Pet Sitting Rates 2026: What to Charge Per Visit and Per Night

Prefer to run the numbers yourself? Use the pet sitting calculator.

Published 2026 guides put a drop-in visit at about $20 to $50 and an overnight in-home stay at about $45 to $90, with big-city overnights reaching $90 to $150. Use those ranges to sanity-check your menu, then set the real price from your cost per visit. By the end you will have a number for each visit type and a price list you can send to every new client.

What pet sitters charge in 2026, by visit type

These are the ranges the main rate guides publish. They are written for pet owners, so treat them as a floor and a ceiling for your market, not as your price. For prices read from sitters' own websites, see pet sitting rates.

The Kinship range depends on the sitter's experience and the dog's needs. The other ranges move mostly with location, which is the next thing to pin down.

Start from your city size, then override with your costs

The same visit costs very different amounts to deliver in Boston and in a small town. Overnight care usually runs $45 to $75 in lower-cost areas, $60 to $105 in mid-market suburbs, and $90 to $150 in cities such as New York, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle and Los Angeles. For a 30-minute visit, major cities start at $25 to $40, while $15 to $25 is more common in smaller towns.

Use this as your starting rule:

• Major city: start overnights at $90 and 30-minute visits at $25, then test against your costs.
• Suburb or mid-size market: start overnights near $60 to $105 and look at where your closest competitors sit.
• Smaller town: start 30-minute visits near $15 to $25 and overnights near $45 to $75.
• Any market: if your cost per visit lands above the range, your price follows your cost, not the range.

Work out your cost per visit before you copy any range

This is the part the rate guides skip. A national average does not know what your sitters earn or how far they drive. Do this sum once per visit type.

Example: say a 30-minute drop-in. The sitter is paid $14. Travel between visits costs $3. Your fixed monthly costs (software, phone, accounting, insurance) are $800 and you run 400 visits a month, so overhead is $2 a visit.

1. Add the three costs: $14 + $3 + $2 = $19.
2. Pick the margin you want to keep. Say 30 percent.
3. Divide the cost by one minus the margin: $19 / 0.7 = about $27.
4. Compare with your market range. If $27 sits inside it, price at $27. If your range tops out at $22, your costs are too high for that market and you need to cut travel or overhead, not the sitter's pay.
5. Set the price at the higher of the range's low end and your cost-plus figure.

That gives you a rate per visit: cost per visit divided by (1 minus your margin). Repeat it for a 60-minute visit and an overnight.

Check that the sitter's share leaves money for you

Many companies pay sitters a percentage of the visit price. Write that percentage down and test it.

In the example, the sitter gets $14 of a $27 visit, which is 52 percent. That leaves $13, and $5 of it covers travel and overhead. Your margin is $8, about 30 percent.

The most you can pay is 1 minus ((travel + overhead) / price) minus the margin you want. With $5 of travel and overhead on a $27 visit and a 10 percent minimum margin, that is 1 - 0.185 - 0.10 = about 71 percent. Pay more than that and each visit loses money.

Do not borrow a marketplace commission as your overhead. PetBnB charges sitters a tiered commission from 18 percent down to 8 percent, and marketplaces say the fee pays for marketing, billing, scheduling and support. If you do those jobs yourself, their cost sits in your overhead, and a company that copies an 8 to 18 percent figure prices too low.

Find how many visits a month cover your fixed costs

Take what is left of each visit before fixed costs, then divide your fixed costs by it.

In the example, a $27 visit minus $14 of sitter pay and $3 of travel leaves $10. Fixed costs of $800 divided by $10 means 80 visits a month before you keep anything. At 400 visits you are far past that. At 60 visits, a quiet month, you are not.

Run the sum at your current visit count and again at a higher one to see what a new sitter adds. If your software charges per active staff member, add that charge to the fixed costs before you decide. Time To Pet's Team plan was $40 plus $16 per active staff member when its pricing page was checked on 2026-10-08, so six sitters came to $136 a month. A flat plan such as Porchlight's Team plan at $79 a month with unlimited staff does not grow when you hire, which keeps that line of the sum fixed. What per-seat pricing really costs a pet sitting company walks through the larger teams.

Write the extras into the price list so they are not decided at the door

A base rate only works if extra work is priced too. Three extras cause most of the lost margin.

Extra pets. Most pet sitters charge extra for additional animals, and $5 to $15 per extra pet per visit is common. Visit price with extras = base rate + (extra pets x per-pet fee) + add-on fees. Example: $27 base + 2 extra pets x $8 = $43 a visit.

Late cancellation. A sitter who is booked and travelling for a visit that earns nothing costs you the pay and the slot. One small company's written policy is that visits cancelled with less than 24 hours' notice are charged at the full cost of the service. Pick a window at least as long as it takes you to refill a slot. If that takes half a day, 24 hours covers it.

Holidays. Holiday weeks add a surcharge almost everywhere. Name the dates, set a higher rate and give holiday cancellations a longer window than regular dates.

Copy this price list and send it before the first visit

Charging by time, with set rates for 30, 45 and 60 minute visits, is described as the industry norm and is easier for clients to understand. Paste this into a document, fill in your numbers and send it to every new client:

Price list (effective [date])

Visits
30 minutes: $__ per visit
45 minutes: $__ per visit
60 minutes: $__ per visit
Overnight in-home stay: $__ per night

Extras
Each additional pet: $__ per visit
Medication or injection: $__ per visit
Holiday dates ([list the dates]): $__ added per visit

Cancellations
Visits cancelled with less than __ hours' notice are charged in full.
Holiday dates need __ hours' notice.

Keep one copy where staff can see it so everyone quotes the same numbers.

Four mistakes that quietly cost margin

• Copying a national average. A rate set from a $20 to $50 range can sit below your cost in a high-cost city, so every visit loses money.
• Pricing from sitter pay alone. Software, texting and admin per visit drop out of the sum, and the margin is smaller than it looks.
• One sitter share for every visit type. A short drop-in and an overnight carry different travel and admin costs, so one share overpays one and underpays the other.
• Rules decided at the door. Clients dispute fees they never saw in writing.

Do this in the next ten minutes

Open a spreadsheet and fill in four cells for your most common visit: sitter pay, travel, overhead per visit (fixed costs divided by visits last month) and the margin you want. Divide the first three added together by one minus your margin. Compare the result with the range for your city size in the table above.

Keep the software line flat as you hire

Every pound of the sum above that you can hold still makes the rest easier to price. Porchlight is scheduling, invoicing, payroll and proof-of-service software for pet sitting companies. Team is $79 a month with unlimited staff, and the 30-day free trial needs no card. Start your free 30-day trial.