How to hire a dog walker: what to require, what to pay, where to find candidates and how to screen

A dog walker in a walking or pet sitting company works solo and unsupervised: they collect keys, enter a client's home, put a leash on someone else's dog, deliver the walk or visit inside a booked time window, and drive to the next appointment. The service list at Fetch! Pet Care, one large franchise brand, gives you the shape of the job — its walkers and sitters do pet visits, dog walks, cat playtime, puppy care, feeding and pet transport, and new walkers may start with few assignments and build a clientele.

What you need from the hire follows from that shape: reliability inside a time window, calm leash handling, judgment when something goes wrong three miles from you, and the transport and availability to actually run the route. This page is the dog walker hub in our hiring for grooming and pet care businesses resource, and it covers requirements, pay, sourcing, screening and onboarding in that order.

Know the labor pool you are hiring from, because independent work is a mainstream option in it. Walkers reach the work three ways: employed or contracted by a company, as platform contractors, or self-employed.

Company walkers hire through a local franchise owner at a brand like Fetch! Pet Care: applicants apply online and interview with that owner. On the platforms, Rover treats its sitters and walkers as independent contractors running their own small business, and its standard US fee is 20% of each booking (California and some pilot cities differ). On the self-employed side, Pet Sitters International says the majority of its members run sole-proprietor sitting businesses.

Federal data reflects the same blend. Dog walkers have no occupation code of their own: BLS counts them inside animal caretakers (includes groomers), a code that also holds groomers, bathers, kennel and daycare attendants and pet sitters. BLS's Occupational Outlook Handbook reports that 25% of all animal caretaker jobs in 2025 were held by self-employed workers — that share covers the whole occupation, not walkers alone, but it tells you self-employment is a normal path for the people you are recruiting.

The practical consequences run through the rest of this page. Your applicant pool can book their own work, so your offer — pay structure, route density, predictability — has to stand next to that option. And any federal pay figure labeled "dog walkers" is really the blended animal caretaker series, which matters when you set rates.

If you want the work itself described from the worker's side, the what a dog walker does career guide covers the job day to day. This page stays on the employer's side of the desk.

Require what the job burns through. Dog handling comes first: leash control with one dog and with a multi-dog household, reading body language early enough to change course, and staying calm when routes go sideways. The sideways moments are predictable — a loose gate, a reactive dog across the street, a second dog crowding the front door. Ask for specific examples; vague ones are information too.

Transport and availability are requirements, not preferences. A walker needs reliable transport between appointments, a driving record you are comfortable insuring, and open windows that match when your clients actually book. Working interviews and routes will test all three before you commit.

Formal credentials are thin in this field, and that is the shape of the trade. O*NET places animal caretakers — the occupation that contains walkers — in Job Zones 1 and 2, with on-the-job training ranging from a few days to one year, and 64% of surveyed respondents said a new hire needs a high school diploma or equivalent. The survey covers the whole occupation, not walkers alone. Treat that as the occupation's backdrop, then set your own bar: you can hire for dog sense and reliability and train your routes, systems and standards on top.

Licensing is not a credential you can verify here. Rover says it does not require sitters to be licensed or bonded, and points instead to local licensing laws that vary by location. What applies to a commercial walking operation is set by your state, city and county — and our research could not verify city-level permit rules for commercial dog walkers from primary sources, so ask your city or county directly before you hire.

Age and driving carry federal rules you will actually hit. The general federal minimum age for non-farm work is 16, and the occupations the Department of Labor lists for 14- and 15-year-olds include no animal care work — so walking routes are 16-and-up under federal rules, and your state may be stricter. Driving is the tighter constraint: DOL's hazardous-occupation order declares motor-vehicle driver and outside helper jobs on public roads hazardous for 16- and 17-year-olds, and 18 is the federal minimum for any occupation DOL declares hazardous. Only a narrow, incidental-and-occasional exemption is available to some 17-year-olds. A route that requires driving between clients is an adult hire in practice.

Pet CPR and first-aid training is the credential worth standardizing on: require it or fund it during onboarding, and keep the certificates on file. It is your business's own requirement — a course completion, not a license. Beyond it, weigh experience with the dogs you actually book (puppies, seniors, multi-dog homes, anxious rescues) over general animal background, and call the references who have seen the candidate alone with dogs.

A background check belongs in the requirements column too, because a walker holds your clients' keys. The procedure behind it is real — notice, authorization, adverse-action steps — and the screening section below walks through it.

You have two workable structures: hourly, where the clock covers the walks and the driving between them, and per-walk (per-visit), where pay follows the booked service. Route density should make the call for you. A packed, clustered route makes per-visit pay simple to run; scattered appointments across town make hourly the structure that reflects what the shift actually costs the walker.

The labeled benchmark is the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics series for animal caretakers (includes groomers), which is the series walkers share with groomers, bathers, kennel and daycare attendants and pet sitters. In the May 2025 release, the national median was $17.00 an hour, or $35,360 a year.

The spread around that median is wide: the 10th percentile was $13.10 an hour, the 25th $14.34, the 75th $19.26 and the 90th $24.07, across 266,910 wage-and-salary jobs nationally.

Two labels before you quote any of it. First, OEWS is a payroll count — wage-and-salary workers only, so self-employed walkers are not in the figure. Second, BLS publishes no walker-only line; it counts walkers inside animal caretakers, and its Occupational Outlook Handbook reports that 25% of all animal caretaker jobs in 2025 were self-employed. So treat the $17.00 median as a reference point for a payroll hire, not as a figure for walkers alone, and set your actual rate from your costs, your route density and your local market.

Whatever structure you pick, the wage rules do not switch off. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and where your state's minimum is higher, the higher rate is the one that applies. Under the Department of Labor's hours-worked rules, work that is not requested but suffered or permitted is still work time when the employer knows or has reason to believe it is happening. The rule's own example is a pieceworker finishing a task; a visit that runs past its window is the same kind of time to capture. If you pay per visit, track actual hours alongside visits so every workweek lands at or above the required rate, and keep the records.

If you are weighing a contractor model instead of payroll, the test is the Department of Labor's, not the paperwork's. Its Fact Sheet #13 factors weigh how much control you exercise, whether the work is integral to your business, the permanency of the relationship, the worker's investment in facilities and equipment, and their opportunity for profit and loss, among others. Classification is a fact-specific call with real consequences, so confirm your setup with DOL's Wage and Hour Division or an employment attorney before you issue any 1099s.

For the full labeled series and how to read it, the dog walker pay data page has the figures with their sources.

Start with people already around animals: kennel and daycare attendants, shelter staff and volunteers, grooming assistants and bathers who want daytime hours outside the salon, veterinary reception staff, and students of working age. Career changers are a real channel too — Pet Sitters International says many of its members came to pet care from education, business and medical or veterinary support careers.

Platform and franchise walkers are a second channel: people already walking for Rover or a company like Fetch! Pet Care know the rhythm of the work and its risks. Fetch! Pet Care, for one, gives its hires an orientation to the company's standards and books the appointments through its office.

Write the ad around the job's realities: the neighborhoods and drive time, the booked time windows, home entry and key handling, the kinds of dogs on your routes, the pay structure and range, and the background check requirement. Specifics filter applicants in a way that "dog lover wanted" never will.

Keep the ad lawful while you write it. The EEOC says a job ad that shows a preference for — or discourages — applicants by a protected trait may violate the law, and its own examples include help-wanted ads seeking "females" or "recent college graduates." The graduate example is the one that bites pet care ads: describe the work, not the person you imagine doing it. Watch the word-of-mouth trap too. The EEOC warns that referral-only recruiting can become a legal problem where a workforce that is mostly one ethnicity keeps producing new hires of that same ethnicity. Broaden the channels instead of leaning on referrals alone.

Post where candidates already look: pet-care job boards, local community groups and your own website. Your dog walker jobs listing on GroomerHires sits in front of people already browsing pet care work — post the role there and link it from your site and social accounts.

Run a consistent stack for every candidate: application, phone screen, in-person interview with a dog in the room, background check, references, then a paid trial on a supervised route. The same order every time keeps your comparisons fair and your process defensible.

Interview questions: keep them to what is essential to judge whether the person can do the job. The EEOC's guidance is explicit — pre-employment questions about race, sex, national origin, age or religion are irrelevant to qualifications and can be used as evidence of discriminatory intent, unless justified by a business purpose. Scenario questions do the work instead. What do you do when a dog plants its feet halfway through the route? A gate is locked and the client is unreachable? Two dogs in one home need opposite handling? Their answers show you the judgment you cannot train quickly.

One more EEOC rule candidates feel directly: do not ask for a photograph with the application. If you need a photo for identification, it can be obtained after a job offer is made and accepted.

The trial is where hiring a walker differs from hiring a receptionist, and it has its own line to respect. The EEOC's testing guidance requires any test to be necessary and related to the job, and to not screen out applicants in a protected group — or applicants 40 and over, unless based on a reasonable factor other than age. A short, paid trial walk — a route you supervise, your own clients' dogs, the clients told in advance — shows you leash handling, time discipline and client manners on a single short route, and paying for it keeps the answer simple.

Background checks are the requirement this role makes non-negotiable, because your walker holds keys to a client's home. If you order reports from a screening company, the Fair Credit Reporting Act sets the steps.

First comes a stand-alone written notice — not buried in the application — plus the applicant's written permission before you order the check. Before you reject based on the report, you send a pre-adverse action notice that includes the report and a copy of "A Summary of Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act." After you act, you send an adverse action notice.

Before you set the policy, check your state law: the FTC's guidance notes that states can restrict employers' use of consumer reports in hiring. The platforms give a working reference point: Rover's check runs through First Advantage and covers identity details, driving record and criminal history (not credit). Care.com's terms treat caregiver background checks as consumer reports regulated under the FCRA.

Screen the other party too — the pets. Fetch! Pet Care's model has coordinators screen each pet's background and temperament by phone and hold an in-home consultation before service starts, and a walker with safety concerns about a pet can have it reassigned. Two-sided screening is what prevents the incident that loses a client and burns out a walker at the same time.

Onboarding starts the day the offer is accepted, not the first walk. The pieces: an orientation to your service standards, your scheduling and route tools, key and access logging with sign-out and sign-back rules, the client communication format, and payment setup. Fetch! Pet Care, for reference, gives every new hire an orientation to its standards once hired. Decide what gets reported after every visit, and through which channel, before the first client.

Write the safety policy down and train it: leash on as the default, off-leash only where you explicitly allow it, weather calls, what to do about loose dogs, and an incident escalation path that reaches you in real time. One platform's policy makes a reasonable starting point — Wag! keeps services on leash or secured indoors, allows off-leash activity only when the owner formally requests it and only in the owner's fenced backyard, and does not recommend dog parks. Add the health rule in plain terms: if a pet in your care seems unwell or gets hurt, the walker calls you and the owner and follows the veterinarian's directions. Walkers spot and refer — they do not diagnose or treat, and medication decisions belong to the owner and the veterinarian.

Retention in this role is route design more than perks. Clustered neighborhoods, time windows that hold, per-visit expectations that convert honestly into hourly terms, and pay that lands when promised will keep a walker longer than a pizza party. Keep hours and pay records current — it is a wage-law habit and a trust habit at the same time, and pay surprises are the kind of thing that sends a walker back to booking their own clients. When someone does leave, ask why; the fixable answers — route design, hours, pay — are yours to change.

This page is employer information, not legal, tax or insurance advice. Wage, hour and child-labor questions belong with the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division and your state labor agency; background-check procedure with the FTC's FCRA guidance and your state law; hiring-discrimination questions with the EEOC; and business licensing with your state, city and county. For a contract or a classification decision, put it in front of an attorney.