Hiring dog groomers and pet care staff decides how fast a grooming salon, daycare or boarding kennel can grow. BLS projects employment of animal care and service workers to grow 11 percent from 2025 to 2035, with about 69,400 openings a year — many of them replacements for workers who leave. This hub covers the employer decisions that follow: which roles to hire, where to find and screen candidates, how to structure pay under the FLSA, and how to train and keep them. It closes with the owner side: starting, licensing, insuring and growing the business.
Which roles grooming and pet care businesses hire
Grooming and pet care businesses hire from two role families.
The grooming side runs from bathers (bathing and brushing) through grooming assistants and apprentices, dog groomers, cat groomers, mobile groomers and show or creative groomers.
Over the grooming side sits a grooming salon manager, with a pet salon receptionist at the front desk.
The pet care side covers kennel attendants, dog daycare attendants, pet resort managers, dog trainers, dog walkers, pet sitters, shelter animal care attendants and pet care associates.
The mix you need depends on the setting.
BLS notes that groomers may work in or operate a grooming salon, kennel, veterinary clinic, pet supply store or mobile grooming service.
Think about what each setting runs on: a mobile operation needs routes, driving and van care covered, a daycare needs playgroup supervision, and a boarding kennel needs cleaning, feeding and overnight shifts.
Scheduling shapes the team too.
BLS says part-time work is common for animal caretakers, that schedules may include evenings, weekends and holidays, and that facilities operating 24 hours a day — kennels among them — need care around the clock.
A by-appointment salon and an overnight boarding kennel are therefore very different staffing problems.
Candidates see these roles from the other side.
The dog groomer job listings show what the market advertises against, which is worth a look before you write your own ad.
Where to find and how to screen candidates
Start with the ad, because the ad is evidence.
Under the ADA, a written job description prepared before advertising or interviewing counts as evidence of the job's essential functions — so list the physical and handling duties honestly, because those are the ones an accommodation question gets measured against.
Pay disclosure in ads is state law where it exists.
Colorado's Equal Pay for Equal Work Act requires employers to disclose compensation, benefits and how to apply in job postings, and bars asking applicants about pay history.
Washington requires the wage scale or salary range and a description of benefits in every posting, but only for employers with 15 or more employees.
Check your state labor agency's current rules before you post.
Screen on the work.
A skills test on the grooming you actually book tells you more than a portfolio, and a paid trial shift beats an unpaid one.
Our research found no DOL rule blessing a short unpaid working interview: for unpaid interns and trainees at for-profit employers, DOL applies the courts' seven-factor primary beneficiary test.
One factor is whether the person's work complements paid employees or displaces them — and a trial groom on a paying client's dog looks like displacing paid work.
Treat an unpaid trial as a wage risk and pay candidates for trial time.
Background checks run on the Fair Credit Reporting Act's script.
Before you order a report from a screening company, the FCRA requires a written notice that stands alone — not a line inside the application — and the applicant's written permission.
If you decline someone based on the report, you owe a pre-adverse action notice with a copy of the report and the summary of FCRA rights first, then an adverse action notice after you act.
The FTC also notes that state law may restrict employers' use of consumer reports, so check yours.
Credential requirements are mostly your call, not the law's.
BLS notes certifications are not required for animal care and service workers, so write any credential you want as "preferred" or as your salon's own requirement.
Where a rule does bite, it is usually local.
New York City, for example, requires whoever supervises a business that boards or grooms small animals to hold a certificate showing completion of a Department of Health-acceptable course in the care and handling of animals, displayed on the premises.
Check your city and county before you post.
Once you have picked someone, the federal onboarding basics apply.
Report the new hire to the state where they work within 20 days of hire, and sooner where your state requires it.
E-Verify is a free federal service that checks an employee's information against government records; whether you must use it depends on state law and federal contracts, so confirm what applies to you before you build it into your process.
Pay plans that attract groomers
Grooming pay is a set of structures rather than one formula.
DOL's regulation describing retail pay methods lists straight salary or hourly pay, salary plus commission, quota bonuses, straight commission, and straight commission with an advance, guarantee or draw.
A salon can adapt those to the trade: an hourly base, a per-dog commission, or a mix of both, with tips on top.
For a benchmark, use BLS — labelled.
BLS publishes no groomer-only wage: groomers are counted inside animal caretakers (SOC 39-2021), which also includes bathers, kennel and daycare attendants, pet sitters and dog walkers.
In the May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, animal caretakers (includes groomers) earned a national median of $17.00 an hour, or $35,360 a year, across 266,910 wage-and-salary jobs.
That is a payroll figure for the whole occupation, not a groomer pay rate, and it excludes the self-employed.
State and percentile tables are on the animal caretakers (includes groomers) salary page.
Whatever structure you pick, the FLSA floor travels with it.
Commission pay is lawful, but an employee must still end up with at least the minimum wage for every hour worked in the week — $7.25 an hour federally, or your state's higher rate where one applies.
Commission is also part of the regular rate used to compute overtime, whether it is paid alone or on top of a salary or hourly base.
Two rules catch salons out.
Off-the-clock finishing is work: under DOL's hours-worked rule, time an employer knows or has reason to believe a groomer is working — say, finishing a dog after clock-out — is paid time even if nobody asked for it.
And commission pay brings overtime rules of its own, which the compliance section below walks through.
Training and retention
BLS says pet groomers typically learn by working under an experienced groomer, though grooming schools are the other route.
For an employer, that is the case for training your own bathers and assistants into groomers — and for knowing the training rules before you start.
Training time is paid by default.
It need not be paid only if all four tests hold: it happens outside regular working hours, attendance is truly voluntary, it is not directly related to the employee's job, and the employee performs no productive work.
Teaching a bather to groom on salon time is directly related to the job, so it does not meet that exemption — it is paid time.
Apprenticeship is now a formal option.
DOL's Office of Apprenticeship recognized Pet Groomer as an apprenticeable occupation in January 2026.
It had earlier approved national guideline standards for Animal Groomer submitted by Groom Curriculum in August 2025 — templates an employer can adopt rather than writing standards from scratch.
Iowa Workforce Development reported in January 2026 that Groom Curriculum's program had three apprentices working for two Des Moines-area businesses by late 2025.
Registration brings federal requirements with it.
An occupation must require at least 2,000 hours of supervised on-the-job learning to be apprenticeable.
A program's term may be time-based (at least 2,000 hours), competency-based or a hybrid.
Standards must set an apprentice-to-journeyworker ratio consistent with proper supervision, training and safety, and the wage schedule must rise progressively, starting at no less than the FLSA minimum wage — a registered grooming apprentice cannot be unpaid.
Retention is the other half of the math.
BLS attributes many of the projected openings in this occupation group to replacing workers who leave it, and describes the work as physically or emotionally demanding, with injury risk when caring for animals.
Your levers follow from that: schedules that respect the evenings, weekends and holiday work the field already carries, safety practices that lower the injury risk, and a ladder people can see.
Employers publish those ladders — Petco's own grooming careers page shows a path from bather to Petco Pet Stylist, Pet Stylist Pro, Grooming Salon Manager and Grooming Mentor, in an employee testimonial.
That is one chain's page for its own titles; build the version that fits your team.
Compliance: classification, wages, safety
Overtime on commission.
Paying commission does not switch off the FLSA.
Section 7(i) lets an employer skip overtime premium pay for a commissioned employee of a retail or service establishment only when its conditions hold.
The employee's regular rate must exceed 1.5 times the applicable minimum wage in every week with overtime, and more than half of their pay over a representative period must be commissions on goods or services.
That period must run at least one month and no more than one year, and the employer selects it.
Fail a condition in any week and time-and-a-half is owed for that week's hours over 40.
The establishment test is the hard one.
The DOL regulation describing typical retail or service establishments (29 CFR 779.318) names barber shops among its examples of services for the public's comfort and convenience, and it does not mention pet grooming.
Our search of that regulation's text found no reference to pet grooming, kennels or animal services.
Whether a salon qualifies turns on its own facts, so confirm with DOL's Wage and Hour Division or counsel before treating your commission groomers as exempt.
What counts as commission.
Tips never count as commission for the 7(i) test, and neither does any portion of pay that is a periodic salary or an hourly or daily rate.
Records are part of the deal: without daily and weekly records of hours worked and earnings paid, an employer cannot substantiate the exemption.
Tips themselves.
An employer may not keep any part of employees' tips, and that includes managers and supervisors.
A manager or supervisor may keep only tips customers hand directly to them for a service they solely provide, like an owner-manager grooming a dog themself.
If you pay the full minimum wage and take no tip credit, a mandatory tip pool may include non-tipped staff such as bathers or kennel staff, but managers, supervisors and the employer may never receive from it.
State tip-pool law can be stricter.
Classification.
The paperwork does not settle status.
DOL's Fact Sheet #13 says receiving a 1099 or being paid off the books does not by itself make a worker an independent contractor.
It also says the place where the work is done, the absence of a formal employment agreement, and whether an alleged independent contractor is licensed by state or local government do not bear on whether an employment relationship exists.
Our research found no federal or state source creating a booth-rental safe harbor for pet groomers — the same factors weigh the work relationship either way.
The test WHD enforces weighs seven factors, including how integral the work is to the business and how independent the worker's operation is.
The IRS asks similar questions across behavioral control, financial control and the type of relationship, and either party can file Form SS-8 for a determination, which the IRS says may take at least six months.
Confirm with the DOL, the IRS or your state labor agency before treating bathers, sitters or walkers as contractors.
Exempt managers.
The federal salary level for the white-collar exemptions is $684 per week as of October 2026.
Salary alone does not exempt anyone — the duties tests also apply — and state thresholds can be higher.
Child labor.
Sixteen is the general federal minimum age for non-farm work.
Fourteen- and 15-year-olds may work only in the occupations DOL's rules specifically permit, and animal care, bathing or grooming dogs, and kennel work are not on that list.
Eighteen is the minimum for hazardous occupations.
State rules differ, so confirm with your state labor agency.
Safety, insurance and credits.
BLS describes animal care work as physically or emotionally demanding, with injury risk when caring for animals.
Workers' compensation is run state by state; DOL's Office of Workers' Compensation Programs publishes a directory of state agencies for checking your own state's rules.
One dated credit: the Work Opportunity Tax Credit covered only wages paid to targeted-group individuals who began work on or before December 31, 2025.
The IRS page still showed that end date in July 2026, so check its current status before counting on it for a new hire.
None of this is a ruling on your salon.
Pay plans, exemption and classification questions turn on your facts, so confirm with DOL's Wage and Hour Division, the IRS, your state labor agency or counsel before you act.
Starting, licensing, insuring and growing the business
Open the business and the first regulator you meet is your state.
In our state-by-state research, no state licenses individual groomers by exam; what applies to a salon, daycare or kennel is facility, kennel and business licensing, plus city and county permits on top.
Where states do license grooming, they license the facility or the business.
Colorado's Pet Animal Care and Facilities Act requires a pet animal facility license from the Commissioner of Agriculture for premises used for boarding, grooming, handling, selling and more.
The July 2025 version of the PACFA rule listed $400 a year for a pet grooming facility and $350 for an independent contractor pet groomer, and the legislature has since continued the Act to September 1, 2034.
Colorado's independent-contractor groomer license is a category of that facility act — a fee license that lists the facilities you work at, not a skills exam.
Connecticut licenses the business of grooming and the grooming facility through its Commissioner of Agriculture.
A grooming facility expressly includes any vehicle or trailer kept as a grooming business, so mobile units fall inside it.
The fee was $200 as of October 2026, with the license running to the second December 31 after issuance and renewed biennially.
The federal government stays mostly out of pet services: USDA APHIS states that anyone housing animals for others — boarding kennels among them — is exempt from Animal Welfare Act licensing, with exceptions for intermediate handlers and holding facilities.
Your state agriculture department, your city and your county are the regulators to ask before you sign a lease.
On money: the SBA states plainly that it does not provide grants for starting or expanding a business; its grants go to nonprofits and resource partners.
The loan side is live.
SBA microloans run up to $50,000 — the average is about $13,000 — and they flow through nonprofit intermediary lenders that make the credit decisions and set the terms.
Insurance is a purchase the business makes for itself.
SBA lists general liability, professional liability, commercial property and business owner's policies among the types to consider.
Pet-care insurers add coverage for animals in your care, custody or control — Pet Care Insurance calls that animal bailee coverage and says it is included in every one of its base policies.
Terms and prices vary by insurer and state, so confirm coverage with a licensed agent.
From there, growth is the hiring question in reverse.
Pricing that covers your costs and your market, marketing that fills the books, software that runs the schedule — and then the second groomer, the second van, the second location.
Every growth stage is a hiring decision.
Employer and owner information, not legal, tax, insurance or veterinary advice. Every rule above has an agency behind it — your state agriculture department, your city or county, DOL's Wage and Hour Division, the IRS, your state labor agency, an insurer or a CPA. Rules change, so confirm with the one that administers yours before you act.
Questions employers ask
Do I have to pay overtime to a groomer I pay on commission?
Commission pay does not switch off overtime by itself.
FLSA section 7(i) exempts a commissioned employee of a retail or service establishment only when its conditions hold.
The employee's weekly regular rate must exceed 1.5 times the applicable minimum wage, and more than half of pay over a representative period of one month to one year must come from commissions.
Tips never count as commission.
DOL's regulation describing typical retail or service establishments does not mention grooming salons, so whether yours qualifies turns on its own facts — check with the Wage and Hour Division or counsel.
Do I have to pay a candidate for a trial groom or working interview?
Treat an unpaid trial as a wage risk.
Our research found no DOL rule blessing a short unpaid working interview; for unpaid interns and trainees at for-profit employers, DOL applies the courts' seven-factor primary beneficiary test, and one factor is whether the work complements paid employees or displaces them.
A trial groom on a paying client's dog looks like displacing paid work.
Pay candidates for trial time — and pay groomers who finish a dog after clock-out, too.
Can I run an unpaid grooming apprenticeship?
A registered apprenticeship cannot be unpaid: federal standards require a progressively increasing wage schedule starting at no less than the FLSA minimum wage, a supervision ratio, and a term of at least 2,000 hours if time-based.
Outside registration, an unpaid trainee can still be an employee owed wages — DOL's Fact Sheet #13 warns trainees may be employees depending on the circumstances — and unpaid trial work carries the primary-beneficiary risk above.
DOL has recognized Pet Groomer as an apprenticeable occupation since January 2026.
How old do you have to be to work in a pet care job?
Sixteen is the general federal minimum age for non-farm work.
Fourteen- and 15-year-olds may work only in the occupations DOL's child labor rules list, and animal care, dog bathing, grooming and kennel work are not on that list; 18 is the minimum for hazardous occupations.
Whether an individual task — say, front-desk cashiering — fits a listed occupation is a fact question, and states can have their own rules, so confirm with DOL's Wage and Hour Division and your state labor agency.
Do I need a license to open a dog grooming salon?
That is state and local law, and it is mostly about the facility, not the groomer.
Colorado requires a pet animal facility license from its Commissioner of Agriculture for premises used for grooming and boarding; the July 2025 rule listed $400 a year for a grooming facility.
Connecticut licenses the business of grooming and the facility, mobile vehicles and trailers included, at $200 biennially as of October 2026.
In our state-by-state research no state licenses individual groomers by exam — check your state agriculture department and your city or county before you open.