EU → EU Moving within the EU: how it works, with no customs at all

A move between two EU addresses is the one we run with a whole category of work missing. Nobody lodges a declaration, nobody instructs a document pack, and no customs deadline sits in your calendar. The EU’s customs union has no customs duties between its member states. Croatia’s customs service puts it plainly for goods arriving from another member state: no customs formalities apply to your personal property. Sweden’s says the same of a move from another EU country: no customs duty, VAT or other taxes, and no import declaration. Here is what that absence changes about planning your move, and what it leaves exactly as it is.

Gone: the export declaration, the import clearance, the customs documents deadline, and the customs stage in the journey. Gone too is the relief question, because there is no VAT or duty to be relieved from. Your paperwork is a passport copy for each person moving and your finalised inventory, due 3 calendar days ahead of the collection window. That one deadline stays because the inventory is the list the van loads against, and the list your cover rests on. No border asks for it.

What else stays is everything that makes a move certain. Your price locks when you book, across every size, so if packing runs long you take the next size at the price already locked. You pay a 25% deposit at booking and the balance when the van loads. Cover for goods in transit, up to £20,275, runs from loading to arrival. People sometimes ask whether, with no customs to pay for, the price should be lower than a UK move. The price is the transport, and there is no clearance line in it because there is nothing to clear.

Not every European move is this page. Switzerland and Norway sit outside the EU, so a move that touches either crosses a customs border. It belongs on our removals to Switzerland page or the Norway page instead. A move that starts or ends in the UK has its own clearance too, and its own pages. The EU’s fiscal territory also leaves out a few places inside its member states, the Canary Islands and Åland among them. Swedish Customs treats a move to or from them as a non-EU one. So if either of your addresses is on an island like that, say so at the quote and we check the route before we price it.

The certificate you get confirms your right to live there, and it is nothing the van waits for. Many people moving within the EU ask us for a document list; for this move the list is yours to keep short, and that registration is the one item on it the move itself never asks you for.

With no border stop, the move is the road, and the EU’s driving-time rules govern the road. Under Regulation 561/2006 a driver may drive nine hours a day, extended to ten twice a week. A break of at least 45 minutes is due after four and a half hours. The same rules cap a driver at 56 hours in a week and 90 in any two weeks. They also require a daily rest of at least eleven hours, which can shrink to nine three times a week. Our transfer-time estimate builds on that daily limit plus the loading and unloading time, which is why a route’s range starts where the driving days end.

On our recorded route, Florence to Valencia comes to 15.6 driving hours: two days at the wheel, so no range on it begins before day 2. Your own vehicle, 20 or 30 m³, carries a range of 2–4 days; a shared 5 m³ load 2–9 days, because a part load waits to share a vehicle with others going the same way.

Two EU countries mean two public-holiday calendars, and they rarely match. The EU’s own record of member-state holidays for 2026 lists 15 August, the Assumption, in more than a dozen EU countries. France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Poland are among them. Easter Monday closes most of the EU on one day, and 1 May nearly all of it. But each country also keeps a national day the other does not: 14 July in France, 2 June in Italy, 12 October in Spain, 3 October in Germany.

When Logistics have a van for you, its driver’s name and registration reach you by email. In transit, the thread is where you ask, and a person answers, not a bot.

Neither end of this move is in London, so our own crew is not the one at your door. Instead, a named vetted partner loads at one end and unloads at the other. Both come from the European partner network behind every MuveOne move, strongest in Paris and Madrid.

Two practical questions come up before anything else when moving within the EU. Is it a dedicated truck or a shared one? At 15 m³ and above the vehicle is yours; at 5 and 10 m³ the load shares. And can the goods wait somewhere if the new address is not ready? Yes: storage at our own facility is an add-on we price on request, bridging a collection you must make and a delivery you cannot yet take. Our removals and storage page shows a real example.