How much does dog daycare cost in the UK? The Genera price index 2026

London stands apart: its middle price is £23.00 a day above the rest of England, which is the gap in rent and wages showing up on the price list. The North and the Midlands sit close together around £27 to £30.

The figure most often quoted for dog daycare comes from Rover's city guides, which average the rates of sitters and daycares listed on Rover. Many Rover sitters look after dogs in their own homes. A licensed daycare pays for premises, a council licence and a staff ratio set by law, and its prices show it.

We also read the published prices of 194 businesses in England that sell dog day care on their own website but that we could not match to any council's licence register. Their middle full-day price is £30, against £32.50 for the licensed daycares above; the middle half charge £25 to £35.

Most daycares charge between £25 and £40. The few above £60 are in London, or sell a premium day with collection and extras built in. The few below £25 tend to be small home-based daycares or kennels with a day service.

Most published prices are for the day only. Collection and drop-off are usually extra, commonly £3 to £10 each way, and some daycares only collect within a few miles. Of the 18 daycares whose day rate included collection, the middle price was £40.50, against £32 for those without.

Many daycares charge less per day for regular weekly days than for a one-off, and some sell only memberships or day packs. Where a daycare had no single-day price we recorded its rate for one regular day a week. A daycare over the £90,000 VAT threshold has to add 20%, so a few quote prices before VAT; we recorded the price as shown.

The prices come from three reads of daycares' own websites. On 12 October 2026 we drew up to 45 licensed daycares from each region of the council registers and read their sites (190 prices). Between 26 September and 10 October our postcard research recorded the prices of the daycares it wrote to (18). And in late September it saved the price lines from about a thousand daycare websites; where the wording made one dog's full-day rate clear, we took it word for word (33 more licensed daycares). We recorded the published full-day price for one dog, the page it was on and the words used. 337 daycares were checked in the sweep; most of the rest publish no price, and some listed websites belonged to a different business or no longer worked. We left out 14 prices that were clearly out of date, were for a short session rather than a full day, or could not be told apart from a boarding rate, and counted each business once.

Where two reads found the same daycare we kept the most recent. Duncan's Dog Co., which publishes this index with Genera, is included at its own published price. The index covers daycares that publish a price, which may not be typical of those that do not. Regions with fewer daycares in the sample, such as the North East, carry more uncertainty. If you run a daycare and your price is out of date in our records, email info@generasoftware.com. You are welcome to quote any figure with a link to this page.