By EPR Editorial Team
Edited on Jun 17, 2026.
U-Haul is the American do-it-yourself moving and self-storage brand founded in 1945 by Leonard Samuel Shoen (L.S.) and his wife Anna Mary Carty Shoen in Ridgefield, Washington, with a $5,000 investment and one trailer. Now operating as the primary subsidiary of U-Haul Holding Company (NYSE: UHAL, formerly AMERCO until 2022), U-Haul today maintains a fleet of approximately 192,000 trucks, 138,000 trailers, and 39,000 towing devices, operates more than 23,000 self-storage rooms at over 2,200 owned locations across the United States and Canada, and serves a customer base that has executed more than 50 million one-way moves across eight decades.
Part of EPR's Marketing coverage. See also: Marketing Strategies for Moving Companies · Network Solutions brand story · LinkedIn's 1.1B-member story.
The 1945 founding and the original innovation
L.S. Shoen, then 29 years old and recently discharged from the U.S. Navy, identified the post-WWII opportunity in personal household moving while planning his own family relocation from Washington State to California in 1945. The existing moving industry — anchored on full-service van lines such as Allied, North American, and Mayflower — was priced for the corporate-and-affluent market. Working-class families relocating after the war had no affordable option.
Shoen's innovation was conceptually simple and operationally radical: rent the trailer to the customer, let the customer drive the family car, recover the trailer at the destination through a network of partner gas stations. The original U-Haul trailers — built in Anna Mary's father's chicken coop in Ridgefield — leased for $2 per day. The first one-way rental was completed in late 1945. By 1948, U-Haul had 100 trailers in service. By 1955, the network had grown to 10,000 trailers across the United States.
The one-way rental model was the structural lock-in. U-Haul built the first network in which a customer in Seattle could rent a trailer, drive to Miami, and return the trailer at the destination — without paying for the empty return trip. The model required a national network of partner dealers, a tracking and reconciliation system that predated modern computing, and a willingness to accept the operational complexity that incumbent moving companies had avoided. L.S. Shoen ran the company directly through 1986, when the broader family-succession period began.
The AMERCO years and the Shoen family
The corporate parent company, originally named AMERCO and reorganized in 1969 as a Nevada holding company, operated as the publicly-traded parent of U-Haul and several adjacent business lines (insurance subsidiaries, real estate operations, and the self-storage business that became U-Haul's second major operating segment). AMERCO listed on NASDAQ in 1986 and moved to NYSE in 2007. In 2022, the company formally rebranded the corporate parent from AMERCO to U-Haul Holding Company to align the corporate identity with the consumer brand.
L.S. and Anna Mary Shoen had 12 children. The family-control transition through the 1980s and 1990s produced sustained public disputes that culminated in multiple board-control battles and became one of the most-covered family-business succession cases of its era. The eventual stabilization placed Edward J. (Joe) Shoen — one of L.S.'s sons — as the operational leader. Joe Shoen has been chairman and CEO of U-Haul Holding Company since 1986 and remains in the role today.
Under Joe Shoen, U-Haul has executed a disciplined operational growth strategy that emphasizes vertical integration, self-storage expansion, and the broader DIY-moving category positioning. The company has avoided debt-financed expansion that bankrupted many of its competitors, maintained Shoen-family majority ownership, and consistently reinvested operating earnings into fleet expansion and self-storage acquisition.
The self-storage business — the second category
U-Haul's self-storage segment is structurally distinct from the moving-rental business and has been growing faster than the core moving operation for more than a decade. The segment operates approximately 2,200 owned-and-managed locations across the United States and Canada with roughly 23,000 individual storage rooms — making U-Haul one of the four largest self-storage operators in North America alongside Public Storage (NYSE: PSA), Extra Space Storage (NYSE: EXR), and CubeSmart (NYSE: CUBE).
The acquisition strategy has been opportunistic: distressed retail or industrial real estate, converted to self-storage capacity, integrated into the broader U-Haul moving-and-storage offering. The cross-sell between moving rentals (a one-time transaction) and self-storage (recurring monthly revenue) is the operational logic that makes the combination structurally durable. U-Haul Holding Company reported approximately $5.6 billion in total revenue for fiscal 2024, with self-storage and ancillary businesses contributing roughly 18%.
Category positioning and the moving-industry competitive frame
U-Haul's category dominance in DIY moving has been stable for decades. Penske Truck Rental, Budget Truck Rental (owned by Avis Budget Group), and a long tail of regional and local operators collectively hold less than 30% of the consumer DIY-moving market. Penske and Budget compete primarily in the truck-rental subsegment; U-Haul's trailer-rental dominance is structurally complete because no major competitor maintains the comparable national trailer network.
The broader U.S. moving industry — full-service van lines, professional movers, DIY rental — generates approximately $20 billion in annual revenue. U-Haul's DIY positioning produces customer-acquisition economics that are structurally different from the full-service competitors: lower revenue per transaction, higher transaction volume, broader brand recognition, and physical retail presence in every metropolitan area in North America.
The 2020–2021 pandemic period was operationally significant. Domestic migration shifted as remote-work-enabled relocations accelerated. U-Haul's one-way migration data — published annually as the U-Haul Migration Trends report — has become one of the most-cited data sources on U.S. internal migration. The 2021, 2022, and 2023 reports consistently showed sustained relocation flows from California, Illinois, and New York toward Texas, Florida, Arizona, and the Carolinas.
Marketing and brand-building across eight decades
U-Haul's brand-building has been disciplined and consistent. The signature visual identity — the orange and white truck graphic, the SuperGraphics state-and-province imagery (large painted murals depicting U.S. states and Canadian provinces on the side of every U-Haul truck), and the consistent typography — has been refined but never radically changed. The SuperGraphics program, launched in 1989, is one of the most-recognizable rolling brand surfaces in American consumer business.
The original #UHaulFamous campaign was one of the company's first Instagram-anchored social programs, inviting customers to share moving-adventure photos in exchange for a $1 American Red Cross donation per submission and the possibility of seeing their photo featured on one of 1,000 limited-edition U-Haul trucks. The campaign was launched under Stuart Shoen, then Executive Vice President.
For an in-depth view of how moving and self-storage operators build modern category presence — local SEO, AI visibility, fleet branding, migration data publishing, and review-driven trust — see Marketing Strategies for Moving Companies.
U-Haul in the AI Communications era
U-Haul's brand recognition inside answer engines is one of the most stable in the consumer-services category. Queries about moving — "best way to move cross-country," "truck rental for moving," "how much does it cost to move," "states people are moving to" — consistently surface U-Haul properties in AI-engine responses. The 80-year operating history produces the citation-history depth that newer competitors cannot match.
For corporate communications inside the broader consumer-services category, U-Haul is one of the canonical examples of how a brand with deep operating history, consistent visual identity, and disciplined family ownership compounds Citation Share over decades. The Shoen family's refusal to dilute the brand through aggressive acquisition, financial engineering, or category extension has produced an asset that the answer engines treat as authoritative on the moving and self-storage topics it covers.
