Our research found no verified standard commission percentage for dog groomers: no primary source stands behind the splits that circulate online.
What exists are employer-published figures, each scoped to its own plan.
PetSmart advertises a guaranteed hourly wage plus up to 55% commission; Petco's grooming careers page publishes none.
How commission is calculated — its base, tiers, the minimum-wage floor and no-shows — matters as much as the number.
What is a typical groomer commission?
A search for one commission number returns a crowd of figures.
Our research could not trace any of them to a primary source: no government series, industry survey or credentialing body we read publishes a commission percentage for dog groomers.
A split quoted in a forum, a school advertisement or a trade article stays an unverified number until an employer posts it itself.
What can be verified is employer-published, scoped to each employer's own plan and dated.
PetSmart's careers page says pet stylists earn a guaranteed hourly wage and up to 55% commission, as of October 2026.
The "up to" matters — the percentage is set by job code, and PetSmart does not publish the number for each level.
Petco's grooming careers page describes groomer pay as "hourly pay plus incentives" and does not publish a commission percentage on that page.
Independent salons set their own plans, and our research found no published commission figures from them.
Franchisees do post: one Pet Supplies Plus franchise in Oro Valley, Arizona, advertised its October 2026 groomer job at $55,000-$90,000 a year — a guaranteed base hourly rate plus commission, with credit-card tipping.
That franchisee's claim that its top performers earn $80,000-$100,000 is its own claim about its own store, not a brand-wide or industry figure.
Commission is one of several groomer pay structures — the companion page runs the full menu, hourly and per-dog plans included.
What is the commission calculated on?
A commission percentage is always a percentage of something, and the plan defines what.
PetSmart's postings define the base precisely: groom pay is a designated percentage of the groomer's grooming sales, based on the job code, and pay for the position is the greater of the base hourly rate or groom pay, never less than the local minimum wage.
The word "sales" is where plans differ, so pin it down before you sign.
Is the percentage applied to the full client ticket or only the grooming services on it?
Do add-ons such as nails or de-shedding treatments count?
Do retail products count?
Are discounts and promotional prices subtracted from the base first?
Ask the same questions about money that sits next to the sale.
Whether tips figure into a commission base is a plan term, not a given — tips are customer money on top of the ticket, separate from what the salon itself pays you.
The percentage also says nothing about your costs.
Petco postings say grooming supplies and equipment are provided, while two Pet Supplies Plus franchisees' postings, in Beltsville, Maryland and Oro Valley, Arizona, require groomers to provide their own tools — clippers, blades, shears.
Two plans can sound identical and leave very different money in your pocket at the end of a week.
How do tiered commissions work?
A tiered commission moves your percentage as your sales move.
The plan sets a sales threshold, pays one percentage below it and a higher percentage above it; a quota-bonus plan instead pays a bonus once a sales quota is hit, leaving the percentage where it was.
Draws are the other lever.
The federal pay-methods regulation, 29 CFR 779.413, recognizes straight commission without advances and straight commission with advances, guarantees or draws — commission money paid ahead of the sales that earn it, then reconciled against what you produce.
The regulation's full list — straight salary or hourly pay, salary plus commission, quota bonus, straight commission without advances, and straight commission with advances, guarantees or draws — is a useful checklist for reading any plan put in front of you.
Published ceilings need the same close reading.
PetSmart's postings tie groom pay to the job code, its careers page advertises up to 55% commission, and neither publishes the percentage for each job code or level.
When a posting quotes one number, ask which level it applies to and what moves you up.
Do commission groomers still get minimum wage?
Yes — commission does not switch off the wage floor.
The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, effective July 24, 2009.
Where a state sets a higher minimum, an employer must meet both.
PetSmart's postings state the top-up in their own terms: pay for the groomer position is never less than the local minimum wage.
Commission also counts when the law does its math.
Under the FLSA, commissions are payments for hours worked and must be included in the regular rate — whether commission is your only pay or sits on top of a guaranteed hourly rate.
When commission is paid weekly, the regular rate is total weekly earnings divided by total hours worked, and overtime owed is an extra half of that rate for each hour over 40.
The overtime exemption is where commission plans get scrutinized.
FLSA section 7(i) lets a retail or service establishment skip overtime for a commissioned employee only when all three conditions hold.
The business must be a retail or service establishment.
The employee's regular rate must exceed 1.5 times the applicable minimum wage in every week overtime is owed.
And more than half of the employee's earnings over a representative period of one month to one year must be commissions.
The establishment test has its own definition: a retail or service establishment is one where 75 percent of annual dollar volume of sales of goods or services is not for resale and is recognized as retail sales or services in the particular industry.
The regulation's illustrative list runs to grocery stores, restaurants, hotels and barber shops — it does not name pet grooming salons, so whether a particular salon qualifies is a fact-specific question.
DOL's clarifications finish the test.
If you are paid entirely by commission, by draw plus commission, or your commissions always exceed the salary or hourly portion, the more-than-half condition is met.
And tips paid by customers may never be counted as commissions for this exemption, however large a share of your income they become.
No automatic exemption for salons
What happens to pay on no-shows and cancellations?
A canceled appointment is lost sales, and under straight commission that means lost commission for the hours it leaves empty.
How a salon actually handles it — full commission credit, partial credit, draw coverage or none — is a plan term, and our research found no industry data on how groomer employers handle no-shows and cancellations.
The structure you sign shapes the exposure.
Under a greater-of plan like the one in PetSmart's postings, the base hourly rate sits underneath groom pay, so a thin book still pays the posted base rate.
Under straight commission without a draw, a thin book earns little commission, though the minimum-wage floor above still applies to the hours you work.
A draw changes the picture again.
It advances commission money ahead of the sales that earn it, so it pays through cancellations and is reconciled later — and the advance's terms are entirely the plan's to set.
Before you accept a commission job, get the missed-appointment terms in writing.
- Whether a canceled or no-show appointment earns anything under the plan, and how it is recorded on your pay record.
- What the plan pays when a client reschedules onto a different day or a different groomer.
- Whether a draw exists, how it is calculated, and how it is reconciled against commission actually earned.
- How the salon fills the gap — rebooking calls, walk-ins or downtime tasks — while you are on the clock.
- What the posted base rate is, whether it is guaranteed every pay period, and how it compares with the local minimum wage.
Commission at big-box vs independent salons
The big boxes publish their models, which makes them the reference point for what a posted commission looks like — and PetSmart and Petco run theirs differently.
PetSmart runs commission explicitly: a guaranteed hourly wage plus up to 55% commission, with groom pay calculated as a designated percentage of grooming sales by job code and pay set at the greater of the two.
Petco's posted model reads differently.
Its grooming careers page pays groomers "hourly pay plus incentives" and Pet Stylist Pro an "hourly pay plus higher incentive package," and that page publishes no commission percentage.
Some Petco groomer and salon-manager postings in September and October 2026 added fixed bonuses — a $500 sign-on bonus paid after 90 days and a $1,000 retention bonus after one year — and Petco groomer postings say grooming supplies and equipment are provided.
Franchise salons are a middle case: the brand's name on the door, the franchisee's pay plan inside.
Pet Supplies Plus grooming jobs are posted by individual franchise owners, and the postings state that each franchised store alone sets compensation, benefits and other terms.
One Arizona franchisee's October 2026 posting guaranteed a base hourly rate plus commission at $55,000-$90,000 a year and required groomers to supply their own tools; Scenthound franchise postings the same month were hourly-plus-tips rather than commission.
Independent salons are the quiet corner: our research found no published commission figures from them, so evaluating one means asking.
The questions in this page apply at every counter — the percentage, its base, the tiers, the floor underneath and the no-show terms — plus the employer's own benefits and tool policy.
Weighing the settings themselves is a career question as much as a pay one; the dog groomer career guide covers the role, the settings and the routes in.
Career information, not legal, tax or insurance advice. Commission plans, overtime treatment and pay floors are fact-specific: confirm how your plan works with DOL's Wage and Hour Division or your state labor agency.