Moving Quote Explained: Shuttle, Long Carry, Stairs

I have signed six long-haul estimates. Until about the fourth one I read a single number on them — the total at the bottom — and treated the rest of the page as packaging.

The total comes from the rest of the page. Somewhere on the second or third sheet of an interstate moving quote sits a block of short labelled lines with a price column beside them. Shuttle service. Long carry. Flight charge. Elevator. Bulky article. Appliance servicing. Most of them are blank when the quote lands in your inbox, and a blank line reads like reassurance. It is a field nobody has filled in yet.

What follows walks down that block in the order it usually prints, with the section number for each rule beside it. Everything here is interstate — a move that crosses a state line, which is what 49 CFR Part 375 governs. A move that begins and ends inside one state answers to that state instead, and nothing below reaches it. Every quotation is the wording the eCFR carried on 16 August 2026. The links point at whatever is current, so if the two disagree, the page you open wins.

The box at the top decides what every line under it means

Before anything else, find the box that says whether the estimate is binding or non-binding. It is usually on the first page, sometimes in the smallest type on the sheet, and every line below it changes meaning depending on which one is ticked. Which of the two you are better off with, and what each one means on delivery day, is a subject of its own — that is what Estimates & Quotes is for.

49 CFR 375.401(b) requires the mover to hand you a written estimate before executing a bill of lading and to state on it which kind it is. The wording of (b)(2) repays a second reading. A non-binding estimate is what the mover believes the total will be, "based upon both the estimated weight or volume of the shipment and the accessorial services requested and the physical survey of the household goods, if required," and the final charges will rest on "the actual weight of the individual shipper's shipment and the tariff provisions in effect."

Three inputs, and the additional-services block is one of them. It is not a menu of optional extras bolted onto a finished price; it is part of how the price was built. Lines left empty mean an estimate assembled from some of its inputs.

Line-haul is the number you compared between quotes

The big figure people set side by side when three quotes arrive is usually the line-haul charge. The FMCSA booklet Your Rights and Responsibilities When You Move — which the mover has to give you a copy of, or a link to, when it gives you the estimate (§ 375.213(a)(2)), and which is reproduced in full as Appendix A to Part 375 if you would rather not wait for a salesperson to email it — defines line-haul charges as "the charges for the transportation portion of your move when a household goods mover transports your shipment." Transportation, with nothing in it about reaching your front door at either end.

The same glossary carries two more entries worth having in your head before you read the block:

• Accessorial (additional) services — "services such as packing, unpacking, appliance servicing, or piano carrying, that you request to be performed or are necessary because of landlord requirements or other special circumstances."
• Advanced charges — "charges for services performed by someone other than the mover." The booklet adds that the mover pays for these and adds them to your bill of lading. A crane, a locksmith, a technician who disconnects a gas dryer: third-party work that arrives on your invoice.

The block, line by line

Shuttle service. A smaller truck runs between your address and the tractor-trailer, parked wherever it can legally sit. It fires when the street is too narrow, the overhang too low, the complex has a no-truck rule, or there is simply nowhere to stand for eight hours. The person who decides is the estimator in your driveway, which is why a quote produced entirely over the phone has a shuttle-shaped hole in it. Ask which address triggers it — origin, destination, or both — and how it is billed: flat, per hundredweight, or per hour.

Long carry. The distance from where the truck parks to your door, beyond whatever the tariff gives you free. That included distance is a number in the mover's tariff and it differs from mover to mover. Get the number, then go and walk it. A third-floor walk-up across a courtyard is longer than it looks from the kerb.

Flight charge. The booklet glossary is unusually direct: "An additional charge for carrying items up or down flights of stairs. Charges for these services may be in addition to the line-haul charges." What it leaves open is how a flight gets counted. Four steps up to a porch and a full landing between floors are not obviously the same unit, and the tariff settles that, not the crew chief on the day.

Elevator. Named in the regulation itself: § 375.401(f) uses "elevators, long carries, etc." as its examples of accessorial services. Buildings that want the lift reserved, padded, or covered by a certificate of insurance from the mover turn this into a scheduling problem as much as a pricing one.

Bulky article. A piano, a safe, a hot tub, a treadmill, a slate pool table — usually a fixed charge per item. Of the whole block this is the line I would check first against what is actually in your garage, because it is the one most likely to have been priced from an inventory taken over the phone.

Each of those lines can print in a different unit, and a figure often arrives without one. The unit is a tariff matter rather than a Part 375 matter, which is not the same as being unconstrained: the Surface Transportation Board's tariff rules at 49 CFR 1310.3(a) require a tariff to "provide the specific applicable rates, charges and service terms" and to be "arranged in a way that allows for the determination of the exact rate, charges and service terms applicable to any given shipment." Flat, per hundredweight, per hour, per item — whichever one it is, the price on your estimate came out of a document that is supposed to make it determinable. So ask for the unit in the same sentence as the price.

One thing about that block genuinely surprised me. Shuttle, long carry and bulky article are not defined anywhere in Part 375. Section 375.103, the definitions section for the whole part, runs to nineteen entries — advertisement, bill of lading, certified scale, physical survey, reasonable dispatch, tariff, and so on — and not one of them is a charge from that block. Search the part with its appendix and the word shuttle does not appear in it at all; "long carries" turns up exactly once, in § 375.401(f), as an example rather than a definition.

What fills the gap is the mover's tariff, which § 375.103 does define: "an issuance (in whole or in part) containing rates, rules, regulations, classifications or other provisions related to a motor carrier's transportation services." So there is no federal answer to how long a long carry is. There is your mover's answer, sitting in a document you are entitled to ask for — which is what the last section here is about.

The blank lines are the expensive ones

This is the paragraph I wish I had read before my first interstate move. Section 375.401(f), in full:

You must determine charges for any accessorial services such as elevators, long carries, etc., before preparing the bill of lading for binding or non-binding estimates. If you fail to ask the shipper about such charges and fail to determine such charges before preparing the bill of lading, you must deliver the goods and bill the shipper after 30 days for the additional charges.

Read what it does and does not do. The charge does not disappear; you may well still owe it. What moves is when it is collected. A mover that never asked and never priced an accessorial service does not get to discover it at your kerb and make unloading conditional on payment for it. The obligation in that sentence is to deliver, then bill after 30 days.

Three requirements sit around it, all pointing the same way:

• Section 375.405(b)(6) makes the mover "clearly describe on the face of a non-binding estimate the entire shipment and all services you are providing."
• The seventeen-item list of what a bill of lading must carry, at § 375.505(b), includes at item (14) "a complete description of any special or accessorial services ordered and minimum weight or volume charges applicable to the shipment."
• Section 375.505(g)(2) does allow a mover to hand you a document that is not yet complete, but it draws the line in a specific place: it may omit "only that information that cannot be determined before loading, such as actual shipment weight … or unforeseen charges incurred in transit." A shuttle the surveyor could see coming is neither, and § 375.401(f) puts accessorial charges on the before-the-bill-of-lading side of that line.

One requirement cuts the other way, and it is worth knowing before you decide a blank line is a win. Under § 375.505(e) the mover must tell you when it reasonably expects a special or accessorial service to be necessary, and must refuse the shipment if you then decline to buy it. A crew insisting a shuttle is unavoidable is not automatically inventing one.

A charge that lands anyway has two channels, and both are timed. Your mover is required to operate an arbitration program under § 375.211(a) covering not only loss and damage but "disputes about whether carrier charges in addition to those collected at delivery must be paid" — binding for claims of $10,000 or less where you are the one asking for it under (a)(7), a decision due within 60 days under (a)(10), and no more than half the cost of instituting the proceeding charged to you under (a)(5). The second channel runs against you rather than for you: 49 U.S.C. 13710(a)(3)(B) says a shipper "must contest the original bill or subsequent bill within 180 days of receipt of the bill in order to have the right to contest such charges." The mirror provision one paragraph up, which cuts a carrier off from billing extra more than 180 days after the original bill, is written for carriers "other than a motor carrier providing transportation of household goods." On a move, that clock runs one way.

Impracticable operations, and the 15 percent

One category behaves differently from everything above, and it carries the least intuitive name on the form. The booklet's glossary calls impracticable operations "conditions which make it physically impossible for the mover to perform pickup or delivery with its normally assigned road-haul equipment so that the mover is required to use specialized equipment and/or additional labor to complete pickup or delivery of your shipment." The two sentences that follow the definition matter more than the definition itself:

A mover may require payment of additional charges for services required due to impracticable operations, even if you do not request these services. The specific services considered to be impracticable operations by your mover are defined in your mover's tariff.

Which is to say: the shuttle, the extra crew, the long carry — met at the address rather than agreed at the estimate — can be charged whether or not you asked for them, and what counts as one is set by the tariff rather than by the rule.

What the rule does set is a ceiling on how much of it can be collected at the truck. Section 375.407(d), on when a mover must hand over a collect-on-delivery shipment, is the plainest statement of it: "You may not demand payment of charges for impracticable operations, as defined in your tariff, of more than 15 percent of all other charges due at delivery." The same 15 percent runs through § 375.405(b)(9), for services the mover decides mid-move are necessary, and § 375.405(b)(10), for services you request after the bill of lading is issued — where it appears as charges "(as defined in your carrier tariff) not to exceed 15 percent of all other charges due at delivery." Anything above the cap is billed afterwards under subpart H rather than collected on the day.

Timing turns on two more paragraphs that are easy to walk past.

When the mover decides mid-move. If it concludes after the bill of lading has been issued that additional services are necessary, it must tell you what they are before performing them and allow you at least one hour to decide — § 375.405(b)(9) on a non-binding estimate, § 375.403(a)(8) on a binding one.

When your estimate is binding and something gets added. Section 375.403 gives the mover three routes at (a)(6) when goods or services turn up that the binding estimate did not cover: reaffirm it, prepare a new binding estimate before loading, or agree with you in writing to treat it as non-binding. Take none of the three and load anyway, and (a)(7) decides the question — failure to execute a new estimate "signifies you have reaffirmed the original binding estimate." The booklet puts the practical edge on it: unforeseen circumstances at destination, "such as elevators, stairs, or required parking permits," get billed after 30 days from delivery, while impracticable-operations charges are due at delivery inside that 15 percent. Which of those three routes was taken, and when, is worth establishing while the truck is still in front of you.

The request that fills the block in

What I got wrong on my early moves was treating the additional-services block as the estimator's paperwork rather than mine, and asking about it out loud instead of in writing. A verbal answer to "will there be a shuttle?" leaves nothing behind that exists on delivery day. The estimate does.

So, for the quote you are holding right now: ask for the tariff pages, in writing. Section 375.213(b)(2) requires the mover, before executing the bill of lading, to furnish "a notice of the availability of the applicable sections of your tariff for the estimate of charges, including an explanation that individual shippers may examine these tariff sections or have copies sent to them upon request." Producing the notice is the mover's job. Asking is yours.

Something like this, by email, so that it exists:

Please send me copies of the applicable tariff sections for the accessorial charges on my estimate — specifically shuttle service, long carry, and flight charges — including the included carry distance and how a flight is counted. Please also confirm in writing whether a shuttle is anticipated at origin, at destination, or neither, and enter each additional-services line on the estimate as either a price or "none" before I sign.

If a line still comes back blank after that, at least you know it is blank on purpose — and § 375.401(f) is what you have in your pocket on the day the truck arrives.

What the request is worth is set by the Board's tariff rules rather than by Part 375. Section 1310.6(a) says copies of "tariffs, specific tariff provisions or tariff subscriptions shall be provided upon request to any interested person," and (b) permits a reasonable charge for them — except for terms incorporated by reference into your bill of lading, which § 1310.4(a)(1) requires to be made available free, immediately or else "promptly." Where an office does not hold the tariff, § 1310.5(d) sets an outer limit of 20 days on producing it. And § 1310.4(b) is the sentence to keep in reserve: a carrier "may not claim the benefit as against a shipper or consignee of" a term incorporated by reference where it has not met those disclosure requirements.

I am not a mover, a broker, or a lawyer, and I know nothing about the specifics of your move — who writes this site, and why. Read the sections against your own paperwork. Quoting them rather than paraphrasing them is the whole point of a page like this.