Half of All U.S. Moving Complaints Come From 66 Companies

The moving industry has a trust problem, and the federal data makes it impossible to ignore — though not in the way the industry usually tells the story.

The familiar version is that moving is a lawless business full of bad actors. USMPO tested that claim against the government’s own records. We looked up all 6,998 USDOT-registered movers in our directory against the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s public household-goods complaint database, a lookup that requires no login and that any reader can check themselves. 5,359 of those companies appear in the federal household-goods registry.

The result contradicts the industry-wide framing. 82.7% of registered movers recorded no federal complaints at all between 2023 and 2025. The problem is not that the industry is rotten. The problem is that a very small, identifiable group generates most of the harm, operates in plain sight with active federal authority, and is almost impossible for a consumer to distinguish from everyone else.

Half of all complaints come from 66 companies

Complaints are not spread evenly across the industry. They are concentrated to a degree that is hard to overstate.

Of 5,359 movers in the federal household-goods registry, 66 companies account for half of every complaint filed. That is 1.23% of the registry. Widen it to the hundred most-complained-about companies and you have captured 61.0% of all consumer complaints in the country.

This reframes the problem. A consumer does not need to avoid an industry. They need to avoid roughly a hundred companies — and they currently have no practical way to know which hundred.

What consumers actually complain about is the price

FMCSA sorts complaints into fourteen categories. The category that dominates is not theft, and it is not breakage.

Estimates/Final Charges appears in 5,629 of 8,492 complaints — 66%. It outranks Loss and Damage (3,386) and Pickup and Delivery (3,384). Deceptive business practices follows at 4,940.

The defining consumer experience of a bad move is not a broken lamp. It is a final bill that does not match the quote. Hostage Goods — a mover refusing to unload until the customer pays more than agreed — appears 1,747 times, which is the most severe form of the same problem.

This is why we treat the price question as the centre of consumer protection in moving rather than a side issue. If you want to understand what usually goes wrong, start with how movers price a shipment and what a legitimate estimate looks like.

The companies with no trucks

Here the data says something that has not been published before.

FMCSA registers two very different kinds of business under the same household-goods umbrella. A carrier owns equipment and moves your belongings. A broker owns nothing, takes possession of nothing, and sells the job to someone else. Both pay the same federal application fee: $300, set out in 49 CFR Part 360, which lists one fee for “an application for motor carrier operating authority, a certificate of registration for certain foreign carriers, property broker authority, or freight forwarder authority.”

In the federal registry, 962 registrants report zero trucks and zero tractors.

Those 962 companies are 18.0% of the registry and 36.9% of all complaints. Their complaint mix is also different: 68.6% of their complaints involve estimates and final charges, against 65.0% for companies that own equipment.

There is a methodological point buried here that matters more than the headline. FMCSA prints a caution directly above its own complaint tables:

When making comparison between companies, it is important to take into account the size of the companies. Larger companies are capable of handling more moves; and therefore, are more likely to have complaints lodged against them.

That caution is correct, and it is why every table below reports complaints per power unit alongside raw counts. But it cannot be applied to a company with no trucks. There is no denominator. The businesses generating the largest share of consumer harm are structurally invisible to the only fairness adjustment the regulator recommends — so they are reported separately here rather than dropped or divided by zero.

The fifteen no-fleet registrants with the most complaints

Every company below is registered with FMCSA, reports no trucks and no tractors, and the complaint counts are the federal record for 2023–2025. Each USDOT number links to that company’s federal page so the figures can be checked directly. A complaint is an allegation recorded by the government, not a proven finding against the company.

Adjusting for size does not rescue the picture

Applying FMCSA’s own caution to companies that do own equipment produces its own result. These are registrants with at least one power unit and at least five complaints, ranked by complaints per truck or tractor.

The top entry recorded 113 complaints against 1 power unit. Size adjustment is supposed to protect small operators from unfair comparison with national van lines; here it does the opposite, isolating companies whose complaint volume bears no relationship to their capacity to perform work.

Florida is not like the other states

Florida-registered movers average 6.29 federal complaints each — more than double the next state. 4,030 of the country’s 8,492 complaints trace to 641 Florida-registered companies. Of the fifteen no-fleet registrants listed above, fourteen are registered in Florida.

We tested our own flags against the federal record

A verification organisation publishing a complaint analysis should be willing to have its own judgements measured by the same data. We ran that test, and we are publishing the result including the part that is not flattering.

The Caution flag is strongly predictive. Companies we flag average 15.72 complaints each against 1.23 for unflagged companies, and 3.94 complaints per power unit against 0.05 — a difference of more than seventy times on a size-adjusted basis.

The Verified designation is a weaker signal than we would like, and the honest reading is that it mostly tracks size. Verified carriers average 4.06 complaints each, which is higher than the unaudited average, because verified carriers are substantially larger — they operate 10,938 power units across 163 companies. Adjusted for fleet, they sit at 0.061 complaints per power unit against 0.05 for everyone else: in line with the field, not measurably ahead of it. 71.2% of them have no federal complaints at all.

We are publishing that rather than burying it. It is also why our verification methodology now states plainly that verification establishes a company met a documented standard at audit — not that any individual move will go well.

Why federal registration screens out almost nothing

Every company named in this article holds federal operating authority. That is not a loophole; it is what the registration system is for. Authority establishes that a business filed an application, paid $300, and carries the required insurance filings. It is a licence to operate, not a quality assessment, and FMCSA has never claimed otherwise.

The gap is that consumers read it as an endorsement. A company can hold active authority, appear in federal databases, and carry hundreds of complaints simultaneously — and nothing in the registration itself tells a consumer which is which.

This is the specific gap independent verification exists to close, and it is why the fourth check in the USMPO 8-point audit requires company-owned trucks and equipment. On this data, that single criterion separates 962 registrants responsible for 36.9% of consumer complaints from the companies that actually carry shipments.

What consumers can do before booking

1. Look up the USDOT number yourself. Search it at FMCSA’s household-goods lookup. The complaint history is on the company’s page. This takes under a minute and is the single highest-value check available.
2. Check the fleet size on that same page. If a company selling you a move reports zero trucks and zero tractors, it is a broker. It will not be performing your move, and it may not know yet who will.
3. Ask directly whether they are the carrier or a broker and get the answer in writing. Brokers are legal and some are reputable; being told one thing and finding another on moving day is the complaint pattern in this data.
4. Get a binding or not-to-exceed estimate in writing. Given that 66% of complaints concern estimates and final charges, this is where the risk actually sits.
5. Check safety and insurance at FMCSA SAFER, and check the company against the USMPO directory.

What the industry should do

Every moving scam that makes the news damages the entire industry. Consumers do not distinguish between the company that overcharged them and the thousands that operate honestly, and this data shows how badly that generalisation misfires: more than four out of five registered movers have no federal complaints whatsoever. They are paying a reputational cost incurred by roughly a hundred companies.

Three changes would shrink the gap. Brokers should be required to disclose that they are brokers at the point of quote, in the same size type as the price. Carriers should publish their tariffs so an estimate can be checked against a rate rather than against another estimate. And complaint history should be surfaced where consumers actually shop — the federal record is public, free, and almost never seen before a booking.

Methodology and limitations

Complaint figures come from FMCSA’s National Consumer Complaint Database, retrieved through its public household-goods lookup. The seed population is the 6,998 unique USDOT numbers in the USMPO directory; 1,639 were not found in the federal household-goods registry and are excluded from all rates. Rankings use complete calendar years 2023–2025 only. The federal snapshot is dated 31 July 2026, so 2026 is a partial year (3,523 complaints in seven months) and is never mixed into three-year totals. Power units are trucks plus tractors; trailers are not driven units.

What this data cannot show: a complaint is an allegation, not an adjudicated finding. A single complaint may fall in several categories, so category counts do not sum to the total — FMCSA states this on its own pages. Complaint volume partly tracks move volume, which size adjustment mitigates but does not eliminate. Companies can re-register under a new name and USDOT number, which resets the visible record, and nothing here detects that. Finally, yearly totals have risen across this window (2,288 in 2023 to 3,448 in 2025), but FMCSA modernised its complaint system during the same period, and easier reporting raises filings independently of conduct. We do not read the trend as proof of a worsening industry.

This is a census of the USMPO directory, not of every mover in the United States.

Sources

• FMCSA, Search Movers & Complaint History — per-company household-goods complaint records, fleet size, authority and safety rating. Snapshot dated 31 July 2026.
• FMCSA, National Consumer Complaint Database — the complaint filing system and the mechanism for companies to challenge duplicate or fraudulent complaints.
• FMCSA, SAFER Company Snapshot — registration, operating authority and safety data.
• U.S. Government Publishing Office, 49 CFR Part 360 — schedule of filing fees for motor carrier, broker and freight forwarder authority.
• USMPO, Verification Methodology — the 8-point audit, data sources, corrections process and stated limitations.