A moving crew’s week mixes hourly pay, per-job flats, lead pay, bonuses, and tips. WageTime is payroll for moving companies, built to pay the whole crew the way a move actually pays out.
About 60% of US moves land between May and September (moveBuddha, 2025), and the last week of every month spikes with lease turnovers, so the busy Friday is the owner fighting a payroll system that speaks only salary. The pay isn’t complicated so much as plural: an hour, a job, a lead bump, a bonus, and a tip, all on one crew, in one week.
Movers get tipped, often $40 to $100 a person on a full-day job (Move.org, 2026), and the crew splits cash at the truck before they pull away. Card tips are different: they land in the move software, and somebody has to push them back through payroll to report and tax them, usually a cycle later. Handle that by hand and either a tip goes unreported or a crew member waits two weeks wondering where their Saturday went.
A single mover’s week is an hourly base, a per-job flat on the big Saturday move, a crew-lead bump for running the truck, a damage-free bonus, and tips. Generic payroll has a box for a rate and a box for salary. Everything else becomes a spreadsheet column, and every column is a place a number goes in wrong the week it’s busiest.
Peak season doesn’t ramp, it slams: leases turn over at month-end and the summer books solid, so a crew of eight in April is eighteen in July and eight again by October. Onboarding that wave one paper packet at a time, then unwinding it in the fall, is its own back-office job nobody scheduled.
The motor-carrier overtime exemption is a long-haul, heavy-truck idea. Your local crew works inside the state on box trucks and owes overtime over 40 like anyone else, and on a week that mixed an hourly rate with a per-job flat and a bonus, that overtime has to be built on a blended regular rate, not the base wage. Assume movers are exempt because they ride in a truck and the back-wage math finds you later.
An agent of a national van line runs two payrolls in a trench coat: the hometown crews clock hourly, while the leased owner-operator who hauls the interstate load gets a percentage of the linehaul tariff and a 1099. Keep them in two systems and January is W-2s from one, 1099s from another, and a reconciliation nobody billed the customer for.
Mover tips run as their own earning code in WageTime: the card tips that come in through your move software get reported and taxed on the crew’s check instead of living in a side spreadsheet, pooled by the rule you set.
| Crew member | Pool share | Card tip |
|---|---|---|
| Devon R.Crew lead | 35% | $63.00 |
| Marcus T.Mover | 25% | $45.00 |
| Ana G.Mover | 25% | $45.00 |
| Ty B.Helper | 15% | $27.00 |
Replaces the shoebox of card-tip printouts, and the crew member who quit over a tip that showed up three weeks late.
A mover’s whole week runs on one check in WageTime: an hourly base, per-job flat rates, crew-lead pay, and damage-free or completion bonuses, each on its own pay code and its own stub line, so the week reconciles instead of swallowing itself.
Replaces the tab in the move-software export that only held base hours, and the half-time formula somebody kept in column J.
The moving calendar’s whipsaw gets handled with bulk onboarding and a bulk termination wizard in WageTime: the spring wave self-onboards from their phones in one batch, and October closes the seasonal crew in one pass, not one profile at a time.
| New hire | I-9 / E-Verify | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Ana G.New mover · E-Verify cleared | I-9 complete | Ready |
| Ty B.New helper · E-Verify pending | I-9 complete | In review |
| Sam O.Rehire · 2025 crew | Record retained | Ready |
| Priya N.New driver | Self-onboarding sent | Awaiting docs |
Replaces the stack of paper packets in May, and the one-profile-at-a-time cleanup every October.
A van-line agent’s two workforces get paid in one run through WageTime: the local hourly crews as W-2 employees, and the leased owner-operator who hauls the interstate household-goods load as a 1099, paid a percentage of the linehaul tariff.
Replaces the owner-operator settlement kept in one file and the crew payroll in another, and the January reconciliation between them.
WageTime keeps the payroll records a mover’s workers-comp audit actually asks for: the annual audit is priced off payroll by classification, so wages recorded cleanly and split by role are money.
Replaces the year-end scramble to reconstruct payroll for the comp audit, and the classification guesswork that came with it.
Full-service payroll is $10 a month per person paid that month, plus $50 a month per company, with unlimited runs. No long-term contracts, no per-run charges.
Off-cycle runs and bonuses cost nothing extra. No long-term contracts; cancel anytime.
Example: 50 people paid × $10 + $50 company = $550 for the month
HR & hiring, onboarding, PTO, time tracking, benefits, and workers’ comp are optional add-ons, priced separately when you’re ready.
See a demoTips run as their own earning code. Card tips captured in your move software are reported and taxed on the crew’s check, and tip pooling splits a job’s tips across the movers who worked it by your rule. When wages plus tips fall under the minimum-wage floor, the run tops it up. You and your tax advisor set the tip policy.
Local moving crews usually do. The motor-carrier overtime exemption is for long-haul, heavy-truck interstate work, so a crew running box trucks inside one state is generally non-exempt and owed overtime over 40 hours. When a week mixes an hourly rate with a per-job flat and a bonus, WageTime computes overtime on the weighted-average regular rate automatically, and checks minimum wage across every hour.
Each kind of pay is its own code: an hourly base, per-job flat rates, crew-lead pay, and damage-free or completion bonuses, all on one check with each line shown separately on the stub. Overtime is built on the blended regular rate for the week, and minimum-wage processing runs underneath. The mover sees the hours, the job, the lead bump, and the bonus reconcile instead of one lump number.
Yes. Local crews run as W-2 employees with full withholding, and a leased owner-operator hauling the interstate load runs as a 1099 paid a percentage of the linehaul tariff through a tiered commission structure. W-9 and contractor setup sit beside full withholding, and year-end 1099s and W-2s are both included. Whether a hauler is a contractor is your decision with your attorney.
With bulk onboarding and a bulk termination wizard. A spring hiring wave self-onboards from their phones with e-signed paperwork and electronic I-9, with an E-Verify case created once requirements are met, and rehire onboarding keeps last season’s returning movers’ records. When the moves thin out, the bulk termination wizard closes the seasonal wave in one pass instead of one profile at a time.
$50 a month for the company plus $10 for each person actually paid that month, with unlimited runs. A five-Friday July costs the same as a four-Friday month, off-cycle bonus runs cost nothing extra, and there are no per-run fees. A mover paying 20 crew in a peak month is $250, whether they ran four payrolls or six.
Last week’s crew hours from your move software, a job or two with per-job pay and tips, and your driver list. Twenty minutes with a payroll specialist on a live demo company: you’ll see tips pooled and run through payroll, a blended hourly-plus-bonus week with its overtime, and your local W-2 crews beside a 1099 van-line owner-operator in one run.
Book a 20-minute demo