Why MoverCompass exists

Search for a moving company and you get a star average and a count. Both are real, and neither answers the question you are actually asking, which is: if this goes wrong, how wrong does it go, and how often?

Take the movers we hold at 4.6 stars with at least a hundred ratings. Among them, the share of ratings that are one or two star runs from about 3% at one end to about 11% at the other. Two companies showing the same 4.6 can sit at either end of that range, and the average is exactly the operation that throws the difference away.

What we built

A page for every moving company we can find in the United States and Canada — 9,782 of them at the last build, alongside 2,869 storage and related businesses Google files against the same searches — showing Google’s published rating breakdown, the share sitting at one and two stars, what those low reviews describe, and the company’s own replies alongside them. Not every company has all of that: where Google publishes too few ratings to work a share out, or we hold no review text, the page says so instead of filling the gap.

We hold 814,419 review texts, of which 58,054 are one or two star. Most directories sample the most recent reviews, which is the set least likely to contain a complaint. We deliberately read the lowest-rated ones too. That is the whole difference.

What we are not

• Not a lead broker. We do not sell your details, take a commission on a booking, or accept payment from a moving company for placement. There is no paid tier and no way to buy a better position.
• Not a licensing authority. We reproduce what companies say about their own credentials and link to the public register. We do not verify anything, and we say so on every page it applies to.
• Not a scoring system. There is no MoverCompass score. Every figure is a count of something a customer or a company published, and you can sort by it.

On publishing complaints

Showing what people say when a move goes badly is the point of this site, and we take the responsibility that comes with it seriously. Reviews are quoted as written and attributed to the platform they were left on. Where a company has replied, the reply appears directly under the complaint, because a reader deciding whether to trust a business learns as much from how it answers criticism as from the criticism.

We do not editorialise about individual companies, and there is no “worst movers” list anywhere on this site. If a listing is wrong, the corrections process is open to any business, free, and does not require anything in return.

Independence

MoverCompass is independent and not affiliated with any moving company, van line, broker or trade association. The full method, including where it is weak, is set out on how we read reviews.