How to hire a cat groomer: what to require, what to pay, where to find candidates and how to screen

Start with the decision that shapes the whole hire: whether you need a groomer who grooms only cats, or a dog groomer who takes cats too. A cat-only salon needs the first. A full-service salon testing a cat day, or adding cats to a quiet room, may only need the second.

Write down what the person walks into before you write the ad:

• The cat workload. How many cat appointments you book now, and how many you want to book. A share small enough today may not justify a dedicated specialist yet; a cat-only salon is built on one.
• The service menu. Bath and dry, comb-outs, shavedowns and comb cuts, nails, and sanitary trims as your policy allows. Your menu is the skill list, and the ad should say it.
• The room and the schedule. Whether cats and dogs share airspace is your operations call — separate rooms, separate days, quieter equipment. Whatever you choose, put it in the ad, because the handling environment is part of the job.
• The reporting line. In a one-groomer salon the hire answers to you; in a larger salon, to your lead groomer or manager. Name it now so the interview can test for it.

The in-house training route exists at scale. PetSmart says its Pet Stylists can be trained in cat grooming in-house through a 3-day Academy, and that stylists are provided with cat-specific grooming and safety equipment. That is one large employer's program rather than a template to copy, but it shows a dog groomer can be brought up on cats.

Our career guide on what a cat groomer does covers the job from the groomer's side. This page stays on yours. If you are still shaping the business itself — a cat-only salon, or grooming added to a clinic or daycare — the hiring for grooming and pet care businesses hub indexes the operator guides, from licensing to startup.

Deal with the license question first: in our state-by-state research, no state licenses individual groomers by exam — that is our research finding, not a blanket legal statement — so there is no state license to ask for in the ad. The AKC and NDGAA themselves describe dog grooming as an unregulated profession, with no license, no national exam and no unified training standard. Colorado's PACFA rules do offer an optional "Independent contractor pet groomer" license category — the one individual license category our research found — and it is a facility-act category with a fee, not an exam.

What you require instead is demonstrated feline skill: cats handled recently, at volume, through the coats you actually book. Ask candidates to walk you through the cats they groomed most recently — coat conditions, shavedowns, comb cuts, seniors — and to show before-and-after photos of their own work. Vague answers about years around animals carry less weight than specifics.

The certifications worth knowing are voluntary credentials from private bodies — exams and memberships, not licenses. Ask for them as preferences, or make one your salon's own requirement:

• NCGI's Certified Feline Master Groomer (CFMG). Issued by the National Cat Groomers Institute: candidates need an active NCGI membership and a minimum 85% score on each of nine exams — four written and five practical. The written exams run under an approved proctor, and the practicals are in person with an NCGI Certifier, not over Zoom. NCGI recommends at least 3-5 days of hands-on training with a Certifier before attempting the practicals, which cover a shorthaired full coat groom, a longhaired full coat groom and a comb cut.
• IPG's cat certification tracks. International Professional Groomers runs its cat certification with the Professional Cat Groomers Association, in three tracks taken in order: Certified Cat Groomer (CCG), Advanced Cat Groomer (ACG) and International Certified Master Cat Groomer (ICMCG). Passing takes 86% on practicals and 90% on written tests. If you sponsor a track, budget carefully. IPG's own page lists the Track 1 CCG package with membership at $425 and the Track 3 Master Cat Groomer package at $495, while giving different figures elsewhere on the same page. Confirm current pricing with IPG before you commit.
• Fear Free. The Fear Free Groomer Certification Program is designed for salon and mobile groomers and is approved for 5 hours of PACCC continuing-education credit. It is not cat-specific — that is what the NCGI and IPG paths are for — but it pairs with either.

Sponsoring a credential is also a retention lever, and NCGI publishes the budget inputs, as of October 2026: $85 annual membership, $65 per exam ($585 for all nine), $45 written-exam retakes, and an optional $1,197 Complete Cat Groomer Training Syllabus. Certifier private instruction averages $500-$1,000 per day, and the CFMG title renews at $125 a year.

Whatever you require, set the sedation line in writing before the first cat reaches the table. The American Veterinary Dental College states that prescribing or administering anesthetic or sedative drugs by a non-veterinarian can be very dangerous and is illegal, and Colorado's PACFA rules prohibit grooming facilities from giving any drug designed to calm an animal during grooming. Your policy should match: a cat too stressed to groom is stopped, rebooked, and referred back to the owner and their veterinarian — never sedated by your staff.

Your business's own operating obligations are separate from anything you require of the hire: facility, kennel and local rules depend on your state and city. Our state-by-state pet business license guide covers what pet businesses file, and the agencies it names are the ones to confirm with.

BLS publishes no groomer-only wage line, so anchor to the occupation that holds cat groomers. BLS counts groomers of all species inside animal caretakers (SOC 39-2021). In the May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, animal caretakers (includes groomers) earned a national median of $17.00 an hour ($35,360 a year), across 266,910 wage-and-salary jobs. The 25th-to-75th percentile band ran $29,820-$40,050 a year, with the lowest-paid 10% under $13.10 an hour and the top 10% over $24.07. That count is payroll workers only: self-employed groomers and owner-operators are not in it, and it covers all animal caretakers in all industries, not cat groomers alone.

Structure comes before number. The three working shapes are hourly pay, commission on services, and a hybrid — an hourly base that floors slow weeks, with commission on top for productive ones. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, and where your state sets a higher minimum, the higher rate applies.

One large employer shows the hybrid's mechanics, as that employer states them: PetSmart postings describe groomer pay as the greater of the base pay rate or "groom pay," a designated percentage of the associate's grooming sales, never less than local minimum wage. Its careers page adds that stylists earn a guaranteed hourly wage and up to 55% commission, plus benefits and discounts. "Up to 55%" is PetSmart's stated ceiling, not a typical rate, and PetSmart's terms are not a market benchmark for your salon.

Our research found no primary source for a standard commission split, and we publish none. Set yours from your bookings, your service mix and your market.

Commission does not switch off the wage laws by itself. The FLSA's section 7(i) commission overtime exemption has three conditions, and all three must hold. The employer must be a retail or service establishment, the employee's regular rate must exceed 1.5 times the applicable minimum wage in weeks with overtime, and more than half of earnings over a representative period of at least one month must be commissions. If any one fails, overtime is owed for hours over 40 — and our research found no DOL regulation naming grooming salons as retail or service establishments, so the first condition is yours to confirm with the Wage and Hour Division or counsel.

Two mechanics catch salons out: customer tips never count toward the commission share for the 7(i) test, and neither does an hourly or daily base rate. Commissions belong in the regular rate used to calculate overtime, and the time records behind the test need to exist in writing.

If pay questions grow past this section, our guide to commission vs hourly pay plans covers the structures in depth. The labelled BLS range in the stats bar above is the anchor to budget against; your bookings and your market set the rest.

Cast a wide net: work three pools, each with its own pitch. The first pool is credentialed cat specialists, and the credential world tells you where they train. NCGI's certification page notes hands-on 2-week cat grooming schools using NCGI materials in Iowa, Arizona and Saskatchewan. A candidate carrying a CFMG has passed written exams under an approved proctor and practicals in person with an NCGI Certifier, so that credential doubles as your first screen.

The second pool is big-box stylists. In-house cat training exists in that world — PetSmart's 3-day Academy is one employer's version — but ask each candidate what they were actually trained on. A big-box background can bring chain-standard hygiene and safety routines; you supply the quieter room and the pay upside.

The third pool is dog groomers willing to add cats: you budget the training time, and the PetSmart academy in the first section shows one employer offers that route.

BLS's Employment Projections give the market backdrop for all three, labelled as the whole occupation. Animal caretaker jobs (self-employed included) are projected to grow 12.1% from 365,300 in 2025 to 409,400 by 2035, with 62,800 openings a year projected over 2025-35 (the BLS table lists 62.8 thousand). Those openings are for the occupation as a whole, so read the figure as demand for the trade, not for cat specialists.

Post where those pools actually look, and make the ad answer the three questions a cat-focused candidate has to judge it by: the share of the workload that is cats, the handling environment, and who pays for the cat-specific equipment. Our guide to where to post the job covers the channels, and you can post a cat groomer opening to the board's grooming and pet care audience directly.

Two posting-law notes before you publish. 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 employers with 15 or more employees to include the wage scale or salary range — or the fixed wage — plus a general description of benefits in every posting. Those two are the states our research verified; other states and cities set their own posting rules — check yours before you publish a range.

Run the screen in four passes: interview, handling scenarios, portfolio, then a supervised trial. For a cat groomer, the second pass decides the hire.

The handling scenarios are where feline skill shows or does not. Ask how the candidate works with a cat that fights the table. The benchmark to listen for comes from the 2022 AAFP/ISFM Cat Friendly Veterinary Interaction Guidelines: scruffing is no longer recommended for cats at any life stage, and it is a mistaken premise that scruffing makes cats easier to work with. Written for veterinary teams, those guidelines are the leading feline-handling standard and a fair benchmark for a hire. A candidate whose only answer is to scruff harder is a training project, not a finished hire; a strong answer describes restraint alternatives, breaks, and letting the cat set the pace. Our cat handling guide for groomers covers the techniques behind those answers.

Ask what the candidate does when a cat is too stressed to finish. Listen for: stop the groom, document what happened, tell the owner what was noticed, and refer any coat or skin finding to the owner's veterinarian. Any answer that ends in a sedative disqualifies itself — sedation sits outside a groomer's scope, as the requirements section above covers.

Test species-specific product knowledge with one question: the client's cat has fleas — what do you reach for? The EPA is blunt about the right answer's shape: flea and tick products go only on the species and size or weight on the label, dog products never go on cats, and kittens are treated only when the label allows it. Label discipline is the difference between a groomer and a poisoning incident.

Check the portfolio against the services you sell: comb cuts, shavedowns, longhair comb-outs, before-and-after pairs on cats the candidate actually groomed. If you run a practical test, the EEOC requires that a test you mandate be necessary and related to the job. It must also not screen out people in a protected group or applicants 40 and over, unless the exclusion rests on a reasonable factor other than age.

Finish with a supervised trial groom on a calm cat — your own, or a friend-of-the-business client — with you or your lead groomer in the room. Pay the trial time. Our research found no DOL guidance on trial grooms specifically. DOL's primary-beneficiary test for unpaid interns weighs whether the work complements or displaces paid employees, and a trial groom on a paying client's animal looks like displacement. Treat that as a risk rather than a ruling, and confirm the treatment with the Wage and Hour Division.

Onboarding is where your handling standards either transfer or do not, so make the first week paperwork with teeth:

• Your handling policy, in writing. Low-stress handling as the standard, when to stop a groom, the no-sedation line, and what gets documented and said to the owner.
• The safety talk. CDC's prevention advice for the scratches and bites the job invites: avoid cat scratches, bites and licks — especially from kittens or strays — wash hands promptly after handling cats, and clean scratch wounds with soap and water. Cat scratch disease is a bacterial infection people usually get after being scratched by cats, especially kittens, and people with weakened immune systems face higher risk of severe disease. Write the reporting steps into your incident log.
• The cat kit. If your tables, tubs and dryers were bought for dogs, walk the hire through what is different for cats and what you are adding. The equipment gap is yours to close, and closing it visibly is part of the pitch to cat-focused candidates.
• Product rules. The EPA label discipline from the screening section, written into your product policy: species-correct flea products only, matched to the label's species and weight, kittens only when the label allows.
• The emergency sheet. The client's vet, the nearest emergency vet, the ASPCA Animal Poison Control line — (888) 426-4435, available around the clock, with a consultation fee that may apply — and the owner's contact, in the grooming room rather than a drawer.

Retention runs on the same levers as other salon hires — schedule control, pay that tracks productivity, visible skill growth — with two cat-specific twists. Sponsor the credential path, using the NCGI and IPG budgets in the requirements section as your inputs, and protect quiet cat blocks on the calendar so the work stays doable. Our guide to retaining groomers covers the full playbook.

Employer information, not legal, tax, insurance or veterinary advice. Confirm licensing questions with your state agriculture department or the agency your state names, wage and overtime questions with the DOL's Wage and Hour Division or your state labor agency, and interview and testing practices with counsel.