Royal Gardens Movers, Edmonton

It is a different day at the same hourly rate. Around a quarter of the homes here are low-rise apartments and roughly one in nine is in a building of five storeys or more, so an apartment address usually begins at a shared door, with a lift to book, a loading zone to hold and a corridor to walk, while the 44% that are detached begin at a driveway. Neither is priced differently; the difference shows up in hours.

Because one median has to cover four kinds of home: half of the 199 nearby moves landed between $469 and $1,585, and that band stretches from a one-person suite to a detached house with a basement. The hourly rate does not change between them. The hours do, and the hours follow the volume, the flights of stairs and the distance from the door to the truck.

Only where the truck has to occupy the roadway. Edmonton issues an On-Street Construction and Maintenance permit for that and charges no fee for it under the current schedule, but it is not same-week paperwork: the City asks for a minimum of 6 working days on low-impact work such as a move, and 10 working days for anything heavier. A driveway or a legal space at the kerb needs nothing.

The middle job across the 199 moves in the surrounding communities ran 4.75 hours on site, and half of them took between 2.5 and 7.63 hours. That is a wide spread around a half-day figure, and it reflects a set that pools suites with full houses. Because the rate is hourly, those hours are what the total is made of.