BLS has no pet-sitter wage line: sitters are counted inside animal caretakers (includes groomers), an occupation whose median pay was $17.00 an hour ($35,360 a year) in May 2025 — employees only.
Company sitters are employees paid on the employer's plan; independent and app-based sitters set their own rates.
What you keep depends on the services you sell, the fees your platform takes, and your costs.
Company sitters vs self-employed sitters
Pet sitting pays two very different ways, and the side you sit on decides which rules apply to you.
An employee of a pet-sitting company is paid on the company's plan.
A self-employed sitter — booking clients directly or through an app — sets a rate for the work and keeps what is left after fees and costs.
Employee sitters have a floor under their pay.
The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and many states set higher minimums of their own — employers must meet both.
New York's minimum, for example, is $17.00 an hour in New York City, Long Island and Westchester for 2026, and $16.00 in the rest of the state — a rule for employees, not independent contractors.
The federal pay figure behind sitter searches describes employees only.
BLS's OEWS program counted 266,910 wage-and-salary jobs in animal caretakers (includes groomers) in May 2025, with a median of $17.00 an hour ($35,360 a year) — self-employed sitters and platform gig earnings are not in that count.
The spread inside the employee data is wide.
The middle half of animal caretakers (includes groomers) made between $29,820 and $40,050 a year, the lowest-paid 10% under $27,250, and the top 10% over $50,060.
None of it is a sitter wage: the occupation mixes groomers, kennel staff, daycare workers, walkers and sitters in one line.
For the full table, including state figures, see the pet sitter salary page.
Self-employed sitters price their own work instead.
Wag! gives caregivers a Dynamic Pricing tool to set their own rates, and on Rover the rate you set is the booking price its service fee comes off.
Self-employment is common in this corner of the labor market: BLS's Employment Projections program, which unlike OEWS counts the self-employed, put 24.8% of all animal caretakers in that category in 2025 — an occupation-wide share, not a sitter-only figure.
However you are engaged, the work bends around clients' lives.
BLS notes that part-time work is common for animal caretakers and that schedules may include evenings, weekends and holidays.
If you are still weighing whether the work fits you at all, the pet sitter career guide covers the job itself, the settings and how sitters land their first clients.
What each service is worth to the sitter
Independent sitters price the job, not the hour: a drop-in visit, a dog walk, an overnight and a house sit each carry their own rate, and your service menu is effectively your income model.
Because the rate is yours to set, you can price a peak holiday week differently from an ordinary Tuesday.
The economics differ by unit.
A drop-in is the shortest job — feeding, fresh water, a potty break, play — so what it pays per hour of your time depends on how close your bookings sit to each other, because the drive between visits earns nothing on its own.
Walks and long visits occupy more of the day.
Overnights and house sits sell the night rather than the hour.
No primary source publishes a typical per-visit or per-night rate, and neither major platform publishes typical earnings for sitters, because both put the rate in the sitter's hands.
That is also why an "average sitter earnings" figure quoted online deserves skepticism unless it names its source — an unverifiable number is an anecdote, not a market figure.
Illustrative arithmetic, not a rate: the same 30-minute drop-in booked four times in a tight cluster turns two hours on the clock into four paid visits, while the same four visits spread across town turn it into one paid visit and a lot of driving.
Move the rate, the spacing or the platform fee, and the answer moves with it.
Your effective hourly rate comes from booking density as much as from your price list.
Sitters employed by a sitting company are paid on the company's plan instead, so the service menu shapes their paycheck differently: the employer's rates apply, not yours.
Overnights and house sitting: pricing the night
Overnight and house-sitting work sells presence.
The client is paying for the evening routine, the night and the morning — coverage a short drop-in cannot provide — and the nightly rate is yours to set, like every other rate on the platforms.
Judge an overnight by the hours it occupies, not by the size of the number.
Illustrative arithmetic: a flat nightly fee that books you from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. covers a 12-hour window.
The same fee is worth far more per hour if the arrangement lets you sleep through part of it than if you are on duty the whole night.
Which of those two describes a given booking is worth settling with the client before you accept, and it is why two sitters can quote different nightly rates for the same job and both be right.
How a multi-pet overnight is priced depends on the platform and your rate settings — check before you quote — and stacking a daytime walk route around it turns a thin night into a fuller day.
Overnight work also follows the client's calendar, and clients travel on holidays.
BLS notes that animal caretaker schedules may include evenings, weekends and holidays — for a sitter, those are the dates to price deliberately rather than give away.
App-based sitting vs fully independent
The apps sell demand and infrastructure, and they take a fee for both.
Under the standard US terms Rover described as of October 2026, Rover applies a 20% service fee per booking, so you keep 80% of what the client pays.
California runs the other way: the rate you enter is your take-home, and the client's price carries a 25% Rover marketplace fee plus an 11% booking fee on top of it.
Rover is also piloting tiered fees in the Seattle/Tacoma/Bellevue, Chicago/Naperville/Elgin and Dallas/Fort Worth/Arlington areas.
In the pilot, the fee on bookings with a given client depends on that client's booking history with you: 30% up to $599, 15% from $600 to $1,199, and 10% at $1,200 or more.
Participation is automatic in those areas, training and grooming bookings are excluded, and this was the pilot structure as of October 2026 — re-check it on Rover before you set rates.
Wag! prices differently.
You set your rate with its Dynamic Pricing tool, and Wag! says to estimate what a pet parent pays, multiply your rate by 1.67 — before tips, booking fees and taxes.
Payouts run weekly through Stripe — processed Wednesday, paid Friday for a Tuesday-through-Monday cycle — with an instant-payout option for an extra fee.
A Pro upgrade on Wag! carries a one-time fee of $149 for new caregivers — Express Onboarding included — or $129 for previously approved ones.
Wag! says Pro caregivers see higher average service pricing — the platform's own claim about its own marketplace, not an independent measurement.
Going fully independent keeps the whole rate and hands you the jobs the app would have supplied: finding clients, taking payments, scheduling, collecting references.
The trade is the platform's cut for your own marketing and admin time — it pays off as repeat clients and referrals accumulate, and it costs evenings when bookings are thin.
One more difference is shape, not pay: Wag! classifies caregivers as independent contractors responsible for their own taxes.
A 1099 form or a contractor label does not by itself make a worker an independent contractor under the FLSA — what the worker is called is not what decides status.
Independent contractors are also not covered by the FLSA's minimum wage and overtime protections; only employees are.
DOL's Wage and Hour Division or your state labor agency can sort out which applies to your arrangement.
Costs, insurance and taxes: what comes out of a sitting income
A posted rate is gross, not income.
Platform fees come off first — 20% on a standard Rover booking, for example — and after that sit the costs of running your route: transportation between visits, supplies, insurance and bonding if you carry them, and your own taxes.
Self-employed sitters generally owe self-employment tax: 15.3% of net self-employment earnings, made up of 12.4% for Social Security and 2.9% for Medicare, generally once net earnings reach $400.
Half of it is deductible when you figure adjusted gross income, and the IRS counts independent contractors and sole proprietors as self-employed for the tax.
Tax paperwork follows volume.
Wag!'s tax page says that for tax year 2025 it issues a Form 1099-K only when a caregiver's payments through Stripe exceed $20,000 and 200 transactions — and that taxes are owed on the income whether or not a form arrives.
Tips have their own federal rule now.
For tax years 2025 through 2028, employees and self-employed people in occupations that customarily receive tips may deduct up to $25,000 a year of qualified tips, whether or not they itemize.
The deduction phases out above $150,000 in modified adjusted gross income ($300,000 for joint filers), and married filers must file jointly to claim it.
Treasury's list of qualifying occupations includes "Pet and show animal caretakers," with pet sitter among its examples.
Social Security and Medicare tax still applies to tips.
Insurance is a cost to research, not a line to guess.
This page publishes no policy prices — our research found none to cite — so a licensed insurance agent in your state is the one who can quote what a pet-sitting liability policy costs and covers where you sit.
Career information, not legal, tax or insurance advice: fee structures, tax rules and platform policies change, so confirm the current numbers with the IRS, DOL's Wage and Hour Division, your state labor agency, the platform, or a licensed insurance professional before you act on them.
Tax rules move; confirm yours