The headline number on an office-move quote is rarely the number you actually spend. After running moves for clients ranging from twenty-person agencies to multi-hundred-employee corporates, a pattern is consistent: budgets are missed because seven cost categories get systematically underestimated. None of them are dramatic. All of them compound.
1. Pre-move discovery
Before anything is packed, someone has to map the new space, plan the desk layout, label every workstation, photograph every server rack, and verify that every cable will reach. Companies budget for the move itself but rarely for the two to three weeks of project work that precedes it. If your facilities team is doing this alongside their day job, multiply your estimate by 1.5.
Avoid it by: including a discovery and planning phase as a line item, not a freebie.
2. Reinstating the old space
The lease ends when the keys go back, not when the boxes leave. Patching walls, removing cable trays, repainting, refurbishing carpet, returning the office to handover condition — this can run anywhere from two to ten percent of the move's headline cost, depending on landlord stringency.
Avoid it by: reading the handover clause in your lease before you sign the moving contract, and getting a written quote for dilapidations.
3. IT cutover and parallel running
You can move desks in a day. Cutting over the IT, telephony, and connectivity rarely follows the same schedule. Most companies run parallel infrastructure for one to two weeks — paying for two leased lines, two PBXs, two network contracts. This is the largest hidden cost in modern office moves and the one that varies most.
Avoid it by: treating IT as a separate workstream with its own timeline, owner, and budget.
4. Staff downtime
If 80 employees lose two hours each during a move, that's 160 hours of paid time gone. Multiply by an internal cost-per-hour and the figure surprises every CFO who hasn't seen it before. If the move forces remote work for a day or two, factor lost productivity into the budget honestly.
Avoid it by: scheduling the move over a weekend with a phased team return, and communicating the plan three weeks in advance.
5. Furniture replacement and refit
A surprising fraction of furniture is never moved. It's too damaged, doesn't fit, or doesn't match the new aesthetic. Budgets for "new chairs for the boardroom" balloon when the boardroom turns out to need new tables, new screens, new signage, and new plants. The trigger isn't the move itself — it's the visible contrast between old assets and a new environment.
Avoid it by: doing a brutally honest asset audit during pre-move discovery. Decide what stays, what goes, and what you'd replace anyway.
6. Storage in transition
If the new lease starts after the old one ends, or if some teams are arriving on different days, you'll be paying for short-term storage. The cost of storage itself is rarely the issue — the cost of double-handling (load → store → unload → store → load → deliver) is. Every additional touch costs labour and adds risk to fragile items.
Avoid it by: asking your moving partner about transition storage in the original quote, and minimising the time gap between leases.
7. The settling-in tail
For one to three weeks after a move, productivity dips while teams sort missing items, locate wall sockets, get printers connected, replace damaged equipment, and resolve a hundred small things. This is real cost, but rarely budgeted for as such.
Avoid it by: scheduling a snagging week with the moving partner explicitly included, so issues are resolved as part of the contract rather than as one-off ad-hoc requests.
The honest move budget
A realistic corporate-move budget allocates roughly:
- 40% to the move itself (packing, transport, unpack)
- 15% to IT cutover
- 10% to the new space (final fit, furniture deltas)
- 10% to the old space (dilapidations, reinstatement)
- 10% to downtime and parallel running
- 10% to contingency
- 5% to discovery and project management
Numbers will vary by company, but the proportions are reliably more correct than the typical "moving cost + 20% buffer" approach.
How we run moves at Pack N Move
When Pack N Move runs a corporate relocation, the brief includes the move and the workstreams around it: pre-move discovery, IT coordination with your provider, transition storage if needed, and a snagging week post-move. The point is to deliver a working office on day one — not a pile of boxes in the right building.
If you're planning a move in Kuwait, get in touch. We do the discovery before the quote.
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