Every family that has moved abroad has a version of the same story:
the shipping went fine, the flights went fine, and then something
small and entirely foreseeable went sideways. A school place that
couldn’t be confirmed. A week of everyone sleeping on mattresses on
the floor. A child who was fine about the whole thing right up until
the sofa left the living room.
The hard part of an international move isn’t the boxes. It’s the
sequencing — and the pieces with the longest lead times are
almost always the ones involving your children.
Here’s the order things actually need to happen in, using Dubai as
the worked example.
Start with the school file, not the shipping quote
This is the single most common scheduling mistake, and it’s worth
understanding before you book anything else.
In Dubai, private schools are regulated by the KHDA, and a child
joining Grade 2 or above generally needs an attested school
transfer certificate from their previous school. Attested
doesn’t mean photocopied. It means verified through a chain:
authentication in your home country, then the UAE embassy, then the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and sometimes a Ministry of Education
equivalency on top.
That chain typically runs six to eight weeks. For
a September start, begin by June. For a January mid-year move, begin
in October. The attestation fee itself is modest — the KHDA
charges around AED 120 — so this is a calendar problem, not a
budget one.
Without it, schools can delay or refuse admission. And a school
place is usually the thing every other date hangs off.
Book the move around the school calendar, not the lease
Once you know the start date, work backwards. Families who arrive a
clear week or two before term begins consistently have an easier time
than families who land the weekend before, because that buffer absorbs
the things that slip: a delayed shipment, a visa appointment, a
uniform fitting, a child who needs a few days to stop being furious
with you.
Leases and notice periods feel like the fixed points. They’re
usually more negotiable than a school’s first day.
Your movers need permission to enter the building
A detail that surprises almost everyone: in Dubai, most buildings
and managed communities require a move-in permit
before a moving crew can bring anything through the door. It
authorises access to the service elevator and the loading dock, and
it’s issued by building management, not by you.
Crucially, buildings will generally only approve that permit for a
company holding a valid trade licence and insurance covering the
building’s common areas. A cheaper unlicensed crew can fail the permit
outright — which means the truck arrives and security turns it
away, with your family standing in the lobby.
It’s worth choosing from verified
moving companies in Dubai whose licence and insurance are already
confirmed, precisely because that paperwork is what gets you through
the door on the day.
Pay for the beds to be reassembled
If you take one practical thing from this, take this one.
Ask explicitly whether disassembly and reassembly are included, and
confirm it in writing. Cots, bunk beds and wardrobes are the items
most likely to be taken apart by the crew and then left in pieces
because reassembly wasn’t in the quote.
The difference between children sleeping in their own beds on night
one and the whole family camping on mattresses for four days is
enormous — far more than the cost of adding it to the job.
Everything else can stay in boxes for a fortnight. The beds
cannot.
Let each child pack one box they control
Give every child a box that is entirely theirs, that they pack
themselves, that gets labelled with their name in enormous letters,
and that travels with you rather than in the shipment.
Whatever goes in it is correct, even if what goes in it is nine
soft toys and a single sock. The point isn’t the contents. It’s that
during a process in which a child controls nothing — not the
country, not the house, not the school, not the friends — there
is one box that is entirely their decision, and it will be there on
the first night.
It is a remarkably small intervention for how much it helps.
Expect the quotes to be wildly different
Moving quotes in expat markets don’t cluster the way domestic ones
do. For the same apartment, it’s completely normal to be quoted AED
800 by one company and AED 2,500 by another.
That gap is rarely negotiating room. It’s usually describing two
different jobs — one includes packing materials, insurance,
disassembly and reassembly, and permit handling; the other includes a
truck and two people. For reference, a one-bedroom move commonly runs
AED 800–1,500 for transport alone and AED 1,200–2,000 with
professional packing, while villas typically start around AED
3,000.
Ask what’s inside the number. Then ask what happens if something breaks.
The short version
- Six to eight weeks out: start the school
attestation chain - Once the school date is fixed: book the move
backwards from it, with a buffer - Before booking a crew: confirm licence,
insurance and permit handling - In the quote, in writing: disassembly and
reassembly of beds - The night before: one box per child, packed by
them, travelling with you
None of this makes an international move effortless. It does mean
the things that go wrong are small and recoverable rather than
structural — and that your children arrive somewhere that
already feels a little bit like theirs.
Written by the team at TaskRight, a verified home-services
platform connecting homeowners with vetted, background-checked
professionals.
