Professional Moving Services in Scarborough, Ontario

Moving Co. is a moving company serving every part of Scarborough, from the apartment towers along Kingston Road to the detached streets above the Bluffs. Local Scarborough moves are billed hourly at $50 per mover, crews arrive with the Certificate of Insurance your condo board requires, and the phone at (905) 752-7787 is answered 24 hours a day.

Scarborough is not a suburb of Toronto. It is Toronto. It has been a district of the City of Toronto since the amalgamation of January 1, 1998, which matters more than most people realise on move day, because it means Toronto’s parking permits, Toronto’s noise bylaw and Toronto’s condo culture all apply here, even when the street looks like Ajax. With a population of 629,941 at the 2021 census, spread from Victoria Park Avenue in the west to the Rouge in the east and from Steeles Avenue down to Lake Ontario, Scarborough is larger than Mississauga and would be Canada’s seventh biggest city if it still stood on its own. Roughly 76 per cent of Scarborough voters rejected the merger in the 1997 referendum. They lost, and the moving rules changed anyway.

What follows is what our crews have learned about moving here: which buildings need paperwork weeks ahead, where a five ton truck will not fit, what the city charges to hold curb space, and when you are legally allowed to start carrying boxes.

Scarborough’s housing mix decides how your move actually runs

Most moving companies write one page and swap the city name. That does not survive contact with Scarborough, because Scarborough is split almost exactly down the middle between two completely different kinds of move.

According to the City of Toronto’s 2021 census profile for the Scarborough Community Council Area, there are 218,930 occupied dwellings here. Of those, 35.2 per cent (76,975 homes) sit in apartment buildings of five storeys or more, and 37.2 per cent (81,510 homes) are single detached houses. Add the low-rise apartments, duplexes, semis and row houses and you land at roughly 48 per cent apartment living against 51 per cent ground related.

Those two halves need different trucks, different crew sizes and different paperwork. A tower move is governed by an elevator booking and a condo board. A Bluffs bungalow move is governed by a driveway, a staircase and a tree canopy. Booking the wrong one is how a move day goes sideways.

Moving out of a Scarborough apartment tower

Scarborough carries an unusually heavy share of Toronto’s older high-rise stock. More than a thousand apartment towers went up across Toronto’s inner suburbs between the 1950s and 1970s, and the region now holds roughly two thousand of these towers in the park, most of them eight storeys or taller. The City has run a Tower Renewal program since 2008 specifically because so many of these buildings are ageing at once. Practically, that means single service elevators, narrow corridors, loading areas that were designed for a 1968 station wagon, and building management that has seen every possible way a move can damage a lobby.

In a tower move, the elevator is the bottleneck and everything else queues behind it. Most Toronto buildings require the elevator to be booked in advance, commonly one to two weeks out, though busy downtown-style condos in the Town Centre area can want three to six weeks. The booking usually buys you a two or three hour window with pads hung in the cab. If your crew arrives without that window reserved, you are not moving that day, no matter how many people you brought.

Moving a detached house, bungalow or backsplit

The detached side of Scarborough is largely postwar: bungalows, backsplits and sidesplits from the fifties through the seventies, with a newer layer of infill and monster homes on the older lots. These moves have no elevator to book and no board to satisfy, which sounds easier and often is. The complications move outdoors instead. Driveways slope. Mature trees hang low enough to catch the top of a cube van. Backsplits mean short flights of stairs at odd intervals, which slows a dolly more than a single long staircase does. Basements in these houses are where thirty years of belongings actually live, and they are the reason a “three bedroom move” turns into a nine hour day when nobody looked downstairs during the estimate.

Do you need a permit to park a moving truck in Scarborough?

Sometimes, and this is the single most common thing Scarborough residents get wrong, because they assume permits are a downtown problem.

Because Scarborough is part of the City of Toronto, it falls under Toronto’s parking regime. If your street is a designated permit parking street, you can buy a Temporary On-Street Parking permit to hold curb space for the truck. As of 2026 the City charges $20.74 for 24 hours, $29.97 for 48 hours, and $44.94 for seven days, each plus HST. You can buy it online up to two weeks ahead. Recreational vehicles and trailers are not eligible. The City updates these fees annually, so check the current rate rather than trusting a number on any moving company’s website, including this one.

If the truck needs to occupy a traffic lane or a section of roadway rather than a legal curb space, that is a different animal: a Street Occupation Permit, priced by type and duration. This comes up on the narrow bluff-top streets and in older pockets where there is no legal frontage to park across.

On a detached street in Guildwood with a private driveway, you will likely need nothing at all. On a permit-parking stretch in Birch Cliff or Cliffside, skipping the permit is how a moving truck collects a ticket while it is half loaded.

What hours can movers legally work in Scarborough?

Toronto’s noise bylaw, Chapter 591, is explicit about loading and unloading, and it is stricter than most people expect. Noise from loading or unloading is prohibited between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. Monday through Friday, and between 11 p.m. and 9 a.m. on Saturdays, Sundays and statutory holidays. The fine sits at $500.

In practice that gives you a working window of roughly 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. on weekends. It is why we will not book a 6 a.m. start in a Scarborough townhouse complex no matter how much a client wants to beat the 401, and why Sunday morning tower moves start later than clients expect. A neighbour with a phone and a grievance can end your move day early.

Certificates of Insurance and elevator bookings in Scarborough condos

Nearly every condo corporation in Toronto, Scarborough included, will ask your mover for a Certificate of Insurance before releasing the elevator. The certificate is issued by the mover’s insurer and proves the coverage is real. Most boards want to be named as an additional insured for the duration of the move, and most want to see liability coverage in the two million dollar range. Requesting it about three business days ahead is normal. Many buildings also hold a refundable damage deposit, commonly in the range of three to five hundred dollars, returned after the superintendent inspects the lobby and the cab. Those deposit and lead-time figures are widespread industry practice across Toronto rather than a single written city rule, so confirm the specifics with your own board.

We carry Commercial General Liability of $2,000,000 per occurrence and $2,000,000 aggregate, Tenant’s Legal Liability of $2,000,000, and Non-Owned Automobile coverage of $2,000,000, all in Canadian dollars, plus cargo and contents coverage on the goods we move while they are in transit. When a Scarborough building asks, we have the certificate issued naming your condo corporation or property management company as an additional insured, with whatever wording the property manager specifies. Send us the building’s requirements when you request a quote and the paperwork is handled before the truck is loaded. Our condo and apartment moving service exists precisely because this part defeats so many people.

Neighbourhood by neighbourhood: what the crew will run into

Scarborough is not one place. A crew that has only worked Agincourt will be surprised by Guildwood, and vice versa.

Guildwood, Cliffside and the streets above the Bluffs

The Scarborough Bluffs run about 15 kilometres from Victoria Park Avenue east to Highland Creek and rise as high as 90 metres, which is roughly the height of a 25 storey building. Nine parks sit along them, and Bluffers Park is the only one with a beach. The streets that follow the bluff edge were laid out to chase the view, not to accommodate a 26 foot truck. They curve, they narrow, they dead end, and mature trees arch over them. In Guildwood, home of Guild Park and Gardens, lots are generous and driveways usually solve the parking question. In Cliffside and Birch Cliff, both closer in and denser, curb space is contested and the permit conversation starts early. When a street genuinely cannot take a full size truck, we shuttle with a smaller vehicle rather than park across a neighbour’s driveway and hope.

Agincourt, Dorset Park and Wexford

North and central Scarborough carry a dense mix of postwar bungalows, walk-up apartments and towers, plus the malls and plazas that make Agincourt one of the busiest parts of the district. These are the moves where a building may be a five storey walk-up with no elevator at all, which changes the crew size calculation completely. Stairs are billed in time, not sympathy, so an honest walkthrough before the day matters more here than anywhere.

Malvern, Woburn and Bendale

Northeast and central Scarborough hold a heavy concentration of the tower stock described above, alongside townhouse complexes and detached pockets. Malvern sits near the 401 and the Toronto Zoo and has long been a first landing place for new Canadians, which means a steady rhythm of arriving and departing households, often with a tight budget and a hard date. Woburn and Bendale mix towers with older detached streets around Scarborough General.

West Hill, Highland Creek, Port Union and Rouge

The eastern edge is where Scarborough turns green. Highland Creek has a ravine running through its centre, West Hill borders Morningside and Colonel Danforth parks, and beyond them sits Rouge National Urban Park, at 79.1 square kilometres the largest urban park of its kind in Canada. Ravine lots mean long carries from the truck to the door, sometimes down exterior stairs. Port Union and the newer Rouge subdivisions are conventional and easy by comparison.

How Scarborough traffic and transit construction affects your move day

Highway 401 is the spine of Scarborough and the reason a crew can be late through nobody’s fault. Below it, the local network has been in flux for several years.

The Scarborough RT, Line 3, closed permanently on July 24, 2023 after a derailment, and an on-street replacement bus has run since November 19, 2023. That pushed thousands of daily riders onto roads that were already busy. A dedicated Scarborough Busway along the old RT corridor between Kennedy and Ellesmere is scheduled to open around September 2026, which should ease some of it, though transit dates move.

Meanwhile the Scarborough Subway Extension is tunnelling beneath Highway 401, carrying Line 2 about 7.8 kilometres from Kennedy to Sheppard and McCowan with three new stops. Tunnelling passed the halfway mark in early 2026. The opening date is genuinely disputed: Metrolinx has pointed toward roughly 2030, while TTC planning documents have used 2033. Either way, construction staging near Kennedy, Lawrence East and McCowan affects lane availability today. The Eglinton East LRT, renamed Scarborough East Rapid Transit in 2026, is an 18.6 kilometre, 27 stop line planned from Kennedy to Malvern by way of the university. Its environmental assessment is complete but it remains unfunded, so it changes nothing about your move this year.

None of this is trivia. It is why we scout the route before a Scarborough move rather than trusting a map, and why a 9 a.m. arrival from the west end is a promise we make carefully.

Student moves: UTSC and Centennial College

The University of Toronto Scarborough and Centennial College’s Progress Campus put a spike into the Scarborough moving calendar every late summer. UTSC residence move-in ran on Thursday September 3 for first-year students and Saturday September 5 for upper-year and graduate students in 2025. Those dates shift every year, so confirm yours with the university before booking anything. Centennial operates the Centennial Place residence at Progress Campus, and the college is relocating its Story Arts Centre programs to Progress by fall 2026, which will add to the local churn.

Student moves are small, time-boxed and unforgiving: a residence gives you a window, and the loading zone is shared with a few hundred other families. These are usually a small move or a single item move rather than a full truck, and the smart booking is early morning on the assigned day, not the afternoon when the queue has formed.

What does a Scarborough move cost?

Local Scarborough moves are billed hourly at $50 per mover, so the total comes down to crew size, truck size and how long the job actually takes. A one bedroom apartment with an elevator booking and no stairs is a different job from a four bedroom backsplit with a finished basement and a garage nobody has emptied since 2009. We give an upfront written estimate after a walkthrough or a proper inventory, and the number you approve is the number you are invoiced.

Timing moves the price more than most people expect. Roughly 80 per cent of North American moves happen between May and September, June, July and August are the busiest months, month end is busier than mid month, and the weekend around Canada Day is the single hardest day of the year to book a good crew. Moving off peak, midweek and mid month, commonly runs 20 to 30 per cent cheaper. If your dates are flexible, read our guide to the cheapest time to move in Ontario, and if you want a number before you call, use the moving cost calculator or see what a one bedroom Toronto move costs.

Winter moves in Scarborough

Toronto averages about 150 centimetres of snow a year and holds at least a centimetre of snow cover on roughly 65 days, with the snow season running November through April. That is the honest case for a January move: it is cheaper, crews are available, and you can usually name your date. It is also the case against one. Bluff-top streets do not get plowed first. Tower loading docks turn into slush. We lay floor protection as a matter of course, but a winter move needs salt on the walk, a shovelled path to the truck and a realistic start time. Plan for the day to run longer than the summer version of the same job.

Storage between closing dates

Ontario real estate rarely lines up neatly. The sale closes on the fifteenth and the purchase closes on the thirtieth, and something has to hold your life for two weeks. Storage in transit typically bridges anywhere from one to thirty days and can usually be extended to around ninety. Because the same company loads it, stores it and delivers it, nothing is handed between vendors and nobody is later arguing about where a scratch came from. Our storage service is built for exactly this gap, and it is the piece Scarborough sellers underestimate most often.

Moving in Scarborough by the numbers

The Scarborough district of Toronto was home to 623,610 people in the 2021 Census, with a housing stock split between 37.2 per cent single detached houses and 35.2 per cent apartments in buildings of five storeys or more.

That even split is the single most useful thing to know about a Scarborough move: about a third of the district is house moves with driveways, and about a third is tower moves that need a service elevator and a Certificate of Insurance, with townhouses and walk-ups filling the middle. We scope each job around which of those it is before we quote it.

About 36.0 per cent of Scarborough households rent, and 55.5 per cent of residents are immigrants, a majority-immigrant district, so international and long-distance relocations are a regular part of our Scarborough work. Scarborough is a district of the City of Toronto, so Toronto’s parking, permit and noise rules apply rather than a separate set.

These figures come from the City of Toronto 2021 Census profile for Scarborough, the most recent national count and the baseline we use when we plan a Scarborough move. You can read the full profile on Statistics Canada.

What Scarborough’s housing and growth mean for your move

Because Scarborough’s homes divide almost evenly between houses and high-rises, the right crew and truck depend entirely on the address, and the numbers let us plan that in advance.

In the house neighbourhoods, from Guildwood and West Hill to Agincourt, a move is a driveway job where crew size and truck size come down to the size of the home. In the apartment corridors along Kingston Road, Eglinton and around Scarborough Town Centre, the same move becomes a service-elevator booking, a loading-dock time slot and a Certificate of Insurance for the property manager. Telling us the building and the floor at the quote stage is what lets us send the right crew.

The steady inbound relocation that comes with a majority-immigrant district also means a lot of our Scarborough work pairs a long-haul or international move with full packing and storage timed to a closing date, which we run end to end on one account.

How many movers you need and how long a Scarborough move takes

As a rule of thumb, a one-bedroom Scarborough apartment takes two movers about three to five hours, a typical three-bedroom house takes three or four movers most of a day, and a large family home usually needs a four or five-person crew. Those are starting points, not fixed quotes, because the real drivers are how much you are moving, how far the carry is from the door to the truck, and the access at both ends.

In Scarborough, a house with a driveway loads faster than a tower along Kingston Road or near Scarborough Town Centre, where the move runs on a booked service elevator. A ground-floor home with a driveway loads far faster than an upper-floor unit where everything travels down a stair or through one shared elevator, so we scope the size of the home, the stairs and elevators, the parking and the distance before we put a number on the job. Sizing the crew correctly is not only faster, it is usually cheaper, because a local move is billed by the hour at 50 dollars per mover and a right-sized crew finishes the job sooner.

To make any Scarborough move day go faster, have everything boxed and sealed before the crew arrives, keep a clear path from the door to where the truck will park, take apart anything you can ahead of time or ask us to handle it, and set aside the essentials and valuables you want to keep with you. The more the crew can simply pick up and carry, the shorter the day and the smaller the final bill.

What we can and cannot move in Scarborough

Professional movers can take almost everything in your home, but for safety and legal reasons there is a short list we cannot load onto the truck. That list includes hazardous and flammable materials such as propane tanks, gasoline, paint, solvents, aerosols, cleaning chemicals and ammunition, none of which are safe in a loaded truck. It also includes perishable food that could spoil in transit and live plants, which do not travel well.

We also suggest you carry a few things yourself rather than sending them on the truck: cash, jewellery, important documents like passports and wills, medications, and small irreplaceable keepsakes. That is not because they are unsafe with us, but because you will want them in hand rather than packed in a box in transit. We give you the full list of what to set aside when you book, so nothing is a surprise on the day.

Everything else, the furniture, the appliances, the boxes, and the awkward and heavy pieces, is exactly what we are for, and specialty items like pianos, art and glass tables get their own wrapping and handling. If you are ever unsure whether something can come on the truck, ask us when we scope the Scarborough job and we will tell you straight.

Our moving services in Scarborough

Whatever the job is, one crew handles it end to end: house moves for the detached streets, condo and apartment moves for the towers, small moves and single item moves for students and one-piece deliveries, professional wrapping and packing, furniture assembly and disassembly, junk removal for everything the basement gave up, and long haul and cross-Canada moves when Scarborough is only the starting point. Businesses moving stock, staging inventory or an office should look at our enterprise logistics program.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a permit to park a moving truck in Scarborough?

Only if your street is a designated permit parking street, in which case Toronto’s Temporary On-Street Parking permit costs $20.74 for 24 hours, $29.97 for 48 hours or $44.94 for seven days as of 2026, plus HST, and can be bought online up to two weeks ahead. If the truck has to occupy part of the roadway rather than a legal curb space, you need a Street Occupation Permit instead. On a detached street with a private driveway you usually need nothing.

What hours are movers allowed to load and unload in Scarborough?

Toronto’s noise bylaw prohibits loading and unloading noise between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. Monday to Friday, and between 11 p.m. and 9 a.m. on Saturdays, Sundays and statutory holidays, with a $500 fine. That leaves a practical working window of about 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. on weekends. Scarborough follows Toronto’s bylaw because it is part of the City of Toronto.

Do Scarborough condos require a Certificate of Insurance?

Almost always. Most Toronto condo corporations will not release the elevator without one, and most want to be named as an additional insured with liability coverage around two million dollars. We carry $2,000,000 Commercial General Liability per occurrence and in aggregate, $2,000,000 Tenant’s Legal Liability and $2,000,000 Non-Owned Automobile coverage, plus cargo and contents coverage, and we have the certificate issued in your board’s name before move day. Send us the building’s requirements with your quote request.

How much does a move in Scarborough cost?

Local Scarborough moves are billed hourly at $50 per mover, so the total depends on crew size, truck size and how long the job runs. Stairs, walk-ups, long carries from legal parking and uncounted basement contents are what push the hours up. You get an upfront written estimate after a walkthrough or inventory, and the price you approve is the price you are invoiced.

Do you move apartment towers in Scarborough?

Yes, and they are a large share of our Scarborough work, since 35.2 per cent of homes here sit in buildings of five storeys or more. We book the elevator, supply the Certificate of Insurance the board requires, protect the lobby and corridors, and work to the two or three hour window the building assigns. Older towers with a single service elevator need the booking made well in advance, commonly one to two weeks and sometimes longer.

Can you handle homes on the Scarborough Bluffs?

Yes. The bluff-top streets in Guildwood, Cliffside and Birch Cliff are narrow, winding and heavily treed, and some will not take a full size truck. When that is the case we shuttle with a smaller vehicle rather than block a neighbour’s driveway, and we confirm the approach during the walkthrough rather than discovering it on the day.

When is the cheapest time to move in Scarborough?

Midweek and mid month, outside the May to September peak. Around 80 per cent of North American moves happen in that summer window, June through August are busiest, month end is worse than mid month, and the Canada Day weekend is the hardest date of the year to book. Moving off peak commonly costs 20 to 30 per cent less.

Do you offer storage between closing dates?

Yes. Storage in transit typically covers one to thirty days and can usually be extended to around ninety, which is what most Scarborough sellers need when the sale and the purchase do not line up. The same crew loads it, stores it and delivers it, so nothing is handed between vendors.

Do you move students in and out of UTSC and Centennial College?

Yes, and these are usually small moves or single item moves rather than a full truck. UTSC residence move-in fell on September 3 and 5 in 2025 and shifts each year, so confirm your assigned window with the university. Booking early in the day beats the queue at the shared loading zone.

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