Price, reviews, availability. That is the list most people work through before booking removalists, and it is the wrong list, or at least the wrong order.
The consideration that should sit first is the one almost nobody checks until something is broken. While your entire household is on a truck between two addresses, who is carrying the risk?
Who Actually Insures Your Goods on Moving Day?
Usually nobody, unless you arranged it yourself.
That surprises people every single time, so here is the legal position in plain terms. Under Australian law, removal companies are not required to insure your goods. The insurance a professional removalist must carry, and AFRA accredited companies hold several policies as a condition of membership, exists to protect the business. Public liability, third party property, motor vehicle, carriers legal liability. Every one of those responds to the company’s own exposure, and the Queensland Government’s consumer guidance says it straight, you will probably need your own insurance for damage or loss of your goods.
What the Removalist’s Insurance Does Cover
Public liability earns its keep in one specific scenario. The crew drops your wardrobe and gouges your timber floor, and the floor is covered, because the floor is property damage caused by the business.
The wardrobe is not. The wardrobe needed transit insurance, which is a separate product covering the goods themselves through packing, loading, the drive and unloading, extendable to storage if the move involves any. Two different policies, and a mover can genuinely hold one while offering nothing on the other, so both get asked about by name.
Why the Boxes You Packed Are the First Ones Excluded
You packed most of the cartons yourself, right? Nearly everyone does, it saves hundreds of dollars.
It also quietly removes those cartons from cover. Transit policies almost universally carry an owner packed exclusion, sometimes written as PBO, and the logic is blunt, the insurer cannot know whether your grandmother’s dinner set was wrapped properly or dropped in loose with the saucepans. If you packed it, the contents are usually not covered unless the carton itself arrives visibly damaged, crushed corner, forklift hole, water stain.
Three ways to live with that sensibly. Pay the removalist to pack the breakables, since professionally packed cartons sit inside the cover and the packing fee doubles as an insurance decision, not a luxury. Or photography high value items going into their boxes with an itemised list, which will not defeat the exclusion but strengthens every claim conversation you might have. Or carry the irreplaceable things in your own car, jewellery, passports, the hard drive, the dinner set if it fits, because the safest policy is the boot of your Corolla.
The $1 Per Kilo Problem With Basic Cover
Some quotes mention cover and mean carriers legal liability, and the difference lands in the maths.
Basic carrier liability commonly calculates payouts by weight, at figures as low as $1 per kilogram. Run that against anything you own. A 65 inch television weighs around 25 kilograms, so a smashed $1,800 screen comes back as $25. A leather lounge might do slightly better at $80-odd, against a replacement cost twenty times that. Weight based cover was designed for freight pallets, not living rooms, and full replacement transit cover with a declared value is the product that actually matches a house move. The cheaper restricted versions have their own catch, several only pay when the truck itself has an accident, which leaves ordinary handling damage, the way most things actually break, outside the policy.
Ask which basis a quote uses. One question, and it separates the quotes properly, because a company $300 cheaper with $1 per kilo cover is not cheaper.
How To Tell Real Cover From a We Fix What We Break Promise
A big paragraph for this one, because it is the sneakiest thing in the industry. Plenty of removalists reassure customers with some version of do not worry, if we break it we will fix it, and that sentence sounds like insurance while being nothing of the kind. It is a goodwill statement with no policy behind it, no product disclosure, no claims process, no external body making them honour it, and if the company decides your cracked cabinet was like that already, your options are their mood or a courtroom. There is also a legal wrinkle worth knowing, only appropriately qualified companies may legally arrange insurance for you at all, a Financial Services Reform Act requirement, which is why AFRA members go through specific training to offer transit cover and can hand you a Product Disclosure Statement and Financial Services Guide when they do. A removalist selling you cover with no PDS is either not qualified or not selling you insurance, and either answer tells you what you needed to know.
The two minute verification is simple. Ask for a certificate of currency, the live document proving the policies exist, before any deposit changes hands. Genuinely insured companies email it the same day, and a company that cannot or will not is showing you exactly what a claim would feel like.
What Else Belongs on the List Before You Book
The insurance question does the heavy sorting, and a few conventional checks still earn their place around it.
- Insist on a walkthrough quote, in person or by video, since sight unseen quotes are where move day price revisions come from.
- Check AFRA accreditation, which carries standards for vehicles, equipment, premises and staff training plus a dispute resolution path if things go wrong.
- Be careful with large upfront payments, small deposit and balance on completion is the normal shape, and Australian Consumer Law guarantees of due care and skill apply to removalist services like any other.
- Read the recent reviews for how the company handled damage, not whether damage ever happened. Every mover breaks something eventually. The ones worth hiring answer the phone afterwards.
Five Questions Before You Book
- Is goods in transit insurance included, optional or unavailable, and is it full replacement or weight based?
- Can you email me the certificate of currency today?
- How are owner packed cartons treated under the policy?
- Does cover include loading, unloading and any storage, or the transport leg only?
- Are you qualified to arrange the insurance yourselves, and is there a PDS?
Fifteen minutes of asking, against a truck holding everything you own. Most companies pass these questions easily, and the ones that stumble were the ones the reviews could never quite warn you about.
