Home / Free tools / Grooming Price per Dog Calculator
Free tool

Grooming Price per Dog Calculator

Turns the income you want, your yearly business costs and your real grooming hours into the hourly rate and per-dog price a groomer needs to charge.

Your numbers

Results update as you type.

Your estimate

Required rate per grooming hour...
Price for an average groom...
Grooms per week at those hours...
Annual revenue needed...

Estimates only. Assumptions are listed below, and you can change every input.

Many groomers price by looking at the salon down the road, then wonder at the end of the year why they worked full weeks and still did not pay themselves properly. Pricing should start from your own numbers: the income you want to take home, the costs of running the business, and the number of hours you can actually spend with a dog on the table once admin, cleanup and gaps are removed.

The calculator adds your target take-home pay to your annual expenses and divides by your billable grooming hours per year to get a required hourly rate. It then converts that rate to a price for an average groom of the length you enter and adds the supplies used per dog. There is no markup or industry benchmark hidden inside; every constant is something you typed in.

How to use this tool

  1. Enter the yearly pay you want and the total cost of running the business for a year.
  2. Enter the weeks you really work and the hours per week you spend with a dog on the table.
  3. Set your average groom length and supplies per dog, then read the hourly rate and the price an average groom needs to be.

What the math assumes

  • Every billable hour you enter is actually sold; unsold hours are not built in, so lower the hours if your book is not full.
  • The hourly rate covers your target pay plus all annual expenses, spread evenly across the year.
  • Per-dog supplies are added on top of the time-based price and are not marked up.
  • Price for an average groom is the hourly rate scaled to the groom length you enter; shorter or longer services should be priced from the same hourly rate.
  • Sales tax, card processing fees and personal income tax are not included unless you put them in annual expenses.

Frequently asked questions

Why are billable hours lower than hours at work?

Booking calls, cleaning, restocking, and gaps between appointments do not earn anything. A groomer at the shop for 40 hours often has 28 to 32 hours of actual table time, and only those hours can carry the price.

How do I price a small bath versus a full haircut?

Use the hourly rate the tool gives you and multiply by the time each service takes, then add supplies. A 45 minute bath and tidy should cost about half of a 90 minute full groom before supplies.

What if the price looks higher than my competitors?

Either your expenses or your income target are higher than theirs, or they are underpaying themselves. You can lower the target, cut expenses, or increase billable hours, but the math will show what each choice costs you.

Link to this toolhttps://groombookr.com/tools/grooming-price-per-dog/

Free for readers and publishers alike. If you cite the result in an article, a link to this page helps others find it.

More free tools from GroomBookr

Bookings and vaccination records in one place

Grooming appointments plus a pet vaccination record vault.

Take bookings