Moving Truck Size Calculator

Truck size comes down to one number: the cubic feet your belongings occupy, matched against the truck’s cargo volume. This page estimates that number from your home size rather than asking you to measure every piece of furniture, because nobody does that and the per-room averages are close enough to pick a truck with.

If you do want to work it out properly, treat each item as its rectangular bounding box, multiply length by width by height, divide by 1,728 to get cubic feet, and add a couple of cubic feet per box. Then compare the total against the table below. The estimate here should land within about 20% of that.

Standard truck sizes and their real capacities:

These are the published cargo volumes the major rental companies quote, and they are what the calculator matches against. Note how uneven the jumps are. Going from 15 to 17 feet buys you 100 cubic feet; going from 20 to 26 buys you 660.

Volume by home size, which is what this calculator starts from for a typically furnished home: studio 300 ft³, 1-bedroom 500, 2-bedroom 750, 3-bedroom 1,100, 4-bedroom 1,450, 5+ bedroom 1,800. The “minimal” setting takes 30% off those and “heavy” adds 30%.

Worked example. A 2-bedroom, typically furnished, with two oversized items beyond the usual (a piano and a treadmill). Base volume: 750 ft³. Oversized items: 2 × 40 = 80 ft³. Total 830 ft³.

The calculator does not then pick the first truck bigger than 830. It asks for 10% headroom first, because furniture does not tessellate and a truck matched to the exact cubic figure is a truck whose door will not close. So the target is 830 ÷ 0.9 = 922 ft³, and the answer is the 20 ft at 1,015. The 17-footer at 865 clears the raw 830 but not the target, which is precisely the trap this avoids.

A plain 2-bedroom with no oversized items comes out at 750 ft³, a target of 833, and a 17 ft truck.

A note on the oversized-items field. The base figures already include ordinary furniture: beds, a sofa, a dining set, dressers. Only count things beyond that, the piano, the gun safe, the chest freezer, the full weight bench. Counting your normal sofa there charges you for it twice.

Money-saving tips:

• Book 2–4 weeks in advance for the best rates
• Mid-week (Tuesday to Thursday) moves are often 20–30% cheaper than weekends
• One-way rentals cost considerably more than round-trip, so factor that into cross-country moves
• Size up rather than down. A half-empty truck costs maybe $20 more; a second trip costs a whole day