Moving Abroad Checklist: Everything to Do Before You Leave the UK

The quick answer. Start your moving abroad checklist six months before you fly. Research and visas come first, then tax and paperwork at three months, then book your international removals company at two months, then bank accounts, utilities and redirection in the final month. The two things people leave too late are the visa and the shipping survey, and both can move your flight date.

We have completed over 10,000 moves and we are rated 4.6 out of 5 from 110 reviews on Trustpilot. This checklist is built from the moves that went smoothly and, more usefully, the ones that did not. If you are moving within the UK rather than leaving it, read what to do and when for a domestic move instead.

Right. Let us get the embarrassing part out of the way first: I have moved house internationally and I still managed to ship a bag of frozen peas to another continent. [pauses for the applause that never comes] They arrived. They were no longer peas. They were a damp rumour in a freezer bag, and somewhere in a customs office there is a form with my name on it.

So yes, I am qualified to write this, in the way a man who has set fire to a kitchen is qualified to talk about smoke alarms. The good news is that everything below is the stuff I wish somebody had bullied me into doing. The better news is that none of it is hard. It is just a lot, and it arrives all at once, usually on a Tuesday.

The moving abroad checklist, at a glance

Here is the whole thing on one screen. Screenshot it, print it, stick it to the fridge that you are probably not taking with you.

Six months out: the decisions everything else hangs off

This is the romantic stage, where moving abroad is still a Pinterest board and nobody has said the word “apostille” out loud. Enjoy it. It does not last.

Pick the city, not just the country. “We are moving to Spain” is a feeling. “We are moving to Valencia, inland side, near a school” is a plan, and only one of those can be quoted, shipped or insured. I once watched a couple change country twice in five weeks, which is a fun way to pay for three sets of paperwork.

Check the visa route before anything else. Every other task on this list can be rushed with money, favours or a truly humiliating phone call. The visa cannot. Governments move at the speed of governments, and they are not moved by the fact that your flight is booked. [I have tried. They are not.]

Work out your landing costs, then add a third. Deposits, agency fees, a car, a bed, and the thousand small purchases you make in the first fortnight because your kettle is on a boat. Every person I have moved has told me the same thing afterwards: the shipping was the predictable bit, and the first month was not.

Start the drawer conversation. You know the drawer. Batteries, a tape measure, eleven keys to nothing, a takeaway menu from a restaurant that closed in 2017. That drawer is going to cost you money to ship across an ocean, and we will come back to it, because it always comes back.

Three months out: paperwork, and the bit everyone leaves too late

If your emigrating from the UK checklist has a weak point, it is here. Paperwork is boring, so the brain quietly files it under “later”, and later turns out to be the week you are trying to find a passport.

Book your removals survey now. This is the single highest-value hour of the whole move and it is free. A surveyor walks your house, measures the volume, spots the access problems, and turns a vague number into a fixed, itemised quote. A video survey works too, and you can do it in a dressing gown. [We can see the dressing gown. We do not judge the dressing gown.]

Tell HMRC you are leaving. Form P85 if you are leaving partway through a tax year and not filing a return. If you do file a self assessment, it goes on that instead. Doing nothing is also an option, in the sense that jumping is an option when a plane has a door.

Gather the documents nobody can replace quickly. Birth certificates, marriage certificates, qualifications, medical and dental records, vaccination records, driving licences, pet paperwork. Scan every single one and put the copies somewhere that is not the laptop travelling in the same bag as the originals. That is not organisation, that is just diversifying your disasters.

Start the pet process if you have one. Microchip, rabies vaccination, health certificate, and in some countries a quarantine period you cannot shorten. The timelines here are legally fixed and genuinely unforgiving, which is a sentence I wish somebody had shouted at me about the peas.

Two months out: what to do before moving overseas, and what to leave behind

Now it gets real, because now it gets priced. Sea freight is charged on the space your things take up, which means this section is the one that actually changes what you pay.

Choose how your things travel. There are three options and most people need two of them.

Now sort everything you own, honestly. Here is the test that has saved our customers the most money: would you pay to put this in a taxi across London? If the answer is no, it is not going on a ship. This includes, and I say this with love, the drawer.

Know what cannot travel at all. Aerosols, paint, solvents, gas bottles, fuel of any kind, matches and fireworks never go, on any shipment, ever. Food, plants and anything with soil on it are restricted and frequently refused. Declaring an odd item at survey costs nothing. Finding it at the port costs a container unpack, which is exactly as expensive as it sounds.

The money side, which refuses to sit neatly on a timeline

Money is the one part of moving abroad that does not politely wait its turn. It shows up at six months, again at one month, and then once more about a fortnight after you land, usually in the form of a text message from a bank you thought you had dealt with.

Do not close your UK bank account on a whim. Ask what the bank actually allows first. Some accounts survive a move perfectly well with a UK correspondence address, and keeping one open is enormously easier than opening one later from abroad, when you will be asked for a UK address you no longer have in order to prove you live somewhere you now do. [It is a circle. Nobody enjoys the circle.]

Open the local account early, even a basic one. In a lot of countries the local account is the key that unlocks the rental, the phone contract and sometimes the electricity. It is the least interesting errand on this entire page and it blocks the most doors.

Budget the exchange rate, not just the amount. If you are moving a deposit, a car fund and three months of living costs, a small swing in the rate is real money. People happily spend a week comparing removals quotes and then move five figures at whatever number appeared on a Tuesday. I have done exactly this and I think about it more often than is healthy.

Check what happens to your pension. Contributions, access age and how it will be taxed where you are going are three different questions with three different answers, and the answers change by country. This is the second item on this page where I would pay a professional rather than trust a forum post from 2019 written by someone called DaveExpat.

Work out your tax residency dates in both countries. The UK has its own rules on when you stop being resident, and your new country has its own on when you start. They do not always line up neatly, and the overlap is where surprise bills live.

Keep a landing fund you do not touch. A month of rent, a bed, a fridge, a kettle and a sofa is a genuine cost that arrives in week one, while your own furniture is somewhere in the Atlantic being extremely relaxed about it. The people who found their move stressful almost never had a shipping problem. They had a cash-flow problem in the first fortnight.

And a small one that is worth more than it sounds: photograph your meter readings, your final bills and every confirmation email, and put them in one folder. You are about to spend six weeks unable to prove anything about a house you no longer live in. Be kind to future you. Future you is going to be jet-lagged and holding a kettle.

One month out: the moving abroad to do list nobody enjoys

This is admin month. There is no way to make admin month glamorous, and I have tried, including once with a spreadsheet so colour-coded it could be seen from space. It did not help. Doing it did.

Tell everyone who bills you. Work through it in one sitting with a cup of tea and a bad attitude.

Check your phone is unlocked before you are standing in a shop in a country where you cannot yet explain what a PAC code is. Ask me how I know. Actually do not.

The last week, and collection day

Nearly there. This is the week where your house stops being a home and becomes a warehouse with opinions.

Pack your six-week life separately, and guard it. Passports, medication, chargers, a towel, enough clothes to be a person. Put it in one room, shut the door, and write DO NOT SHIP on it in letters visible from orbit. Crews are good. Crews are also fast. A bag left in a hallway is a bag that gets loaded, and it will be the bag with your medication in it, because the universe has a sense of humour and it is not a kind one.

Check the inventory and sign it. Every box gets a number and a description. Read it. If something is damaged before it is loaded, it is noted before it is loaded, and that single piece of paper is the difference between an insurance claim and a long conversation about trust.

And the drawer? The drawer does not make it. It never makes it. I have watched grown adults negotiate with themselves about eleven keys to nothing at eleven o’clock at night, and I have never once seen the drawer win. Let it go. It has had a good run.

What we see go wrong, across 10,000 moves

This is the part no checklist on the internet can copy, because it is ours. These are the four things that actually delay a move, in the order we see them.

One: the survey happens too late. Without it, the quote is an estimate and the volume is a guess. Every genuinely painful surprise we have seen started here.

Two: the inventory is rushed. A vague inventory is what customs officers slow down. Countries increasingly want the contents itemised, not “box of kitchen”.

Three: somebody ships something they should have declared. See: aerosols, and a man who genuinely believed a half-full paint tin was fine because it was “nearly empty”.

Five: nobody measured the doors. Not the container, the doors. The wardrobe that came into a 1930s semi in pieces and was assembled upstairs by a previous owner is not leaving that room intact, and finding this out on collection morning is a genuinely terrible way to start a Tuesday. A surveyor spots it in four seconds and plans for it. We have dismantled a lot of furniture on doorsteps and we would rather not add yours to the list.

None of those five are exotic. That is rather the point. Moves do not usually go wrong dramatically, with a lost container and a phone call in the night. They go wrong quietly, weeks earlier, when a survey was postponed or a form was left in a drawer. [That drawer again. I did warn you.]

Four: the timeline was built backwards from hope. Here are the real transit times we quote, so you can build yours from facts.

A part load adds time at both ends, because the container waits to fill and then clears as one consignment. That is not a hidden cost, it is a trade: you pay less and you wait a little longer.

Your first month abroad

You landed. Well done. Now do the boring things quickly, while you still have the adrenaline, because in three weeks you will be a person who lives here and lives-here people put things off.

Register locally. Most countries have a residency registration with a deadline and a fine bolted to the back of it. Find the deadline on day one, not day forty.

Open a local bank account and sort healthcare. These two unlock almost everything else: a phone contract, a rental agreement, sometimes the electricity. It is a queue-shaped week and there is no way around it.

Confirm your tax residency in both countries. Being tax resident in two places at once is legal, briefly, and expensive, permanently. This is the one item on this entire list where I would genuinely pay an accountant rather than read a forum at midnight.

Unpack the kitchen first. Not the most sentimental advice, but the first hot meal you cook in a new country does more for morale than anything in a box marked “ornaments”. [And yes, I checked the freezer first. Old habits.]

Moving abroad checklist: frequently asked questions

How far in advance should I start planning a move abroad?

Six months is comfortable and three months is workable if the visa is already in hand. The two items that set the earliest possible date are the visa and the removals survey, because neither can be rushed. Everything else on the list can be compressed into a hard month if it has to be.

What do I need to tell HMRC when I leave the UK?

Tell HMRC you are leaving so your tax record reflects it. Form P85 covers it if you are leaving partway through a tax year and do not complete a self assessment return. If you do file a return, the departure is reported there instead. Confirm your leaving date and check what happens to pension contributions.

What cannot be shipped overseas?

Aerosols, paint, solvents, gas bottles, fuel of any kind, matches and fireworks never travel on any shipment. Food, plants and anything carrying soil are restricted and are often refused at the border. Declare anything unusual at the survey, because removing a banned item at the port means unpacking the container.

Should I take a full container or a part load?

A full container suits a whole home and sails when you are ready. A part load suits anything under roughly three bedrooms and you pay only for the space you use, but it sails when the container is full and clears customs as one consignment. Below three bedrooms, a part load is usually the sensible choice.

How long will my belongings be in transit?

Europe by road is typically 6 to 12 days. The USA is usually 4 to 8 weeks by sea, Australia and New Zealand 6 to 12 weeks, and South Africa 4 to 6 weeks port to port. Your quote carries a specific timeline for your route, including the inland leg at the far end.

Do I need to be there on collection day?

Someone with authority to sign the inventory does. The inventory is the document your insurance rests on, so it needs reading and signing by a person who knows what is in the house, not a neighbour doing you a favour.

Ready to put a date on it?

A moving abroad checklist tells you what to do. A survey tells you what it costs and when it sails, and it is free and takes about an hour, in person or over video. If you are moving abroad from the UK, start with our international removals service, or go straight to a free, no-obligation quote. Quotes are itemised in writing, and nothing is booked until you say so.

And if you are still holding the drawer: put it down. Walk away. You are free now.