The 5G cellular network is being deployed across many countries and is becoming an integral technology for mobile communication. The ubiquity of the 5G services, however, will require the dissemination of a large number of base stations which translates into a significant number of handoff operations compared to ear-lier generations (e.g. 4G/LTE). Furthermore, Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a 3GPP specification designed for enabling the wireless communication of low powered IoT devices. However, NB-IoT does not provide complete support for handoff operations and is intended for fixed IoT devices. In this paper, we investigate critical handoff attributes that may affect the end-to-end service inNB-IoT and present a user-centered handoff optimization model.Results show that our proposed user-centered model significantly outperforms the generic uniform preferences across 96% of tested handoff operations.