What moving labor actually covers
Moving labor means you handle the truck and we handle the muscle. You rent the moving truck, the POD, or the U-Pack container, park it, and keep the keys. Our crew arrives with pads, straps, dollies and shrink wrap, and we load it or unload it. For most Austin jobs a two-person crew runs about $120 to $180 an hour, and you get that number in writing before you book anything. There is no deposit to get a quote.
Titan Moving & Delivery is family owned out of Del Valle, just off SH 130 southeast of Austin. Lee Lucio has been doing this work since the late 1990s, starting alongside his father, and he still answers the phone and quotes the jobs himself. The crew is seven people, not a rotating pool of day laborers pulled off an app.
What you provide and what we bring
The split matters, because it is where most labor-only jobs go sideways. Here is the line.
- You provide: the truck, trailer, POD or container, the fuel, any parking or street permit, and the boxes if you packed yourself.
- We bring: the crew, moving pads and blankets, hand trucks and four-wheel dollies, straps and rope for tying off the load, shrink wrap, and tools for taking apart bed frames and table legs.
If you want us to bring boxes and do the packing too, that is a different service. Our packing and unpacking service covers that, and plenty of customers combine the two: we pack on a Friday, you rent the truck for Saturday, and we load it.
How much does moving labor cost per hour
Two movers and no truck runs roughly $120 to $180 an hour in the Austin area. The spread comes from a few real things, not from a pricing game.
Stairs move the number. A third-floor walk-up with no elevator takes longer per box than a ground-floor garage, so the same load can cost more. Distance from the truck to the door matters just as much. If the closest legal spot to park a 26-foot truck is 200 feet from your unit, every trip is longer. Heavy pieces move it too. A gun safe, an upright piano, a treadmill, or a marble table top all need more hands and more time than a couch.
Most labor jobs land between two and four hours. A one-bedroom load-out is often done in three. A three-bedroom house being loaded into a 26-foot truck is usually a four to six hour job with a bigger crew. When Lee quotes you, he asks what floor you are on, how far the truck can park, and what the heaviest thing in the house is. Those three answers get the estimate close.
Loading and unloading a rented truck, POD or container
Loading is not just carrying. A truck that is packed loose will shift on I-35 and arrive with broken furniture. Our crew loads in tiers, heaviest items against the wall of the truck first, mattresses and box springs on edge, and everything strapped off in sections so the load cannot tip when the truck brakes. Furniture gets pads and shrink wrap before it goes anywhere near the wall of the truck.
Containers are their own problem. A POD is short and shallow compared to a rental truck, so the packing math is different. You cannot leave dead air at the top or the load will slide when the container gets picked up and tilted onto a truck. We build the load tight, top to bottom, and wall off the door end so nothing falls out when you open it in three weeks.
Unloading is where people underestimate the value. If we are unloading a truck someone else packed, we go slower, because we do not know what is under what. Tell us if there is something fragile buried in the middle and we will get to it carefully.
Is labor-only moving cheaper than a full-service move
Sometimes. Run the real numbers instead of guessing. A rental truck for a local move is often $50 to $100 by the time you add mileage and fuel, and you are the one driving a 20-foot box truck through Austin traffic. Add three hours of moving labor at $150 an hour and you are around $500 all in for a one-bedroom.
A full-service local move with our truck, our crew, and our insurance on the drive is usually a few hundred dollars more, and you never touch a steering wheel. If your move is small, if you already have the truck, or if you are moving into a storage unit you rented, labor-only is the right call. If you are moving a full house and you do not want to be liable for a rental truck, look at local moving with our truck and crew instead.
What labor-only does not include
We are direct about this so nobody is surprised on move day. Labor-only does not include driving your rental truck. Rental agreements name the driver, and our crew is not on your contract, so we do not take the wheel. It also does not include the truck itself, fuel, mileage, or the container rental.
Valuation coverage works differently on a labor job as well. When we drive our own truck under our own authority, the load is on us in transit. When you drive the rental, the drive is yours. What we are responsible for is how the load is built and how it is handled going in and out of the door. That is the honest version, and it is the version worth knowing before you book anyone.
Apartments, storage units, and jobs the crew does often
A lot of our labor work is not a full house. People book two movers for two hours to get a sleeper sofa up to a second-floor apartment. Storage unit loads are steady work: you have a 10 by 15 unit and a rented truck, and you need it packed floor to ceiling so it all fits. Estate cleanouts where family is doing the sorting and just needs the heavy pieces carried out. Staging jobs where furniture moves out for photos and back in a week later.
The rented-truck-in-the-driveway job gets more common the further out you go, because the houses have real driveways and a 26-footer actually fits in them. We load U-Hauls in Buda and we load PODs in Hutto most weeks, and both are usually finished before lunch, because a garage-level load with no stairs is the fastest work in this trade.
We also get called for the pieces other labor crews turn down. Safes, hot tubs, marble tops and appliances are normal days for us. If it is on wheels, on stairs, or over 300 pounds, ask.
Getting a quote
Tell us the address, the floor, what you are loading into, and roughly what is going. Lee will give you an hourly rate and an honest window of how many hours it should take, in writing, before you commit to anything. If the job turns out smaller than expected, you pay for the time you used.
Titan Moving & Delivery is licensed and insured, with our own interstate authority. Our numbers are public. Look them up on the FMCSA and TxDMV sites before you hire anyone, including us. We hold 4.7 stars across 47 Google reviews, 44 of them five stars, and the fastest way to see why is to read them. When you are ready, request a quote and we will get you on the schedule. Booking a week ahead is usually enough, though spring and summer weekends fill up fast. For the full list of what the crew handles, see all our moving services.