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U-Haul rents moving trucks, trailers, and storage units, and sells the boxes and supplies people need to move.
U-Haul is the company people call when they need to move their stuff. It rents out trucks and trailers by the hour or the day, rents self-storage units, and sells the boxes, tape, and padding that go with a move. You can find it almost everywhere: the company says its network covers all of the United States and most of Canada, with thousands of company-owned stores and tens of thousands of independent dealers, from gas stations to hardware stores, renting its trucks on the side.
The moving business and the storage business feed each other. Someone rents a truck for a day, then realizes they need a place to keep the furniture for a month, and U-Haul rents them a storage room too. That is why the company keeps buying and building storage facilities — storage brings in steadier, recurring money than one-day truck rentals, and it has been the growth engine. U-Haul makes money from rental fees, storage rent, and sales of moving supplies, and customers pick it because the trucks are close by and you can drop them off somewhere else, which matters a lot on a one-way move. The company has an unusual structure. It is controlled by the Shoen family, which founded it in 1945, and it has two classes of stock — one with voting power, one mostly without. It is also famously frugal and does a lot in-house: it builds much of its own storage, repairs its own trucks, and even makes its own boxes. That keeps costs down, though critics note the truck fleet is old and the rental experience can be inconsistent.
Its main competitor in truck rentals is Budget, through the Budget truck brand that Avis Budget Group operates. In storage, it competes with many regional and national operators, including Public Storage and Extra Space Storage. The business is tied to how often people move, so a weak housing market or a slow economy can dent truck rentals, while storage tends to hold up better because people still need a place for their things. After years of heavy spending on new storage properties, U-Haul has been shifting toward paying down debt and buying back stock, a sign management thinks the shares are cheap relative to the cash the business throws off.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026