A Sydney office move is a relocation, not a building project. Most of the complexity happens in the eight weeks before moving day, not on moving day itself. This checklist is the timeline we use with clients for a mid-sized office (20–50 staff) — scale it up or down depending on how much IT complexity and how much furniture you’re carrying.
The short answer
For a 20–50 person office with standard IT, plan on 8–12 weeks total. IT cutover is the critical path: NBN Enterprise Ethernet or fibre at a new address takes 6–10 weeks. Everything else fits around it. The physical move itself happens over a weekend so Monday morning is business-as-usual. Expect $3,000–$15,000 + GST for the physical relocation depending on size, plus separate lines for IT, furniture disposal and any storage.
Week 8: decisions and bookings
Confirm the new address and signed lease. Nothing starts before this. The lease start date drives every other date.
Choose the move weekend. Friday evening through Sunday evening is standard. Avoid month-end weekends (demand peaks, crew premiums go up), avoid school-holiday Fridays (traffic), and avoid the week before Christmas (everything slows). Mid-month weekends are ideal.
Book the removalist. An office move with good commercial experience booked 8 weeks out will have flexibility on crew size and start time. The same booking 2 weeks out often has to work around whatever slot is left. Get the commercial quote locked in early so the date is yours.
Book the IT transition. If the new building doesn’t have fibre or Enterprise Ethernet installed, this is the call that starts the 6–10 week clock. NBN Co’s business-grade provisioning is reliably the longest-pole item in any office move.
Confirm the new building’s move rules. Most commercial towers have goods-lift bookings, loading dock windows, after-hours access procedures and insurance requirements. Confirmed in writing, not over the phone.
Week 7: inventory and space plan
Walk the current office with a tape measure. List every piece of furniture by type, quantity, and whether it’s moving or being disposed of. Photograph anything that’s assembled on site and will disassemble for the move (sit-stand desks, pod walls, server racks).
Map the new office floor plan. Name every desk. Number every room. Every piece of furniture gets a destination label before it’s packed — it saves a day on the other end.
Decide what’s not going with you. Old desks, broken chairs, filing cabinets from before the cloud. Commercial furniture disposal is easier pre-move than post-move, because it can go out with the move truck rather than needing a separate collection.
Flag confidential materials. HR files, signed contracts, financial records. These move with a chain-of-custody process, not in the general load.
Week 6: staff comms and department leads
Announce the move to staff. Date, address, and what they need to do. Most staff worry about two things: their commute change and their desk assignment. Answer both in the first announcement.
Appoint a department lead for each team. Their job: pack their own team’s stuff, label it, and be the point of contact for the crew on move weekend. One lead per 8–12 people is the right ratio.
Set up the shared move folder. Floor plan, desk assignments, colour code by department, important dates, building rules at the new address. A single source of truth everyone can link to.
Book parking permits if needed. Sydney CBD moves almost always need a City of Sydney permit for the loading dock approach, even when the building has a dock — the truck often queues on the kerb. North Sydney, Chatswood, Parramatta and St Leonards have similar requirements. 10 days’ notice standard; 14–21 days for weekend slots in CBD.
Week 5: IT cutover planning
Lock the IT cutover plan. Who’s disconnecting what, when, and who’s reconnecting it. The most common failure mode is assuming the new internet service is live by Monday morning; confirm it in writing with the ISP, and have a backup 4G or business mobile hotspot plan in case.
Label every cable. In the server room, in workstation pods, in meeting rooms. A cable photo of each rack, taped to the inside of the rack door, is what saves hours on the reconnect.
Identify the critical systems. Email, VoIP, shared drives, any production software. Each gets a named owner for the cutover and a pre-move test plan.
Coordinate with the telco. Number porting for office phones takes 10–15 business days — start the paperwork now. If you’re keeping your current VoIP provider, the cutover is usually a configuration change rather than a physical re-provision.
Week 4: packing supplies and pre-pack
Order crates. Plastic crates beat cardboard for office moves — sturdier, stackable, reusable, and cheaper over 2+ moves. Standard ratio: 2 crates per desk plus 4 per meeting room, plus separate boxes for archive files. A 20-person office needs about 60 crates.
Distribute crates to staff. Each person gets 2 crates a week before the move. Enough for personal effects, reference books, desk paraphernalia. Monitors and workstation kit go with the main crew, not in personal crates.
Colour-code by department. Coloured stickers on every crate — one colour per team. The crew reads colour faster than text. Add floor/room number on the destination label.
Start archive packing. Old files that aren’t in daily use — pack them now, label them clearly, and confirm which ones actually need to move versus which can go to secure document storage or shredding.
Week 3: final logistics
Confirm the removalist booking in writing. Arrival time Friday evening, estimated finish Sunday. Crew size, trucks confirmed. Certificate of insurance sent to both buildings.
Confirm goods lift bookings at both ends. At the current office for load-out, at the new office for unload. Windows need to overlap with drive and staging time.
Walk the new building with the lead. Identify the dock, the lift, the route to your floor, the location of your specific suite. Confirm where the desks go. Mark the floor with tape if needed so the crew unloads to the right places.
Brief the crew. The removalist foreman wants: floor plan, colour-code key, IT contact phone number, building contact phone numbers at both ends, after-hours access procedures, parking permits, and a priority order (what gets unloaded first — usually the server rack and the executive suite).
Week 2: staff pack and IT dry run
Staff pack their personal effects. The department leads drive this; most staff take a lunchtime on the Friday before the move weekend.
IT dry run. Pre-stage whatever can be staged at the new office. Network switches ready to rack. Desktop builds ready to image. Cable runs pulled. The less the IT team has to do under time pressure on move weekend, the lower the risk.
Communicate the weekend schedule to the whole office. Who’s needed on site and when. For most offices, that’s the IT lead Friday evening, department leads Saturday for spot-checks, and the IT lead Sunday afternoon for the final systems test.
Order lunch for the move crew on Friday night and Sunday afternoon. Small investment, big return on crew pace. Six hours without food is a tired crew.
Week 1: final prep
Wednesday or Thursday before the weekend: final pack of shared items. Kitchen, shared files, meeting room kit. Leave Friday for personal desks.
Friday morning: everyone clears their desk. Personal belongings home or in crates. Monitor on the desk; keyboard and mouse in a labelled bag attached to the monitor. Chairs stay (they move with the general load).
Friday 5pm: office closed to staff. The IT team starts the server shutdown sequence. Crew arrives at 6pm.
Friday 6pm–11pm: load-out. Server rack first (carefully, with IT supervision), then workstations, then shared furniture, then personal crates, then meeting rooms, then archive and long-term storage items.
Move weekend: Saturday and Sunday
Saturday: transport and staging. The crew transports and pre-positions items at the new office. Department leads on call for spot decisions. IT team at the new office staging the server rack and network.
Sunday morning: unload and placement. Everything to its mapped position. Crew handles all furniture placement; IT handles all hardware reconnection.
Sunday afternoon: IT systems test. Email, network, VoIP, shared drives, critical software. Test every floor, every meeting room. Any issues surface now, not Monday 9am.
Sunday evening: walk-through. The operations lead and the move foreman walk the new floor, tick off the inventory, and sign off.
Monday morning: business as usual
8am: staff arrive. Coffee’s on, desks are labelled, monitors are on, email is working. A welcome email from the ops lead with the new building rules, parking, gym, mail handling, and who to call if anything’s off.
The department leads do a spot-check in the first hour. Anything missing? Anything wrong? The crew’s still available for the first 24 hours to fix it.
What typically goes wrong
Internet not live Monday morning. The most common single failure. Mitigation: order a business 4G/5G hotspot as backup; 50Mbps for a week is cheap insurance.
Wrong desk assignments. Staff arrive, their desk is empty or not where they expected. Mitigation: publish the seating plan by name the Wednesday before the move; take feedback Thursday; lock it Friday.
Missing crates. A crate from finance ends up on the marketing floor. Mitigation: the colour-code system and the department-lead walk-through on Sunday evening.
Lift booking ran over. The unload pushed past the booked window. Mitigation: book longer windows than you think you need, and use the buffer.
Server rack reassembled differently. Cables in different ports, power distribution reordered. Mitigation: the pre-move rack photo, and the cable labels. IT should witness the rack rebuild on Sunday.
Where Hartmann fits in a Sydney office move
We handle the physical side — crew, trucks, packing, furniture disassembly, server-rack crating, document chain-of-custody, furniture disposal. We coordinate directly with your IT team on the hardware sequence and with both building managers on the logistics.
We don’t run your IT migration, provision your new internet, or handle your telco porting — those sit with specialist providers. What we do is handle the physical move carefully enough that Monday morning looks like an ordinary Monday, not the Monday after a move.
For a small office (under 20 staff) we typically quote two movers and a truck for a Saturday, finishing inside the day. For 20–50, three movers over Friday–Sunday. For 50+ or multi-floor, a larger crew split across two trucks.
Thales Yan handles commercial quotes directly and will walk through the building requirements at both ends before pricing. For a full-scope quote, email or call — an office move is never a generic number, it’s a specific plan.
Related reading
- Commercial & office removals in Sydney — service detail and what’s included.
- How far in advance should I book a Sydney removalist? — lead times for office and residential moves.
- Moving out of a Sydney apartment — for the staff who are moving house the same month.
Or request a commercial quote with the number of staff, current address, new address, and preferred weekend — Thales will come back within the hour.