How many boxes do you need to move?
There is no formula that survives contact with an actual house, because two homes of the same size can differ enormously in how much is in them. What there is instead is a way of estimating that gets you close, and a rule about sizes that matters more than the count.
The rule: the size mix is more important than the total. A house packed entirely into large boxes is harder to move, more likely to break something, and slower to load than the same house packed sensibly.
Count rooms, not bedrooms
Bedroom count is how houses are described and it is a poor guide to how much is in them. A better estimate comes from walking through and counting the spaces that actually generate boxes.
The kitchen is almost always the biggest single contributor and the one people forget, because most of it is behind cupboard doors. Then bedrooms, then the living space, then the awkward ones: the basement, the garage, the shed, the closet under the stairs, and the storage unit you have not opened in a year.
Walk through with a notepad and give each space a rough number based on how full its storage is rather than its floor area. Add the garage and the basement even if you are certain there is not much in them, because there always is.
The size mix, which is the part that matters
Boxes come in a few standard sizes and each one exists for a reason. Using the wrong one is the most common packing mistake there is.
Small boxes are for heavy things. Books, tools, tinned food, records. A small box full of books is already at the limit of what one person should be lifting, and a large box full of books is a box that will fail or hurt someone.
Medium boxes are the workhorse and most of a house should be in them. Large boxes are for light bulky things only: bedding, pillows, cushions, lampshades, winter coats. The instinct to put heavy things in the big box because it holds more is exactly backwards.
- Small: books, tools, tinned goods, anything dense
- Medium: the majority of a household, and the default when unsure
- Large: bedding, pillows, soft furnishings, light bulky items only
- Dish barrel or specialist kitchen boxes: crockery and glassware
- Wardrobe boxes: hanging clothes, which saves a lot of time
- Flat picture and mirror boxes: framed art and anything glass fronted
The rough estimate, and why to go over it
As a starting point, most people find a one-bedroom apartment lands somewhere in the low dozens of boxes, a two-bedroom home in the higher dozens, and a three or four-bedroom house comfortably past a hundred once the garage and basement are in. Those ranges are wide because the variation between households is genuinely wide.
Whatever number you land on, get more than that. Boxes are the cheapest part of a move and running out at the worst possible moment is a real cost: it stops the packing, forces a trip out, and is how half-packed rooms happen. Unused flat boxes can usually be returned or passed on.
Everything else you will need alongside them
The boxes are the visible part and the rest is what determines whether things arrive intact. Packing paper rather than newspaper, which transfers ink onto everything. Bubble wrap for the genuinely fragile. Proper packing tape and a dispenser, because the roll you fight with is the reason boxes get sealed badly.
Two markers, so one is always findable. And a stack of plastic totes if any of this is going into a garage, a basement or a storage unit, or if you are moving between December and March, because cardboard and moisture do not get along.
The alternative to counting any of this
You can also not do it. A packing service brings its own materials in the right proportions, which removes the estimate entirely, and it is faster by a wide margin because it is what the crew does all week.
It is worth considering for the kitchen alone even if you pack everything else yourself. The kitchen is the slowest room in any house, it is where most breakages happen, and boxes packed by the crew are often treated differently under valuation than boxes you packed.