Released Value vs Full Value Protection: Do the Math

Sixty cents a pound. Written out like that it sounds like a rate, the kind of thing you skim past because rates are for the mover to worry about. It is not a rate. It is the released value of everything you own, and it stops being abstract the moment you put a weight beside it. A four-pound laptop is worth $2.40. A fifty-pound television is worth $30. A dresser that arrives in three pieces is worth whatever it weighs times six-tenths of a dollar, and nothing else about it — not what you paid, not what the replacement costs, not that it was the only piece of furniture you ever bought new — enters the calculation at all.

That is the whole of the option. It is also the level a great many households travel on, because it costs nothing and because the place you agree to it does not look like a decision. It looks like an initial box beside a paragraph of small type. The other choice on that same form is Full Value Protection, and the two are not a premium tier and a basic tier of one product. They are two different arithmetics, and they produce numbers about ten times apart.

Everything else on this site about damage and loss runs back through this one choice, so this page starts earlier than a claim form: at the two numbers, at where in the rules each one actually comes from, and at which day of your move each one is still changeable on — which is the part that decides whether knowing the rest does you any good.

Scope first. 49 CFR Part 375 is a federal rule and it reaches your move only because the move crosses a state line. If both addresses sit inside one state, stop reading and go find that state's household goods regulator instead; none of what follows applies to you, the 60 cents included. Section text quoted here is what the eCFR carried on 17 August 2026, read against the published title 49 issue dated 7 August 2026; booklet language is from Appendix A as it stood the same day. Every citation below links to the live text, not to my copy of it.

The unit is the article, not the shipment

Here is the sentence that does the work, from 49 CFR 375.203(b):

If an individual shipper agrees to ship household goods released at a value greater than 60 cents per pound ($1.32 per kilogram) per article, your liability for loss and damage may be limited to $100 per pound ($220 per kilogram) per article if the individual shipper fails to notify you in writing of articles valued at more than $100 per pound ($220 per kilogram).

Per article. Not per shipment, not per box, not per room. The FMCSA booklet — reproduced in full as Appendix A to Part 375, which is the version I read because it does not require waiting for a salesperson to email you a PDF — spells out what that means with an example the industry's own marketing pages tend to leave out:

Released Value is minimal protection; however, it is the most economical protection available as there is no charge to you. Under this option, the mover assumes liability for no more than 60 cents per pound, per article.

and then, plainly:

For example, if a 10-pound stereo component valued at $1,000 was lost or destroyed, the mover would be liable for no more than $6.00 (10 pounds × $ .60).

A thousand-dollar item, six dollars. Nobody reading that sentence in advance chooses released value by accident. The problem is that hardly anybody reads it in advance, because the booklet arrives in the same email as the estimate and the estimate has a total on it that wants your attention more.

One footnote that matters more than it looks, because it is the part people get wrong in both directions. The 60-cent figure is written into the regulation itself — it is in § 375.203(b) above, and again in § 375.303(a), which lets a mover sell you insurance "only when the individual shipper releases the shipment for transportation at a value not exceeding 60 cents per pound ($1.32 per kilogram) per article." But the rate you are released at does not come from the CFR. It comes from a Surface Transportation Board order, and it is not frozen. Section 375.201(c) sends the mover to the STB's Released Rates of Motor Carrier Shipments of Household Goods and then adds: "The rate may be increased annually by the motor carrier based on the U.S. Department of Commerce's Cost of Living Adjustment." Section 375.505(b)(12) says it again in the plural, of "the released rates." So 60 cents is the figure the rules are drafted around, not a guarantee about the figure on your valuation statement. Read yours before you assume which one you are on.

The math on a household

Take a shipment of 7,000 pounds — plug in your own number when you have a weight ticket; that is what the ticket is for. Released value tops out at 7,000 × $0.60 = $4,200, and only if literally everything is destroyed. What you will actually be arguing about is a handful of items, and those look like this:

Those weights are mine, not the mover's — arithmetic to show the shape of the thing, not a claim about your television. And working them out surfaced a gap I went looking to close and could not: nothing in Part 375 tells you how the weight of a single article gets established. Section 375.503(a) requires an itemized inventory identifying "every carton and every uncartoned item," with "an identification number that corresponds to the inventory" placed on each article. Numbers, not pounds. The shipment weight comes from certified scales, and §§ 375.507 through 375.519 are detailed about that — how to weigh, your right to watch it, when you may demand a re-weigh, what the weight ticket must say. All of it is about the truck. Between the inventory and the weight ticket there is no per-item figure anywhere, which means the weight of your broken dresser is something you and a claims adjuster arrive at by assertion. If a section governs it, I could not find it on 17 August 2026, and I would like to be sent the number.

Now the other side. The booklet sets the minimum for Full Value Protection:

The minimum valuation level for determining the cost of Full Value Protection of your shipment is $6.00 per pound times the weight of your shipment.

Same 7,000 pounds, so a declared value of at least $42,000. Ten times the released ceiling — $6.00 against 60 cents — and that ratio comes out of the two published figures rather than out of anything your mover decides, subject to the indexing caveat above.

What FVP buys is described as an obligation with a choice attached — the mover's choice, not yours:

Under your mover's Full Value Protection level of liability, subject to the allowable exceptions in your mover's tariff, if any article is lost, destroyed, or damaged while in your mover's custody, your mover will, at its option, either (1) repair the article to the extent necessary to restore it to the same condition as when it was received by your mover, or pay you for the cost of such repairs; or (2) replace the article with an article of like, kind and quality, or pay you for the cost to replace the items.

Read "at its option" twice. Full Value Protection is not a promise of a new dresser. It is a promise of repair or replacement or cash, decided by the party writing the cheque. And read the clause before it once, because it is the one that gets clipped out of quotations: subject to the allowable exceptions in your mover's tariff. The tariff is a document you have almost certainly not seen, and the booklet does not say what is in it. The narrow foothold the rules give you is § 375.213(b)(2), which requires the mover to hand you "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." That notice is written about the charge pages. Asking for the liability-exception pages in the same request is not something the section entitles you to, but it is a reasonable thing to ask a mover in writing, and the answer tells you something either way.

What it costs, and how to read that

I am not going to tell you what Full Value Protection costs, because the charge lives in your mover's tariff and differs from mover to mover. The booklet says only that the cost "may vary by mover and may be further subject to various deductible levels." What I can tell you is where to look and what to do with it:

1. The valuation charge sits on the estimate as a priced line like any other tariff item — the same document family as the shuttle and long-carry lines covered in Moving Quote Line by Line, and you can ask for the tariff pages behind it the same way.
2. Divide that charge by the declared value in hundreds. Say the line reads $500 against $42,000 of coverage: that is roughly $1.19 per $100 of goods. The rate is comparable across quotes; the raw dollar charge is not, because the declared values differ.
3. Whether a low charge means a low rate or a large deductible is not visible on the estimate, so it has to be asked, in writing. A cheaper premium and a bigger deductible are not the same purchase.

Then the actual decision, which is smaller than the internet makes it: the difference between the two options on a 7,000-pound shipment is roughly $37,800 of exposure. If the valuation charge is in the hundreds, you are being asked whether you would pay that to not carry that exposure yourself. Framed that way most people answer quickly, and they answer the same way they would about any other deductible in their life. What derails them is never the price. It is not knowing that $4,200 was the alternative.

Two places that charge is required to exist, and neither of them is your inbox. The booklet closes its Full Value Protection passage with "The charges that apply for providing Full Value Protection must be shown in your mover's tariff. Ask your mover for the details under its specific program." And where those tariff terms are incorporated by reference into your bill of lading, the Board's own rule at 49 CFR 1310.4(a)(2) makes the notice say so, entitles you to "a brief summary of the principal features of such terms on or with the document," and entitles you to "a more complete explanation of such terms upon request" — with limits on the carrier's liability for loss or damage named at (a)(2)(i) as exactly the kind of term that triggers it. On deductibles there is nothing to look up at all: reading the part with its appendix on 18 August 2026, the single occurrence of the word is the booklet's "may be further subject to various deductible levels" — no amount, no tier, no ceiling. Whatever levels you are offered came out of a tariff, which is why they have to be asked for.

Which day you are on decides what you can still change

This site sorts everything by when. Valuation has four moments, and the useful thing to know is that the door closes much earlier than people assume.

Estimate day — the choice appears. Section 375.401(g) requires the mover to "include as a part of your estimate the liability election notice provided in the Surface Transportation Board's released rates order." So the election is not something sprung on you at the truck; it is legally required to be on the estimate you are holding weeks earlier. If it is not there, that absence is itself information. On the same day, § 375.213(a) requires the mover to furnish the booklet — as a copy or a link — along with the estimate.

Load day — the choice becomes binding. The bill of lading must carry, at § 375.505(b)(12), the STB's valuation statement, which "requires individual shippers either to choose Full Value Protection for your liability or waive the Full Value Protection in favor of the STB's released rates," plus, if you do waive, "the charges, if any, for optional valuation coverage." That signature is the whole ball game. Everything the claims process can eventually award you was capped here, before the first box went on the truck.

Two protections sit around that signature and both are about time. Section 375.505(h) requires the bill of lading to be "provided to, signed, and dated by the individual shipper at least 3 days before the shipment is scheduled to be loaded," and requires the mover to give you "the opportunity to rescind the bill of lading without any penalty for a 3-day period" after you sign. Which means the document carrying your valuation election is meant to be in your hands with days to spare, not on a clipboard at 7 a.m. The same paragraph carves out one exception, and it is worth knowing so you do not misread a legitimate change as a violation: items or services you add on the day of the move can amend the bill of lading without starting a fresh 3-day period.

The other protection is statutory and it runs the other way — it is about what a signature has to be before it counts. 49 U.S.C. 14706(f)(3) says released rates "shall not apply to the transportation of household goods by a carrier unless the liability of the carrier for the full value of such household goods under paragraph (2) is waived, in writing, by the shipper," and paragraph (2) sets that full-value liability as the standing rule "[u]nless the carrier receives a waiver in writing." No written waiver, no released rates. Which is why the question to ask about your own file is not "did I choose released value" but "where is the piece of paper on which I chose it."

Delivery day — the choice is spent, but the record is not. Nothing you do at the door changes the ceiling. What you can still protect is the evidence, and one rule helps: § 375.701 says your "delivery receipt or shipping document must not contain any language purporting to release or discharge" the mover from liability, though it may say the property was received in apparent good condition "except as noted on the shipping documents." Which is an instruction disguised as a permission: note it, on the document, before you sign. Photographs help, but only the ones that already exist — the evidence available on claim day is the evidence you made before the truck arrived and at the moment the crate came off it. Separately, § 375.703 caps what can be demanded from you at the door: on a binding estimate, "the exact estimate of the charges, plus charges for any additional services requested by the shipper after the bill of lading has been issued"; on a non-binding one, 110 percent of the estimate plus those same additions; and in both cases impracticable-operations charges limited to "15 percent of all other charges due at delivery." Money owed and damage owed are separate arguments; do not trade one for the other on the pavement.

Claim day — the ceiling is already set. You have, per the booklet, "9 months from the date of delivery (or in the event of loss for the entire shipment, from the date your shipment should have been delivered) to file your claim," which tracks 49 U.S.C. 14706(e): a carrier may not provide "a period of less than 9 months for filing a claim ... and a period of less than 2 years for bringing a civil action." Once filed, 49 CFR 370.9 requires the carrier to "pay, decline, or make a firm compromise settlement offer in writing to the claimant within 120 days after receipt of the claim," with a written status update every 60 days if it runs longer.

And one line in 370.9(b) that belongs here rather than in a claims article, because it explains settlement offers that look insultingly low even under full value:

When settling a claim for loss or damage, a household goods motor carrier as defined in § 375.103 of this subchapter shall use the replacement costs of the lost or damaged item as a base to apply a depreciation factor to arrive at the current actual value of the lost or damaged item.

Replacement cost as a base, then depreciation. Sit that beside the booklet's "replace the article with an article of like, kind and quality" and you can see where the argument in most settlements actually happens. Not over whether you are covered. Over which of those two sentences is being applied to your sofa.

There is a trap in the filing itself, and it catches people who did everything else right. Under 49 CFR 370.3(b) a claim is a written communication that identifies the shipment, asserts liability, and makes "claim for the payment of a specified or determinable amount of money" — three parts, and the third is the one that goes missing. Paragraph (c) says outright that the notes you made at the door are no substitute: "Bad order reports, appraisal reports of damage, notations of shortage or damage" on delivery receipts or other documents, and inspection reports issued by carriers, do not standing alone satisfy the filing requirement. Paragraph (d) closes the other exit, refusing voluntary payment on a claim pitched at an uncertain amount "such as '$100 more or less'" until a figure is filed — so the notation protects the record without starting the 30-day and 120-day clocks.

Whichever number you chose, the booklet keeps a list of ways it comes down

Choosing Full Value Protection does not end the subject. The booklet runs a short section headed "Reducing Your Mover's Normal Liability," and it is worth reading in the booklet's own order rather than in the order that feels intuitive, because the intuitive order puts the rare one first.

Your acts and omissions. The first item is deliberately broad — "Your acts or omissions cause the loss or damage to occur" — and the two examples the booklet reaches for are the two that actually happen: "improper packing of containers you pack yourself do not provide sufficient protection or you include perishable, dangerous, or hazardous materials in your shipment without your mover's knowledge." The regulation behind that second half is § 375.203(a), and it is written at the mover, not at you: if a shipper includes "perishable, dangerous, or hazardous articles in the shipment without your knowledge, you need not assume liability for those articles or for the loss or damage caused by their inclusion in the shipment." Read that last clause slowly. It is not only the leaking bottle that falls outside the mover's liability. It is everything the bottle leaked on. Owner-packed cartons are flagged as such on the inventory in ordinary industry practice; the marking is a mover's convention rather than a Part 375 requirement, but the consequence it points at is this booklet sentence.

Released value, plus goods worth more than released value. The second item is this article in one line: you "chose the Waiver of Full Value Protection—Released Value level of liability (60 cents per pound per article) but ship household goods valued at more than 60 cents per pound per article." Which describes, in practice, almost everyone who chose it — the table further up is what "valued at more than 60 cents per pound per article" looks like item by item.

A declared value lower than the goods are worth. The third item sits on the Full Value Protection side: "You declare a value for your shipment which is less than the actual value of the articles in your shipment." Worth pairing with what the $6.00-per-pound figure actually is. The booklet calls it "the minimum valuation level for determining the cost of Full Value Protection" and adds that "[y]our mover may use a higher minimum value, or you may declare a higher value for your shipment (at an additional cost)." It is a floor for pricing the coverage. It is not a finding about what your things are worth, and if your household is worth more than six dollars a pound, the minimum is where an underinsurance argument starts rather than where it ends.

Articles over $100 a pound that you never wrote down. The fourth item is the one with a regulation you can quote back: you "fail to notify your mover in writing of articles valued at more than $100 per pound." Go back to § 375.203(b) and read its opening condition, because it is routinely dropped when that paragraph gets summarised. The $100-per-pound ceiling applies where "an individual shipper agrees to ship household goods released at a value greater than 60 cents per pound ($1.32 per kilogram) per article." That is a limit living on the upper side of the choice. If you waived down to 60 cents you never arrive at it — your liability was already sixty cents a pound and a $100 cap has nothing left to cut. Paragraph (c) is the half worth acting on: give the written notice and you are "entitled to full recovery up to the declared value of the article or articles, not to exceed the declared value of the entire shipment." The booklet names the category — "any item whose value exceeds $100 per pound (for example, jewelry, silverware, china, furs, antiques, oriental rugs, and computer software)" — and warns that movers "are permitted to limit their liability for loss or damage to articles of extraordinary value, unless you specifically list these articles on the shipping documents." A one-pound ring is a $100 item unless it is on that form.

There is a fifth thing that is not on the booklet's list, because it runs the opposite way. Insurance is not valuation, and only one of the two is Part 375. Notice first when a mover may even sell it: § 375.303(a) permits it "only when the individual shipper releases the shipment for transportation at a value not exceeding 60 cents per pound ($1.32 per kilogram) per article." Insurance is the released-value companion product. If somebody is selling you a policy, that is a reason to go and check which box is ticked on your valuation statement, because under this paragraph the two travel together. And where it is sold, (c)(2) requires a copy of "the policy or other appropriate evidence" at the time of sale, (c)(3) requires it "written in plain English," and (c)(5) points at the mover rather than at you: failure to issue it "will subject you to full liability for any claims to recover loss or damage attributed to you." That paragraph enlarges what the mover owes. If you paid for insurance and never received a document, it is the one to have open.

Why the decision feels smaller than it is

Put the two documents side by side and the design problem is visible. The estimate shows a valuation charge — a real number, in dollars, today, in a column of other real numbers. What no form shows is the thing the charge buys you out of, because $37,800 of exposure has no line anywhere. A printed cost sitting next to an unprinted risk is a comparison people get wrong in one predictable direction, and they get it wrong faster in the last five minutes of an appointment, which is exactly when a stack of forms tends to get initialled.

The two dates make it worse rather than better. Section 375.401(g) puts the liability election on the estimate, which is early — early enough that it reaches you before you have a weight ticket, a delivery window, or any concrete sense of what is riding on it. Section 375.505(h) puts the binding version on a bill of lading you are meant to hold for three days. Between those dates the choice is wide open and almost entirely abstract; after the second one it is concrete and closed. Nothing in the rules delivers it to you at the moment when it is both.

Which is the case for doing the arithmetic yourself, early, on a piece of paper the rules do not provide: your own weight estimate times sixty cents, written next to the valuation charge on the quote. Those two figures on one line is the comparison the paperwork never makes for you.

The framing to avoid is treating $4,200 as a small version of $42,000. It is not a lower tier of the same product. It is a different product, priced at zero, and the reason it can be priced at zero is in the booklet's own example: ten pounds, six dollars.

One asymmetry is worth acting on before the file goes into a drawer. Your mover must keep the bill of lading "for at least 1 year" (§ 375.505(d)) and each estimate for at least a year from the day it was made (§ 375.403(c), § 375.405(d)), while 49 U.S.C. 14706(e)(1) leaves you nine months to file a claim and not less than two years from a written disallowance to bring an action. The paper that fixed your ceiling can outlive the copy anyone else is obliged to hold. Photograph the valuation statement on the day you sign it, together with the estimate it is attached to.

Everything above is one reader's reading of public documents, written with no licence of any kind standing behind it and no sight of your paperwork — the terms I write under set out what that does and does not mean. The section numbers are the part worth keeping. Open them beside the form in front of you, and where the regulation and this page disagree, the regulation is right and this page is out of date.