The quick answer. Start your moving house checklist as soon as your offer is accepted, but do not book a removal firm for a fixed date until contracts have exchanged, because until then your moving day is not real. Before exchange, declutter and get quotes. After exchange you usually have one to two weeks to confirm everything.
We have completed over 10,000 moves and we are rated 4.6 out of 5 from 110 reviews on Trustpilot. This checklist is in the order a British move actually happens, which is not the order most checklists use. It sits alongside our guide to what drives the cost of a UK house move, which answers the other question everybody has.
Right, confession first. I have moved house three times and I have packed the kettle in a sealed box on all three occasions. Every single time. You would think a person who does this for a living would learn, and you would be wrong. So we are going to come back to the kettle, because it is the single most predictable mistake in British domestic life and I am its leading practitioner.
Here is the thing that makes a UK move different, and it is why most checklists you will read today are quietly useless. You cannot pick your moving day. Your solicitor does, sort of, in concert with everyone else’s solicitor, on a date agreed at exchange of contracts. Everything before that moment is a guess with a van attached.
What is on this page
- Why you cannot book a moving date until exchange of contracts
- What to do when moving house, before contracts exchange
- The ten days after exchange, which is the actual sprint
- Who to notify when you move house
- Completion day, hour by hour
- If you are renting, the rules changed in May 2026
- Moving day with children and pets
- What we see go wrong, across 10,000 moves
| When | What you actually do | Why it waits until then |
|---|---|---|
| Offer accepted | Instruct a solicitor, book a survey, start decluttering, get removal quotes | None of this depends on a date, so it is all free to start now |
| Searches and enquiries | Keep packing non-essentials. Ask your removal firm about access and parking | The legal side is out of your hands, so use the time on the part that is not |
| Exchange of contracts | Confirm your removal booking. Buildings insurance starts. The date is now real | This is the first moment anything is binding. Before it, nobody owes anybody a date |
| The week or two after exchange | Meter readings, redirection, councils, DVLA, broadband, schools, final packing | Everything gets compressed into here, and this is where people panic |
| Completion day | Keys, van, and the hour by hour reality below | Keys only move once money moves |
| First fortnight after | Register with a GP, re-register to vote, update the log book, pet microchip | Nothing breaks if these are day three rather than day one |
Why you cannot book a moving date until exchange of contracts
Exchange of contracts is the moment your sale becomes legally binding, and it is usually only one to two weeks before completion. Until contracts exchange, either side can walk away, which means any moving date you have been told is a preference rather than a fact. This is why removal firms ask whether you have exchanged before they will hold a slot.
I know. You wanted a checklist and I have opened with contract law. Stay with me, because this one fact saves more moves than every packing tip ever written.
The government says the average home purchase now takes around 120 days, and that one in three sales fall through (MHCLG, June 2026). Read those two numbers next to each other and the strategy picks itself. Four months of waiting, then a one-in-three chance the whole thing evaporates, which is a deeply unreasonable way to run a country’s housing market and also just how it is.
So the useful split is not weeks. It is before exchange and after exchange. Before exchange you do everything that does not need a date. After exchange you sprint.
Guess how long most people think they will have after exchange. Most say a month. The honest answer is closer to ten days, and that gap is the entire reason this post exists.
What to do when moving house, before contracts exchange
Before exchange, do every job that does not need a confirmed date. That means instructing your solicitor, booking your survey, decluttering hard, gathering removal quotes and booking a survey with your removal firm. None of it is wasted if the date moves, and all of it is miserable to do in a hurry.
Declutter like you mean it. Removal costs are driven by volume, so every bin bag is a small refund. More importantly, you will not have to unpack it, and unpacking is where the real despair lives.
Get your removal survey done early. This is the bit people skip and then regret. A survey turns a guess into a written, itemised quote, and it is also where a surveyor spots the things that ruin a day: the sofa that came in through a window, the piano nobody mentioned, the fact that your street has no loading access between eight and ten.
Start a “do not pack” pile now. Put it somewhere stupid, like the bath. Label it. Defend it with your life. The kettle goes here. (The kettle will not go here. We both know the kettle will not go here.)
And ask your removal firm about access at both ends. Narrow stairs, a lift that needs booking, a third floor with no lift, a shared driveway, permit parking. Movers can plan for any of it and cannot plan for a surprise.
The ten days after exchange, which is the actual sprint
Once contracts exchange, your date is fixed and everything official happens at once. Confirm your removal booking first, then work through utilities, councils, redirection and the DVLA. This is the compressed part of a UK move and the reason to have done the slow jobs already.
Here is the order I would do it in, and I am going to put the two that carry actual fines first, because burying those under “label your boxes” would be a strange choice.
1. Confirm the removal booking. Ring them the day you exchange. Not the day after.
2. Your driving licence. It is free, it is online, and GOV.UK is blunt about the consequence: “You can be fined up to £1,000 if you do not tell DVLA when your address changes.” Your licence should arrive within a week (change your address on your driving licence).
3. Your V5C log book, which is a completely separate job. This catches almost everybody. Updating your licence does not update your vehicle, and the same wording applies: “You must update your vehicle log book (V5C) if you change your address”, with the same up-to-£1,000 exposure (change your address on your V5C). Two jobs. One fine each. Nobody tells you this.
4. Both councils, separately. There is no national “I have moved” button for council tax. You tell the old council and the new council through their own forms (find your local council). And be ready for a strange month: under the Local Government Finance Act you can be liable for two properties at once, as resident of the new one and owner of the empty old one.
5. Utilities and final meter readings. Photograph every meter on completion day. Photograph it even if you think you will remember. You will not remember, and a photograph with a timestamp has settled more billing arguments than any amount of being right.
6. Post redirection. Royal Mail needs several working days’ notice, so this is not a job for the night before. Set it up with time to spare, and keep it running longer than feels necessary, because the stragglers arrive in month seven.
7. Broadband, and book it now rather than when you arrive. This is the one people genuinely underestimate. Citizens Advice found that over one in three people who move house hit an unexpected delay getting broadband working, with some waiting more than two weeks (Citizens Advice, from a YouGov survey of 2,009 movers). The survey is a few years old and the pattern has not changed. Book it the moment you exchange, and make peace with a week of tethering.
8. Schools, work, insurance, banks, subscriptions. The long tail. The table below is the version you can tick off.
Who to notify when you move house
Tell the DVLA, both councils, HMRC, your GP, your bank and your insurers, and set up Royal Mail redirection. Your driving licence and your V5C log book are the two with a real fine attached, and they are two separate jobs. Your passport does not need updating at all.
| Who | Is it a legal duty? | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| DVLA, driving licence | Yes | Free. “Fined up to £1,000” if you do not. Licence arrives in about a week |
| DVLA, V5C log book | Yes | A separate job from your licence. Usually free. Same fine wording |
| Your old and new council | Yes, for council tax | No single national service. Two separate forms |
| Register to vote | Yes, you must re-register | A new address means registering again, not just once in your life |
| HMRC | You need to tell them | Online or in the HMRC app. Self Assessment details update with it |
| Benefits, if you claim | Yes, straight away | Your claim might be stopped or reduced if you do not report a change straight away |
| GP surgery | No, but do it | No ID and no proof of address needed. Your old surgery is told automatically |
| Pet microchip database | Yes, you are responsible | You are responsible for keeping your pet’s microchip information up to date |
| Firearm or shotgun certificate | Yes | Notify the issuing police force “without undue delay”. Not a 7 day rule, whatever you have read |
| TV Licence | Update it, do not cancel it | Your licence number stays the same |
| Royal Mail redirection | No | Needs several working days. Catches your strays while the long tail updates |
| Your passport | No | A UK passport carries no address. Nothing to do |
Sources: driving licence, V5C, council finder, register to vote, HMRC, benefits, registering with a GP, pet microchip, passports.
Two of those deserve a moment. Registering with a GP needs no ID and no proof of address, which contradicts roughly everything you have been led to believe about British bureaucracy, and your old surgery gets told automatically so you do not have to make an awkward phone call. And your passport genuinely needs nothing, because it has never had your address on it. I have watched someone fill in a passport form for this. I did not stop them in time.
Completion day, hour by hour
On completion day your keys are released only once your buyer’s money reaches your seller’s solicitor, which is often early afternoon rather than morning. The removal van loads your old home first, then waits for the key release before unloading at the new one. If funds arrive too late in the day, the move can slip to the next working day.
Here is the bit nobody warns you about: you are out before you are in. You are expected to have left your old house around midday. You may not get keys to the new one until well after that. Those two facts do not meet in the middle, and the space between them is where you sit in a loaded van wondering whether you have done something wrong. You have not. This is just how it works.
One person on Mumsnet put it better than any guide: “didn’t get the keys until 4pm and moved out of my house at noon. So plan for that time” (moving day tips thread).
Morning. The crew arrives and loads. This part is reliable, because it does not depend on anybody’s bank. You will be in the way. That is fine, everybody is in the way, the crew has met you before in a hundred other houses.
Around midday. You are expected to be out. Your solicitor is aiming to complete about now, and the whole chain’s money has to clear by roughly four o’clock for the day to work at all.
Late morning to early afternoon. Money moves up the chain. Your sale funds your purchase, which funds theirs, and nothing completes until each link lands. Nobody can hurry it and your solicitor is not ignoring you.
Early to mid afternoon, usually. Your seller’s solicitor confirms receipt, the estate agent is authorised to release keys, and you can actually get in. “Usually” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It can be four o’clock. It can be later.
So the van waits. This is normal, it is planned for, and it is why your removal firm asks about the chain. It is also why never completing on a Friday is the most repeated piece of advice in every moving thread on the British internet: everybody completes on a Friday, every solicitor is doing four of them, and when the banking day runs out on a Friday the next slot is Monday. Three nights, not three hours.
What to do with the gap. Have somewhere to be, have food, have the kettle somewhere you can reach it. Which brings us back to the kettle, which is in the van, in a box, under a wardrobe. I did warn you.
If you are renting, the rules changed in May 2026
If you rent in England, your tenancy has probably changed type without you noticing. Most existing assured shorthold tenancies automatically became assured periodic tenancies on 1 May 2026 under the Renters’ Rights Act. Tenant notice to leave is now two months in writing, and it must land on the day your rent is due or the day before.
Worth saying plainly, because almost every moving checklist online still cheerfully explains your AST and your section 21 notice, neither of which is a thing any more. Those pages are not slightly behind. They are describing a tenancy that stopped existing in the spring.
Your notice is two months, in writing, and GOV.UK accepts “a letter, email or text”. The timing rule is the fiddly bit: it has to fall on or immediately before a rent due date, so count backwards from your rent day, not from your moving day. Yes, this means a calendar and a bit of counting on your fingers. I did it twice and got it wrong once.
Rent in advance is capped at one month. A landlord cannot ask for six months up front any more, which quietly removes one of the great British renting humiliations.
Rental bidding is banned. The advertised rent is the rent. “Your landlord cannot accept or encourage offers above the advertised rent.” The sealed-envelope auction for a one-bed above a chip shop is over, and nobody will miss it.
And your deposit. It must be in a protection scheme within 30 days, and returned within 10 days of you both agreeing the amount. The cap is five weeks’ rent where the annual rent is under £50,000.
One honest note: there is no legal requirement for a check-in inventory. Take your own photographs anyway, dated, in every room, on the day you arrive and the day you leave. It is evidence rather than law, and it has won more deposit disputes than any tenancy clause.
Sources: Renters’ Rights Act, overview for tenants, the full guide, deposit protection.
Moving day with children and pets
Arrange for children and pets to be somewhere else on moving day. A loaded stairwell and a crew carrying wardrobes is not a safe place for a toddler, and cats bolt. Most people send children to a grandparent for a night or two and bring them over once the bedrooms are made up.
The advice from people who have done it is unusually consistent on this. You cannot have small children running about while furniture moves at speed, and there is a softer reason too: children find watching strangers carry their things out of the house genuinely upsetting. Nobody warns you about that part, and then you are managing a house move and a small person’s grief at the same time.
Cats are the harder problem. The settled wisdom is a minimum of two weeks indoors at the new house before you let one out, and plenty of people go to three or four. The reason is simple and sad: cats navigate home, and home is still the old address. People lose cats on moving day often enough that “put them in a cattery for the day” is the single most common piece of advice going.
On the day, shut your cat in one empty room with food, water and a litter tray, and put a sign on the door so nobody opens it. Not a carpeted room, apparently, or they will dig at the door trying to get out, which is a level of feline determination I find frankly admirable.
And on buttering a cat’s paws. You will be told to do this. It is folklore, the internet has been arguing about it for twenty years, and the people who swear by it say the point is to do it before the cat’s first trip outside so it can smell its way home. It is not advice I would build a plan around. Keep the cat in for a fortnight instead, which is the bit that actually works.
What we see go wrong, across 10,000 moves
This is the part no checklist on the internet can copy, because it comes from the vans rather than from a desk. These are the things that genuinely cost people a day.
One: the removal firm gets booked before exchange. Then the date moves, and the slot has to move with it. Booking early is right. Treating a pre-exchange date as fixed is not.
Two: nobody mentioned the access. A narrow lane, a permit bay, a lift that needs booking through the building manager, a third floor with a turn in the stairs that a sofa will not take. All of it is workable with notice and all of it burns an afternoon as a surprise.
Parking deserves its own warning, because the official route often does not exist. If your road has no restrictions, there is nothing for the council to suspend, so there is no permit to buy. What actually works is embarrassingly low tech: knock on your neighbours’ doors a few days before, put a cone and a note in the space, and ask one of them to park across a second space overnight. People are overwhelmingly decent about it. The alternative is a lorry double parked for two hours accompanied by a horn section.
Three: the survey never happened. Without one the quote is an estimate and the volume is a guess, and the van that turns up is sized to that guess.
Four: the boxes are labelled and the rooms are not. This is the one nobody thinks of. Write the room on four sides of every box, then put a sheet of paper on each door in the new house saying what that room is. Your “office” is somebody else’s third bedroom, and a crew cannot read your mind through a wall. Ten minutes with a marker pen saves you carrying everything twice.
Five: the one box that matters is in the van. Kettle, mugs, tea, phone chargers, loo roll, bin bags, a knife to open the other boxes, medication, and whatever your children or pets need for a day. Put it in your car. Not the van. Your car. I have given this advice for years while personally failing to follow it, which I think makes me more credible rather than less.
Six: nobody made the beds. Do the beds before you unpack a single box. At the end of a completion day you will be too tired to be sensible, and the difference between a good first night and a grim one is whether there is somewhere to lie down. Strip each bed by wrapping the sheets and pillows inside the duvet, then that bundle goes in the car with the kettle.
Seven: the new house is not clean. Assume it will not be. Pack cleaning things and loo roll where you can reach them, or book a cleaner for the morning you arrive. There is no legal obligation on a seller to leave a house spotless, and a surprising number take that literally.
Moving house checklist: frequently asked questions
What order should you do things when moving house?
Instruct a solicitor and get removal quotes as soon as your offer is accepted, declutter while the legal work runs, then confirm your removal booking the day contracts exchange. Utilities, councils, the DVLA, broadband and post redirection all happen in the one to two weeks between exchange and completion.
Who moves first on completion day?
The seller moves out first. Your removal crew loads your old home in the morning, then waits for keys to be released at the new property, which happens only after your buyer’s money reaches your seller’s solicitor. That is commonly early afternoon rather than morning.
When should I book a removal company?
Get quotes and a survey as soon as your offer is accepted, then confirm the booking on the day you exchange contracts. Before exchange your date is not binding, so a confirmed slot may need to move.
What do I need to change when moving house in the UK?
Your driving licence and V5C log book with the DVLA, council tax with both councils, your electoral registration, HMRC, your GP, your bank and insurers, and your pet’s microchip record. Your passport does not need changing.
Do I need to tell the DVLA when I move house?
Yes, and it is two separate jobs. Your driving licence and your vehicle log book are updated separately, both are usually free, and GOV.UK states you can be fined up to £1,000 for failing to tell the DVLA your address has changed.
How long does a house move take from offer to completion?
The government says the average home purchase takes around 120 days, and that one in three sales fall through. Exchange of contracts typically happens one to two weeks before completion, which is when your moving date becomes real.
Ready to put a date on it?
A checklist tells you what to do. A survey tells you what your move actually involves, and it is free and takes about an hour. If you are moving within the UK, start with our house removals service or go straight to a free, no-obligation quote.
And please, genuinely, put the kettle in your car.