Why the count is per room and not per person
Box estimates are built on rooms because rooms are the only thing you can count before you start. The working figure is somewhere between 10 and 20 boxes per furnished room, and the position within that band is set by what kind of room it is. Bedrooms are at the bottom: a bed, a wardrobe of hanging clothes that goes into wardrobe boxes rather than cartons, and a chest of drawers whose contents fill three or four. Kitchens and studies are at the top and it is not close — a kitchen is small boxes of crockery, glassware, tins, pans and appliances, and a study is books, which are the densest thing in any house.
Multiply out and the totals land where the removal firms quote them: around 30 to 40 boxes for a one-bedroom apartment, 50 to 65 for a two-bedroom, 90 to 110 for a three-bedroom house. Those are usable starting numbers and they are wrong for any specific house by a wide margin, in a direction you can predict from one question: how long have you lived there? Volume accumulates with time in a place far more reliably than it does with square footage.
The size mix matters more than the total
| Box | Nominal size | Volume | What goes in it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small | 16 x 12 x 12 in | about 1.3 cu ft | Books, records, tools, tinned food, anything dense |
| Medium | 18 x 18 x 16 in | about 3 cu ft | The default — kitchen, toys, files, most of everything |
| Large | 18 x 18 x 24 in | about 4.5 cu ft | Linen, cushions, lampshades, light bulk |
| Extra large | 24 x 18 x 24 in | about 6 cu ft | Duvets, pillows, nothing with weight |
| Wardrobe | about 24 x 21 x 48 in | about 13 cu ft | Hanging clothes, straight off the rail |
Getting the mix wrong is worse than getting the total wrong, because a box of the wrong size is either unusable or dangerous. Fill a large box with books and it is around 80 pounds, which fails the box, fails the stack it goes into, and fails whoever picks it up on the stairs. Fill smalls with pillows and you have paid for four times the cardboard you needed and doubled the number of trips to the truck. The single sentence worth remembering is that box size should go down as contents get denser.
Tape, paper and the supplies that stop the work
A roll of packing tape at 55 yards is 165 feet. Taping a box properly — one strip along the bottom seam and one across each of the two bottom edges, then the same on top — uses something like seven to nine feet, so a roll does around twenty boxes. The estimate here uses twenty, and the honest advice is to buy half again as many rolls as it says. Tape is trivially cheap and running out of it brings packing to a complete stop in a way that running out of boxes does not, because you can improvise a box and you cannot improvise tape.
Packing paper is harder to estimate and the figure here is deliberately a coarse average. A box of folded clothing needs none. A box of glassware can take two or three pounds by itself, wrapping each piece and filling the voids. What paper is doing is stopping movement inside the box, which is what actually breaks things — an item that cannot shift will usually survive a drop that an item rattling in a half-empty box will not. Buy unprinted newsprint rather than newspaper unless you enjoy washing ink off crockery at the other end.
Order once you have started, not before
There is a better method than any estimate on this page, and it costs one evening. Pack the room you use least — the spare bedroom, the loft, the garage shelves — and count what it took. That gives you a real boxes-per-room figure for your household rather than a national average, and you can multiply it by what is left with some confidence. It also tells you the thing no calculator can: what proportion of your possessions are dense enough to need small boxes. Do that first, order against it, and the second order stops being inevitable.
Questions people ask
How many boxes do I need to move a 2-bedroom apartment?
Around 50 to 65 cartons for most two-bedroom apartments, plus two to four wardrobe boxes for hanging clothes. The split usually falls near 30 percent small, 40 percent medium and 30 percent large and extra large, which for 55 boxes is roughly 17 small, 22 medium and 16 large. That is a starting order rather than a final number, and the direction it is wrong in is predictable: households that have been in one place more than three or four years consistently need more, and the excess turns up in the kitchen, the study and whatever cupboard has been absorbing things.
How many rolls of tape do I need?
About one 55 yard roll per twenty boxes, so 50 boxes needs three rolls — and you should buy four or five. A 55 yard roll is 165 feet, and taping a box properly uses seven to nine feet across the bottom seam, the two bottom edges and the same on top. The reason to over-buy is not the arithmetic but the failure mode. Running out of boxes is an inconvenience you can work around for an hour; running out of tape stops packing dead, usually at nine in the evening the day before the move. Get a decent dispenser too, because peeling tape by hand from a roll wastes both tape and temper.
Should I use small or large boxes for books?
Small, without exception, and it is the one packing rule worth being rigid about. Books are around 20 to 25 pounds per cubic foot, so a large box of 4.5 cubic feet packed with them is 90 to 110 pounds — beyond what one person should lift, beyond what the box bottom is built for, and beyond what the stack under it in the truck will tolerate. A small box at 1.3 cubic feet holds around 30 pounds of books, which is a sensible carry. The general form of the rule: as the contents get denser, the box gets smaller.
How much packing paper will I need?
As a coarse figure, a pound or less per box averaged across the house, so a 55 box move is somewhere around 40 pounds — but the average conceals everything useful. Kitchens dominate: wrapping glassware and crockery and filling the voids in those boxes can take two or three pounds each, so a kitchen alone may account for half the total. Boxes of clothing, bedding and files need none. Buy unprinted newsprint rather than newspaper, because printing ink transfers onto everything it touches and you will spend the first evening in the new place washing plates.