The India to United States corridor remains one of the busiest moves we coordinate — and in our experience, almost none of the friction is freight. It is the interaction between a US employer's H-1B start window, the petition stage at the time of move, and a young family's desire to get furniture into a new apartment before the children's first day of school. These three clocks do not naturally align, and a shipment planned to one of them will miss the other two.
Here is how we approach the corridor for IT families specifically.
Start with the petition stage, not the move date
An H-1B move looks different depending on whether the petition has been approved, the visa has been stamped, or the worker is travelling on an unstamped I-797. In all three cases the shipment can sail — but the destination clearance posture changes.
If the worker has the visa stamped and the family is moving together, US customs treats the consignment as standard unaccompanied personal effects. If the worker is travelling first on the I-797 and the family follows in two or three months, we file the shipment in the worker's name with the destination address held in escrow until the family's arrival window firms up. Filing in the spouse's name when only the spouse's I-94 is finalised is the cleaner route in that scenario.
Plan around the start date, not the ticket date
The most common timing mistake we see is anchoring the move to the worker's flight date. The flight is usually the easy part. The harder anchor is the employer's confirmed start date and the period of corporate housing or temporary accommodation they have offered.
Most US IT employers offer thirty to sixty days of temporary accommodation. Our usual recommendation is to land freight into a permanent address by day forty-five, which means packing in India around forty days before the worker's reporting date. East and West Coast destinations split this differently:
- Mumbai or Kandla to New York, New Jersey, Boston: 30 to 38 days door-to-door is realistic.
- Mumbai or Chennai to San Francisco Bay, Seattle, San Jose: 38 to 48 days door-to-door, because the trans-Pacific routing via Singapore or via Suez and the East Coast is longer.
- Bengaluru or Hyderabad to Dallas, Austin, Raleigh: typically routed through Chennai or Mumbai then trucked from the destination port; budget 35 to 45 days.
School calendar overrides everything
If a child is moving, the US school year admission window beats the shipment timeline as a planning constraint. Public school registration in most US districts requires proof of address, immunisation records and previous transcripts. The immunisation records and transcripts can be hand-carried — the proof of address cannot exist until the family has signed a lease.
Our usual sequence is: the worker flies, secures a lease in the first two weeks, the family follows once the school registration paperwork is in motion, and the shipment arrives in the third or fourth week of the family's stay. This avoids the unhappy scenario of a family in a furnished short-let watching their container sit in a yard incurring storage charges.
What we ship and what we do not
For an IT family on a first H-1B move, the cost-benefit of shipping certain items is genuinely marginal. Indian-voltage appliances, traditional Indian kitchen equipment that has a US-spec equivalent, and bulk consumables are usually better left or sold. What ships well: mattresses and bedding that fit US-standard bed sizes (queen and king translate), upholstered furniture in good condition, books and personal effects, religious items and art, and children's toys.
What ships poorly: 220V appliances without a planned step-down setup, Indian-spec ovens and gas hobs (US kitchens are largely electric or natural gas at different pressures), and large solid-wood furniture that would not survive the humidity differential between, say, Chennai and Boston.
The 220V question
If the family is moving to a US city with a sizeable Indian community, 220V appliances can be useful because supporting infrastructure (specialty grocers, voltage converters, mechanics) is genuinely available. In smaller US cities the calculation tilts the other way. We will give a candid view during the survey rather than ship everything by default.
The temporary versus permanent accommodation split
One of the most useful planning conversations we have with first-time H-1B families is the split between what to hand-carry, what to ship by air freight (a small consignment, three to five days transit) and what to send by sea (the bulk consignment, four to six weeks).
Air freight is worth it for: school records and academic certificates that should not be in the sea consignment, prescription medications and supporting prescriptions, work essentials, and the children's familiar bedding and a few toys. Sea is for everything else.
This split also smooths the temporary-to-permanent housing transition. The hand-carry plus air freight covers the family for the first month in temporary accommodation; the sea shipment arrives once the permanent lease is signed.
Indian community resources at destination
For most IT corridors — the Bay Area, Seattle, Dallas, North Carolina's Triangle, the New York and New Jersey metro — there are well-established Indian community networks that genuinely help the soft landing. We will share the locally relevant grocery, temple, school and weekend-class contacts at destination as part of the handover. This is not freight scope, but it is the difference between a family that settles in three weeks and one that takes three months.
If your move is in motion and you want to talk through the timing against your start date and your children's school cycle, a fifteen-minute scoping call is the most useful first step.
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