Moving in NYC With Roommates: How to Merge Belongings and Split Costs

Three people. Three apartments. One 950-square-foot three-bedroom in Astoria. Without a plan, moving day delivers three coffee makers, two microwaves, a futon nobody remembers agreeing to, and zero couches, because everyone assumed someone else was bringing one. Merging households in New York is a logistics problem, and it goes a lot better when it’s treated like one.

The Inventory Audit

Before anyone tapes a single box, build a shared spreadsheet. The columns are simple: item, owner, dimensions, condition, verdict (keep, sell, donate), and destination room. Start with the big-ticket items, because those are where the duplicates and the disputes live; couch, TV and console, kitchen table and chairs, rug, dressers, desks, AC units.

Resolve every duplicate in the spreadsheet, not on the sidewalk. Whichever coffee table loses gets sold or donated before moving day; nobody should pay a crew to transport the runner-up “just in case.” And measure the new apartment before ruling on the finalists. The winning couch is not the more expensive one. it’s the one that fits through the door and works in the floor plan. Democracy is fine for picking the living room rug. Dimensions get the final vote.

The audit takes one evening and one group chat argument. That is dramatically cheaper than discovering the overlap in the new living room, at hourly rates, with the truck double-parked.

Handling Multiple Pick-Ups

Two or three origin addresses feeding one destination is a routing problem, and in NYC it’s a paperwork problem too. The stop order gets planned around geography, traffic windows, parking at each address, and each building’s elevator reservation, and every building involved may require its own Certificate of Insurance before anything moves through the lobby. Three buildings can mean three separate COIs, which is exactly the kind of thing you want one company coordinating rather than three roommates improvising.

Inside the truck, careful packing is what keeps three households from turning into one pile. Every box gets labeled with its owner and its destination room, color-coded tape per person is the low-tech trick that holds up, so the unload sorts itself at the door instead of in the hallway.

One rule keeps the whole day on schedule: everyone is completely packed before the truck reaches their address. The clock runs while roommate number two hunts for tape, and that’s the most expensive tape in the city.

Splitting the Bill Fairly

Equal thirds sounds fair until you notice one roommate owns a full one-bedroom’s worth of furniture and another owns a mattress and eight boxes. A split that survives the group chat usually looks like this: the fixed costs, base truck fee, travel time, tolls, divide evenly, because everyone benefits equally from the truck existing. The labor hours divide proportionally by volume, which the inventory spreadsheet makes painless: count each person’s items and boxes, and the ratios fall out on their own. Any extra-stop fee belongs to the person whose pickup created the stop.

Agree on the formula in writing before moving day, and run it against real numbers, an itemized estimate, rather than splitting a mystery lump sum after the fact. Money arguments between roommates are best had in a spreadsheet, in advance, when nobody is tired and nothing is double-parked.

Get the Numbers Before Moving Day

Multi-stop moves across two or three NYC addresses are routine work for U Santini Moving & Storage, the routing, the COIs for every building involved, and the labeling discipline that keeps three households sorted. Request a detailed estimate up front so the roommate math is settled before the truck rolls, and the only thing left to argue about is whose art goes over the couch.