Business Data & Benchmarks · United States
Pet Care Services Revenue Benchmark (Except Veterinary)
Pet care other than veterinary work, covering grooming, boarding, sitting and training.
Average Pet Care Services Revenue per Year 2022 Economic Census
The 2022 Economic Census counts every pet care business with paid employees, excluding veterinary practices, and publishes their combined annual receipts. Dividing one by the other gives the average annual revenue per employer establishment below.
≈$410,000 /year
Average annual gross revenue per employer establishment
24,655
Employer establishments in the United States, 2022
as published $10.1 billion
Combined annual gross revenue of employer establishments, 2022
How this is calculated: about $10.1 billion in combined annual revenue divided by 24,655 employer establishments works out to $410,000. This is an average per establishment, and averages get pulled up by large, busy operations, so a typical business may sit below it.
Scope: Pet Care (except Veterinary) Services (NAICS 812910). Pet care except veterinary services, covering grooming, boarding, sitting and training together. Employer establishments only: owner-operated businesses with no paid employees are not in these figures.
Three different capacity models sit inside this one code. A grooming salon sells appointments and is capped by table hours, a boarding kennel sells nights and is capped by licensed runs, and a training service sells courses that can fill a room at once. Boarding also swings hard around holidays while grooming does not. Read the figure as the pet services trade, never as a grooming benchmark.
Boarding needs licensed space while grooming needs only a table, so the same category contains very different capital requirements.
Source US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, Summary Statistics (ECNBASIC): ESTAB, RCPTOT and PAYANN by NAICS · Vintage 2022 Economic Census · Calculation BusinessNES · Accessed July 2026
Where these figures come from
Data Source Notice
This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau.
Figures above are from the 2022 Economic Census reference year, released by the Census Bureau in 2024 and 2025; markets have moved since.
Employer Establishments at Year Five Industry group
Other personal services, NAICS 8129, the 2018 starting count compared with the count of five-year-old establishments in 2023.
50.4%the year-five count as a share of the starting count
Across the 2014 to 2018 cohorts, five-year results ranged from 46.5 to 50.4 percent. This benchmark covers Other personal services, NAICS 8129, as a whole. It is not a survival rate for pet care businesses on their own: they are 24,655 of the 59,810 employer establishments in that group, about 41 percent of it. How this is measured
Payroll as a Share of Revenue Official data
Payroll covers groomers, attendants and trainers, not the kennel space, supplies or insurance a pet business carries.
| Cost line | Share of receipts |
|---|---|
| Annual payroll share of receipts, United States | ≈43% |
Payroll share of receipts, Pet Care (except Veterinary) Services, United States, 2022 Economic Census.
Approximately 43.0 percent of every revenue dollar in this category goes to annual payroll. As the census defines it, payroll includes wages, salaries, reported tips, commissions and bonuses; it excludes employer-paid benefits, employer payroll taxes, contractor payments and owner compensation. Treat it as one verified anchor, not a full labor cost breakdown. Hands-on time is what is sold here, and the payroll share is high for a service business. The usual explanation is that little of this work can be automated, which is an interpretation rather than something the ratio itself demonstrates.
This is not total labor cost or profit margin.
How to read this number
Beyond the Benchmark BusinessNES analysis
What the census figures leave out about pet care businesses, and what to look at instead.
What the numbers do not show
This category holds several different businesses: grooming, day care, boarding, training and in-home services. They need different premises, different insurance and different staffing, and the census reports them together.
Capacity utilization, the driver of profit in boarding, is not visible in receipts. Boarding revenue is capped by kennel spaces and concentrated around holidays, while grooming is capped by table hours and spreads through the week.
Operator lens
- Repeat frequency is set by the service, not the marketing. Grooming returns on a predictable cycle; boarding follows the customer's travel, which no operator controls.
- Liability sits behind every service. Animals in care create obligations that shape insurance, staffing ratios and the terms customers sign.
Questions to ask before starting or buying
- Which services actually generate the revenue? Ask for the split between grooming, boarding, day care and training, because each has its own constraints.
- What is the licensing position for boarding? Overnight care is regulated in many jurisdictions and the requirements attach to the premises.
- How is staff trained and retained? Handling experience is the difference between a routine day and an incident, and it is not quickly replaced.
- What does the incident and insurance history show? Ask about claims, bite records and how they were handled.
- How seasonal is the boarding side? Holiday concentration means the same kennel can be full and empty within two weeks.
Models worth considering
- Turn travel demand into a subscription Day care packages and regular grooming plans convert episodic visits into scheduled ones and smooth the week.
- Take the service to the customer Mobile grooming can reduce reliance on a conventional lease, though vehicle, maintenance, storage and insurance replace part of that overhead, and it reaches owners who cannot travel with an anxious animal.
- Work with the buildings, not just the owners Residential developments and hotels that accept pets need a service partner and bring volume without individual marketing.
Explore More on BusinessNES
More BusinessNES guides and rankings, plus neighboring benchmark pages built from the same verified data.
Sources and Methodology
Every figure on this page is bound to a published source, and each figure's own source line names that source precisely: the 2022 Economic Census for counts, receipts and payroll, and the Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics for the industry continuation benchmark. Where a page shows a sector survival curve instead, that series comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
BusinessNES performs the arithmetic on those published figures and nothing else. Receipts are divided by establishments, and payroll by receipts. The age-five establishment count is divided by the age-zero establishment count for the same four-digit industry group, then repeated across five age-zero cohorts to give a reference and a range. This category's share of its industry group comes from the same published tables. Every one of them is recomputed from the sealed source files at each release and blocks publication if it does not match. Results are rounded and marked approximate. The reference year is 2022 for revenue and payroll; treat every figure as a baseline, not today's market.
Category scope matters: these figures cover Pet Care (except Veterinary) Services (NAICS 812910), employer establishments only. The scope note near the top of the page explains what that includes and excludes for this business type. For pet care, note that veterinary services are a separate Census category and that grooming alone is narrower than this code.
Full method, sources and limits
Spotted an error? Corrections are logged and published. Business data and benchmarks by BusinessNES.