairs, elevator waits, how far the truck sits from your door, and whether there is anywhere legal to park it. A ground-floor house in Circle C with a driveway sits at the bottom. A fourth-floor walk-up in West Campus with no loading zone sits at the top. We ask about all four before a number goes in writing, and no deposit is needed for a quote. The fifth thing is the one you control, which is how much is already boxed when we walk in, and if that is the part you dread our packing crew in Austin can do the house the day before the truck comes.
Downtown and Rainey Street high rises
In a tower downtown, on Rainey, or in Seaholm, the building sets the schedule and you work around it. Three things decide whether the day goes smoothly.
- Certificate of insurance: nearly every managed high-rise wants a COI naming the building and its management company as additional insured, submitted days ahead. We carry the coverage and we send it. Buildings turn trucks away over this, at the gate, with your apartment already packed.
- Freight elevator windows: you get a reserved block, usually two to four hours, often not on the day you wanted, and the whole move has to fit inside it. That is why we push for a bigger crew downtown, not a cheaper one. Four movers inside a three-hour window beat two movers who run out of elevator.
- Dock height and clearance: some downtown docks have a hard height limit a 26-foot box truck will not clear. We check before move day and bring the truck that fits instead of finding out on the ramp.
The heavy pieces ride that same elevator, because there is no other way an upright or a gun safe is leaving a tower, and the freight car is not the place to improvise. Our Austin piano movers work the reserved window with the rest of the crew, board and straps already on the truck, so the instrument is not the reason the block runs out.
The Domain, North Burnet, and mid-rise apartments
The mid-rises around the Domain and North Burnet run on the same logic as downtown, just gentler. There is an elevator reservation, a designated loading spot that is usually not the one closest to your unit, and a long hallway between the elevator and your door. That hallway is the hidden cost. A 150-foot carry each way, done forty times, is an extra hour or two nobody quoted you for. We ask for a photo of the route and build the carry into the estimate. Mid-rise work is the everyday version of apartment moving in Austin, elevator reservation and certificate of insurance and all, and the buildings around the Domain are stricter about both than most people expect.
West Campus and Riverside lease churn
Student housing near UT and along Riverside turns over on a schedule the whole city feels. Most of those buildings have no freight elevator at all, which means stairs, and stairs are the most expensive thing you can put between a crew and a truck. On a third or fourth floor walk-up, adding a third mover usually lowers your total bill, because the same load goes down in far fewer hours. Ask us to price it both ways and pick the cheaper one.
The other West Campus problem is the curb: often there is no loading zone and no legal place for a truck within a hundred feet of the door. That is a long carry stacked on top of the stairs, and a crew that quotes you without asking about it is guessing.
Students often have the truck already, because a friend with a lease and a card rented it for the weekend. In that case you are only buying hands, and the same crew shows up as hourly moving help in Austin with no truck on the bill, loads the box tight so nothing shifts on I-35, and goes home.
Hyde Park and Travis Heights older homes
Hyde Park, Travis Heights, Clarksville, and Bouldin were laid out long before anyone owned a 26-foot truck. Narrow lanes, cars parked both sides, low limbs, no driveway, and a pier-and-beam house with six or eight steps up to a porch that turns at the top. All of it is fine if it is planned, and all of it is a problem if it is not.
On these jobs we send the right size truck rather than the biggest one, work out where it can legally sit, and plan the porch turn before anyone picks up a sofa. If the house has an upright piano, a gun safe, a marble top, or a hot tub on the deck, those get quoted as line items through our specialty moving crew, not treated as ordinary furniture.
East Austin new builds, Circle C, and two-story family homes
The new builds east of town and the two-story houses out in Circle C and southwest Austin have the easiest access in the city. Driveways, wide streets, room to work. So the cost driver flips: here it is volume and interior stairs. A four-bedroom two-story means a lot of trips up and down a staircase with a landing, and a full garage is often an hour by itself. What keeps that job mid-band instead of top-of-band is being fully packed when we arrive.
End of month is why you cannot get the day you want
Austin leases end on the last day of the month, so a huge share of the city’s moving demand lands on the same four or five days. The end-of-month weekend slots go first, usually weeks out, and they go to whoever called earliest. If your dates have any flex, a mid-month weekday is easier to book and easier to move, because you are not sharing a freight elevator with three other tenants in your building. If you are locked to the 31st, book early. That is the whole strategy.
Traffic, truck access, and where our trucks start
Our yard is at 4200 Burch Dr in Del Valle, just southeast of Austin off SH 130. That is a real advantage and worth saying plainly: we come at the city from the east instead of fighting down I-35 or across Mopac from the far side of town. Downtown is about twenty minutes outside rush hour. It also means we can start early, and a crew on your street at 8am is working while the highways are still moving. Drive time goes on the written quote as its own line rather than buried in the rate.
Who is actually showing up
Titan Moving & Delivery is family owned, founded in January 2020, with a crew of seven. Eliseo “Lee” Lucio III runs it. He learned the trade alongside his father starting in the late 1990s, he answers the phone, and he quotes the jobs. We are licensed and insured, and long-distance work runs under our own authority with no broker handoff. Our numbers are public on the FMCSA and TxDMV databases, so look them up. We are at 4.7 stars across 47 Google reviews, 44 of them five star.
Getting a quote on your Austin move
Tell us both addresses, your floor, whether there is an elevator and whether it has to be reserved, how close the truck can get to the door, and the heaviest thing in the place. You get back a written quote with the crew size, the hourly rate, the expected hours, and the travel line, and nothing gets added to it on move day.
If you want the whole thing handled, that is our local moving service. If the boxes are the part you dread, our packing services crew does them ahead of move day, which beats paying a full moving crew to wrap your kitchen by the hour. If you already rented the truck or the container and just need the muscle, our labor only crew loads and unloads it hourly.
