Moving from Los Angeles to Portland: 2026 Cost & Time

LA to Portland is a steady I-5 West Coast lane. Two-way volume keeps carriers full, so this route sees deeper off-peak discounts than similar-distance lanes elsewhere, target October through April.

Cost by home size

What affects your Los Angeles → Portland cost

• At roughly 963 miles this is a mid-range haul, usually a two- to three-day run, transport and handling contribute fairly evenly to the quote.
• Peak season (May–September) adds roughly 15% here; an off-season move is the biggest single saving on the calendar.
• Full packing and specialty items (piano, gym equipment, oversized furniture) are the add-ons most likely to change your final number.

Where the money goes on this move

Any quote for this move is two things added together: the crew hours to load your home and unload it again, and the transport in between. On a 963-mile lane those halves are nowhere near equal, and the bigger one is where your decisions actually land. For a 2-bedroom household, transport is about 68% of the pre-adjustment total here, and 65% at five bedrooms.

Quoting this lane off a flat cents-per-mile number will mislead you. Our model steps the rate down in bands, which puts a 2-bedroom load at roughly $2.26 a mile once averaged across all 963 miles. This route's final mile falls in the 500–1,500 mi band.

Crew rates at each end of this move

The carrier bills this move on weight and distance, but the people carrying your sofa are hired in two different labor markets, and those markets do not cost the same. These are the local rates we publish for Los Angeles and Portland.

Los Angeles is the more expensive labor market of the two, at $216 an hour for a 3-mover crew against $197 in Portland — a $19 an hour gap that would matter a great deal if this were a local move at that end, and matters much less on a tariff-priced interstate job.

Access is where the estimate and the invoice most often part company, and the two ends of this move present different problems. Los Angeles: Hillside addresses in Silver Lake, Echo Park, and the canyons come with long stair carries and streets no full-size truck can turn on, which routinely forces a shuttle. Westside and downtown towers add COI paperwork and reserved elevators.

Portland: Older Craftsman housing across Southeast and North Portland has front steps, basements, and narrow driveways, and the inner neighborhoods are street-parking only, so crews carry further than the home size would suggest.

What changes this number

Four decisions move this bill more than anything else, priced here in dollars against the 2-bedroom benchmark for this lane rather than as percentages. Two of them are entirely yours.

Peak season and an end-of-month date compound, so a late-July pickup carries both and lands roughly $736 over the off-peak baseline. It is the largest figure on this page you can change for free.

How this lane prices against its neighbours

If the destination is still open, the comparison worth seeing is cost, not distance. Every figure below is the same 2-bedroom benchmark computed the same way as the range at the top of this page.

Estimates, not quotes: every figure is computed from one published model at $62 per mover per hour plus tiered mileage, and none is attributed to a named company. See the method.