← Dog boarding & daycare pricing calculator
Search this question and you get a range: twenty-five to seventy-five dollars a night, more for large dogs or cities. The range is not wrong, and it is not usable, because it hides the four things that actually decide whether a night pays: staff time, supplies, overhead, and the margin you need to keep running.
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Thirty minutes of staff time — feeding, potty breaks, play, cleaning the run — at an $18/hour wage is $9.00. Add $4.00 of food, bedding, and cleaning supplies, and a $10.00 share of rent, utilities, and insurance allocated to that one dog-day, and the true cost to deliver one night is $23.00 before you have kept a dollar.
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Staff labor (0.5 hr × $18/hr) | $9.00 |
| Supplies | $4.00 |
| Overhead allocated | $10.00 |
| Cost to deliver | $23.00 |
| Margin (25%) | $5.75 |
| Price per night | $28.75 |
| 3-night reservation | $86.25 |
That $28.75 is not a market rate and does not have to match what any other facility charges — it is what your own staff time, supplies, and overhead actually require. Raise the wage, the overhead share, or the margin, and the number moves; that is the calculator working as intended, not a flaw in it.
A second dog from the same family shares the run, the feeding trip, and most of the potty-break time the first dog already accounts for. Charging a full second stay overprices the easiest booking a facility gets — the one that needs no second kennel and no second cleaning cycle.
Two dogs for three nights at a 10% multi-dog discount is $163.88, not $172.50. The $8.63 discount reflects the real extra cost of a second dog far better than doubling the price does, and it is often the difference between keeping a multi-dog family's business and losing it to a facility that already discounts.
A long stay is worth discounting — it fills a run for one booking instead of several, and it competes with the weekly rate other facilities already advertise. But discounting the whole stay gives away margin on nights that cost exactly the same to deliver as a short booking. The fix is a threshold: discount only the nights beyond it.
| Nights | At full rate | At discount | Discount | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 (threshold 7, 10% off past it) | 7 × $28.75 | 3 × $25.88 | $8.63 | $278.88 |
A flat 10% off the whole 10-night stay would have priced it at $258.75 — $20.13 less than the threshold-based discount recovers, for exactly the same booking. The nights every stay has in common should not subsidize the discount meant to win the long ones.
Pricing one reservation well is half the question. The other half is whether the facility as a whole is profitable, which depends on how many of its runs are actually filled across a month — not on any single stay's price.
| Figure | Value |
|---|---|
| Kennel/run count | 12 |
| Monthly dog-day capacity (12 runs × 30 days) | 360 |
| Fixed monthly costs | $6,000.00 |
| Average realized rate | $45.00 |
| Variable cost per dog-day | $13.00 |
| Break-even occupancy | 52.1% (187.5 dog-days) |
At a projected 65% occupancy (234.0 dog-days), the facility clears break-even and nets a $1,488.00 monthly profit. At 30% occupancy (108.0 dog-days) with the same rate, it falls 22.1 points short of break-even and loses $2,544.00 for the month. Two very different months, one nightly rate — occupancy is the variable a per-stay price alone cannot see.
There is no single right answer, because a nightly rate hides four separate costs: staff time, supplies, facility overhead, and the margin you need to keep. A worked example with 30 minutes of staff time at an $18/hour wage, $4 of supplies, and $10 of allocated overhead costs $23.00 per dog-day to deliver, and prices at $28.75/night with a 25 percent margin. Your own numbers will differ, and that is the point: the rate has to come from your costs, not from what a competitor posts.
No, and pricing it that way loses multi-dog bookings. A second dog in the same reservation adds handling effort but not a second kennel run, a second cleaning cycle, or a second staff trip, so charging a full second stay overprices the easiest booking a facility gets. A 10 percent multi-dog discount on the example above turns two dogs for three nights into $163.88 instead of $172.50 -- an $8.63 discount that keeps the family's business without giving away margin on the parts of the stay that really did double.
A long stay is worth discounting because it fills a calendar for one booking instead of several, and it competes with weekly rates other facilities already offer. But the first several nights of any stay cost exactly the same to deliver as a short one, so discounting the whole stay gives away margin you never needed to. In the worked example, a 10-night stay bills the first 7 nights at the full $28.75 rate and only the remaining 3 at a 10 percent discount -- $8.63 off a $287.50 flat total, landing at $278.88.
Because a nightly rate prices one dog for one night, and a facility's profit depends on how many of its runs are actually filled across a whole month. A 12-run facility with $6,000 in fixed monthly costs and a $45 average realized rate needs 52.1 percent occupancy just to break even -- roughly 187.5 of its 360 monthly dog-day slots. At a more realistic 65 percent occupancy it clears that with room to spare, turning a $1,488.00 monthly profit; at 30 percent it falls 22.1 points short of break-even and loses $2,544.00 for the month at the same rate. The rate alone cannot tell you which of those two months you are having.
No. This tool has no booking, no calendar, no payment processing, and no client messaging -- it only prices a reservation and checks occupancy math. Plenty of facilities run a booking or kennel-management platform for scheduling and use a separate calculation, like this one, to decide what to actually charge.
The calculator prices one reservation from your own staff time, supplies, overhead, and discounts, and checks whether your kennel/run occupancy clears a monthly break-even. It runs entirely in your browser.
Open the free boarding & daycare calculator
Weighing this against just matching a competitor's posted rate? See this calculator vs. a flat nightly rate.