Moving from San Francisco to Seattle: 2026 Cost & Time

The I-5 corridor between the Bay Area and Seattle is a dense two-way tech-relocation lane. Because trucks run full in both directions, off-peak (October–April) discounts on this route tend to be deeper than the national average.

Cost by home size

What affects your San Francisco → Seattle cost

• Around 810 miles, San Francisco to Seattle sits in the middle per-mile tier, so distance and home size pull on the price about equally.
• Flexibility on your pickup or delivery window gives carriers room to consolidate your load, which usually trims the price.
• Access on both ends, stairs, long carries, elevator reservations, or tight truck parking, adds crew hours the estimate can't see until the mover reviews it.

Where the money goes on this move

Movers do not price this lane as one number. They price handling — the crew hours at both ends — and they price the 810 miles, and the ratio between the two is what makes one household's quote look nothing like another's. For a 2-bedroom household, transport is about 65% of the pre-adjustment total here, and 62% at five bedrooms.

Because the mileage bands step down, the effective rate depends entirely on how far you are going. For this distance a 2-bedroom load averages about $2.39 a mile, and a five-bedroom load pays the same rate on a bigger truck — which is why transport is 62% of that bill rather than 65%. This route's final mile falls in the 500–1,500 mi band.

Crew rates at each end of this move

Loading happens in one labor market and unloading in another. Below are the rates each of those markets carries, which are the numbers you would pay outright if either end of this were a local job.

San Francisco is the more expensive labor market of the two, at $223 an hour for a 3-mover crew against $208 in Seattle — a $15 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.

The hourly rate tells you the price of an hour. What decides how many hours is the housing at each end. San Francisco: This is the hardest access market in the country: Victorian walk-ups with four flights and no elevator, streets too narrow for a full-size truck, and permitted parking that has to be reserved with the city days ahead. Many jobs need a shuttle.

Seattle: Queen Anne, Capitol Hill, and Fremont combine steep grades, narrow streets, and older walk-ups with no elevator, and the city requires a permit to reserve curb space for a moving truck across most of the dense neighborhoods.

What changes this number

These are the levers, priced. A percentage would be the same on every page on this site, so the figures here are computed against this lane's own base.

Peak season and an end-of-month date compound, so a late-July pickup carries both and lands roughly $678 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.