Gen Z Is Reshaping the Moving Industry, and It's Not About Phone Phobia

Ask ten moving company owners what's changing about their customers, and several will bring up some version of "kids don't answer their phones anymore." The data tells a more specific story than that, and a more useful one, because the real shift isn't about phones at all. It's about what happens before anyone picks one up.

Gen Z Is Already the Industry's Growth Engine

This isn't a future trend to plan around. It's already the current customer base.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, 12% of Gen Z (ages 15–29) moved in 2022.¹ That's the second-highest rate of any age group, just behind Millennials at 15%, and more than double the 5% rate among adults 60 and older.

On the rental side, the shift is even sharper. Experian's 2024 analysis of U.S. rental market data found Gen Z now accounts for 30.5% of all renters nationally, up 3.5 percentage points in a single year and the fastest-growing segment in the market.² The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies puts the trajectory in even starker terms: Millennial renter households have already peaked and are now declining as that generation moves into homeownership, while Gen Z is the only generation still adding net new renter households.³ That makes it the segment nearly all future rental-driven moving demand depends on, not just today's growth line.

moveBuddha's analysis of Census migration data puts the average age of a U.S. mover at 23.4, squarely inside Gen Z.⁴ Whatever this generation expects from the process of hiring a mover isn't an edge case. It's close to the median customer already.

The "Gen Z Hates Phone Calls" Story Doesn't Hold Up Well

A stat that shows up constantly in this conversation is some version of "90% of Gen Z has phone anxiety." It traces back to a single Australian survey, and it's been recycled uncritically by no shortage of blogs and vendors with an obvious interest in selling phone alternatives. That doesn't make it false, but it's thinner than the confidence it's usually cited with.

Closer polling complicates the caricature further. YouGov's research on the topic found that 65% of Gen Z say calling a stranger makes them uncomfortable.⁵ That's a real number, but YouGov itself frames it as part of a broader age trend, not something unique to the youngest adults. Nearly half of all adults (49%) share the same discomfort, compared to a third of the oldest respondents.

And when it comes to actually resolving something, the phone hasn't lost its place. Nextiva's research found 72% of Gen Z respondents say they're "likely" or "very likely" to choose phone support again after using it.⁶ Separate research from PolyAI and Dynata found 86% of Gen Z prefer calling customer service over emailing or filling out a form.⁷ A generation that supposedly can't stand the phone is, by a clear majority, still choosing it when they need something resolved.

So "Gen Z won't call you" isn't the accurate version of what's changing. Something more specific is.

What's Actually Shifting: Self-Service First, Phone Second

Five9's 2025 Customer Experience Report found Gen Z is the generation most likely to attempt self-service before contacting a business at all.⁸ 94% try to solve something on their own first. That same research found a large share consult a search engine or an AI tool before ever making contact directly.

Then the pattern flips. 47% of Gen Z say they still want a phone option specifically for urgent or high-stakes situations, per the same Five9 research. Put together, this isn't a generation avoiding phones. It's a generation that has moved the phone call later in the process, after they've already done as much on their own as they can, and specifically for the moments that are complex or actually warrant a real conversation.

That's a genuinely different finding than "young people are scared to call," and a more useful one for any service business trying to figure out what to actually change.

Why This Lands Differently in the Moving Industry Specifically

Plenty of local service industries adapted to this pattern years ago. Restaurant bookings, salon appointments, and much of home services have offered some form of self-serve scheduling or pricing for a decade or more. Moving has largely stayed a single-entry-point industry: to get a price, you call and describe your home to someone you've never spoken to before, from memory, in real time.

That gap matters more once you look at how Gen Z actually approaches a move financially. A Talker Research survey commissioned by Lemonade, covering 2,000 Americans who'd moved in the past five years, found Gen Z was the most likely generation to build an actual moving budget beforehand: 60%, compared to 55% of Millennials, 46% of Gen X, and 38% of Baby Boomers.⁹ This isn't a generation looking to dodge a conversation. It's one that wants a number it can plan around before that conversation happens.

A phone-only quoting process asks this customer to have a live, unscripted conversation before they can get the one piece of information, price, that most of them want to plan around first. That's not a preference mismatch. It's a sequencing mismatch, and it's a structural one: an industry that's only ever offered a single on-ramp doesn't fit a generation whose default behavior is to gather information independently before making contact.

What This Means in Practice

The practical takeaway isn't "stop answering your phone." The data doesn't support that, and abandoning phone support entirely would ignore the meaningful share of every generation, including Gen Z, who still wants it, especially for anything complex, high-value, or going wrong in real time.

The takeaway is about where the phone sits in the process. Giving customers a self-directed way to get an initial, structured estimate, whether from photos, a guided questionnaire, or a similar tool, doesn't remove the phone conversation. It moves that conversation to where it's actually useful: confirming details, discussing a specialty item, or working through a scheduling conflict, instead of being the only door in.

Moving companies that build both paths in aren't chasing a demographic trend. They're matching how their fastest-growing customer segment already behaves everywhere else, and positioning themselves for where the rest of their customer base is headed next, not just where it's been.