how much to charge for pet sitting in the UK

The short answer

Most UK pet sitters charge £11 to £20 for a drop-in visit, £10 to £20 for a half-hour solo dog walk and £35 to £70 a night to stay over. Where you land in those ranges depends on where you live, how long you spend and what it costs you to get there.

These come from the price guides listed under where the numbers come from. Treat them as a sense check, not a price list: most are ranges published without saying how they were gathered.

Work out your own price

What other people charge tells you what customers are used to paying. It doesn't tell you whether you can live on it. For that, start from what a visit costs you:

• Your time, including the travel. A half-hour visit with fifteen minutes of driving is 45 minutes of your day, and you can't be anywhere else for any of it.
• Your mileage. HMRC's flat rate for a car is 55p a mile from 6 April 2026. It's meant to cover fuel, insurance, servicing and wear, so it's a fair measure of what driving really costs you.
• Your running costs: insurance, a DBS check, software, your phone, poo bags and treats, shared across the visits you do in a month.
• Card fees, if your customers pay by card.

A visit takes me minutes, plus minutes and miles of travel.

I want to earn £ an hour.

My running costs are £ a month, and I do about visits a month.

My customers pay by card.

Charge at least

£16.65

£13.50 for your time, £2.20 for mileage, 50p towards running costs and 45p in card fees.

Mileage is counted at 55p a mile, and card fees at Stripe's 1.5% + 20p for a UK card.

With the numbers it starts with, a half-hour visit comes to £16.65: £13.50 for 45 minutes of your time at £18 an hour, £2.20 for four miles, 50p towards running costs and 45p in card fees.

What should you earn an hour?

The National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour from 1 April 2026. It doesn't apply to you if you're self-employed, but it's a useful floor: if a visit pays you less than that for the time it takes, you'd earn more in almost any job.

You need more than the floor, because nobody pays you for the gaps between visits, your holidays or the days you're ill, and nobody pays into a pension for you. You'll also pay Income Tax and National Insurance on what's left after costs. That's why the calculator starts at £18.

Extras and busy times

• Bank holidays, Christmas and New Year: most sitters charge 50% to 100% more. In one survey of UK cat sitters, the average bank holiday visit was £27.43 against £13.74 on a weekday.
• Weekends: most cat sitters charge the same as a weekday. Dog walkers more often add £2 to £5.
• Another dog from the same home: £4 to £8 on top.
• More cats: many sitters have one price for one or two cats and add a supplement for each one after that.
• Giving medication: £3 to £10.
• Summer: some sitters put prices up by 10% to 20% from June to August, when they're turning work away.

Where you live

London usually comes out as the most expensive, but the gap is smaller than you might expect. Bark's regional averages for a dog walk run from £14.25 in Scotland to £17.50 in London and the North West. Protectivity's guide puts an hour of dog walking at £20 to £30 in London, £18 to £26 in the South East, £14 to £22 in the South West, £14 to £20 in the Midlands and £12 to £18 in the North and Scotland.

Prices vary more within a region than between them. In that survey of cat sitters, the cheapest (£9.50 a visit) and the most expensive (£25) were both in Yorkshire.

Marketplace prices aren't your prices

A lot of the prices you'll find online come from marketplaces like Rover, where anyone can offer to sit. Rover's city guides list drop-in visits at around £10 to £15. If pet sitting is your living, and you're insured, checked and turn up every time, you're offering something different and can charge for it.

Putting your prices up

• Do it once a year, at the same time each year, so customers come to expect it.
• Give at least a month's notice, in writing.
• Start new customers on the new price straight away.
• Don't apologise. Your costs go up every year, and a sitter who goes out of business is no use to anyone's cat.

Where the numbers come from

We checked these on 13 October 2026. None is an official statistic.

• ManyPets asked 19 UK pet sitters for their prices in January 2026: cat sitting visits, bank holiday rates and the Yorkshire figures.
• Bark publishes average dog walking prices from its own data: solo and group walks, weekend supplements and the regional averages.
• Protectivity, a pet business insurer: dog walk prices by length, hourly rates by region and the cost of extras. It doesn't say how the figures were gathered.
• Pets Locally: drop-in and overnight ranges, and summer prices. It doesn't say how the figures were gathered.
• Rover's city price guides: marketplace prices for drop-in visits.
• GOV.UK: the flat rate for mileage and the National Living Wage.