Royal Oak Movers, Calgary

One-bedrooms are 18% of Royal Oak's own book: 6 completed moves, two movers and one truck, a median of $808 and 3.75 hours on site. Half of them ran between 3.38 and 4.88 hours and half fell between $629 and $914. Six jobs is a small sample, so read the median as its midpoint. The load is a bedroom, a living room and a kitchen's worth of boxes; stairs and how far the truck can park from the door are what move a job inside that band.

Two-bedrooms are 15% of the book, 5 completed moves worked by two movers and one truck, with a median of $842 and 4 hours on site. The hours band is the tightest on this page, half of them between 4 and 4.5, and the price band is narrow too at $799 to $1,069. On five jobs that is a small sample rather than a rule, but it is what an hourly rate does to a load whose contents are fairly predictable: barely longer than a one-bedroom here, and barely dearer.

This is the heavy end of Royal Oak's own book: 6 three-bedroom moves, four movers and one truck, a median of 8.13 hours on site and $2,163. Both bands are enormous. Half of them ran between 4.5 and 11.38 hours and half fell between $1,014 and $2,980, so this median is the middle of a very small and very spread sample rather than a rate. At this size the garage, the basement and how much is boxed before the crew arrives decide the day, and the crew here has run to four movers rather than three.

Fewer than five moves of this size sit inside Royal Oak's own boundary, so this card is drawn from 60 four-bedroom-plus house moves across northwest Calgary. It is three movers and one truck, a median of $1,694 and 7 hours on site, with half running between 5.13 and 9.81 hours and half falling between $1,036 and $2,569. Sixty jobs is a far steadier base than the cards beside it, which is worth remembering where the numbers on two cards do not line up in the order you would expect.