Operations
Choosing Truck Size From Cubic Feet, Not From the Bedroom Count
July 2026 · 5 min read
The short answer
Size the truck from total cubic feet with a practical load factor of about 85 percent of nominal capacity, not from the number of bedrooms. A two-bedroom home can run anywhere from 400 to 900 cubic feet depending on how long the customer has lived there.
Bedroom count is the most common shorthand in dispatch and the weakest predictor in the business. Two two-bedroom apartments can differ by more than double in volume, because volume tracks how long someone has lived somewhere and what they collect, not how many doors the floor plan has.
Work from volume, then apply a load factor
Take total cubic feet from the cube sheet and plan against roughly 85 percent of the truck’s nominal capacity. The missing 15 percent is pads, load bars, dollies, imperfect stacking, and the aisle a crew needs to work. A 26 foot truck listed at 1,600 to 1,700 cubic feet is a 1,400 cubic foot truck in practice.
Crew size follows volume and access together
Volume tells you how much there is; access tells you how hard each piece is to move. A 600 cubic foot ground-floor house with driveway parking and a 600 cubic foot third-floor walk-up with a 150 foot carry are the same load and two different jobs. Stair flights, elevator type and carry distance belong on the dispatch card next to the cube.
Truck fill diagram — 1,400 usable cubic feet against a 26 ft box
Where the numbers should come from
If cubic feet arrive as a range from a phone call, every downstream decision inherits that range. If they arrive as an itemized report built from footage of the actual rooms, dispatch is planning against a number somebody can point at. That is the entire argument for surveying before you quote.