How to hire a kennel attendant: what to require, what to pay, where to find candidates and how to screen

A kennel attendant is the person who keeps other people's pets fed, clean, exercised and safe while their owners are away, and who keeps the facility itself running between stays. BLS's Occupational Outlook Handbook describes kennel attendants as caring for pets, often overnight, in place of owners: cleaning cages and dog runs, feeding, exercising and playing with animals. Experienced attendants, in BLS's description, may also take on basic healthcare tasks and bathing.

The backbone of the job is routine. O*NET lists doing facility laundry and cleaning, organizing, maintaining and disinfecting animal quarters as a core task for animal caretakers, and feeding and watering animals according to schedules is its highest-rated core task. Just behind feeding in O*NET's ratings: providing treatment for a sick or injured animal or getting it to a veterinarian, then observing animals for illness, disease or injury.

Before you write a word of the ad, write down what the job is at your place. Your list will draw from building blocks like these:

• Feeding and watering on your schedule, with every meal logged.
• Turnout, walks and play sessions.
• Cleaning and disinfecting runs, kennels and common areas, plus the facility laundry.
• Watching every animal for changes in appetite, stool, energy or behavior, and reporting what they see to you and to the owner's veterinarian rather than diagnosing it themselves.
• Medication rounds, where your clients' pets need them, run exactly per the owner's and veterinarian's directions and your written protocol.
• Front-desk help at check-in and check-out.

That last mix is not exotic at scale: PetSmart describes its PetsHotel Specialist role as handling check-ins and check-outs, leading playtime, caring for pets and keeping the hotel clean — one large operator's version of the same bundle.

Decide the schedule the job really runs before you hire anyone. BLS notes part-time work is common for animal caretakers, that schedules can include evenings, weekends and holidays, and that facilities operating 24 hours a day — kennels among them — may need care around the clock. If you board overnight or open on Saturdays, say so now, in the posting.

The work is physical, and the posting should say so plainly: BLS notes animal care and service workers must be able to kneel, crawl and lift heavy supplies such as bags of food.

Be clear about what this role is not, too. On our board, all-day playgroup supervision is the daycare attendant role, and baths and grooms belong to bathers and groomers. If the role you actually need sits between those, the worker-side detail — duties, settings, how people get into the field — is in our career guide on what a kennel attendant does.

This page is the kennel-attendant piece of our larger guide to hiring for grooming and pet care businesses; the hiring hub holds the cross-role material on pay plans, policies and compliance.

Require less paper than you think, and more character than a resume shows. BLS says animal care and service workers typically have a high school diploma or equivalent, need no prior work experience in a related occupation, and learn the occupation on the job — with many employers preferring candidates who already have some animal experience. O*NET places the occupation in Job Zones 1 and 2, meaning very little to some preparation, with on-the-job training ranging from a few days to a year.

So treat requirements as a filter for reliability, not credentials. The things worth weighting:

• Comfort around dogs and cats, from any setting — a shelter, a farm, a busy household, a pet store.
• A work history that shows showing up: attendance-heavy jobs in housekeeping, kitchens or warehouses translate well.
• Weekend and holiday availability, stated specifically.
• Written communication, since feeding charts, medication logs and incident notes are the paper trail you will rely on.

On formal credentials, set the bar where the job needs it. Nothing in the occupation's entry profile — diploma or equivalent, experience optional, learned on the job — turns on a certificate. If you want pet first aid training, list it as preferred and fund the course after the hire rather than filtering people out at the application stage.

Licensing runs the other way — to the business, not the hire. Any kennel, boarding or facility license your state requires of a boarding operation is yours to hold as the operator, so the question for your posting is what your business carries, not what the candidate does. Rules differ by state and city, and they change.

Confirm before you post: check current kennel, boarding or facility licensing, permit and registration requirements with your state agriculture department or equivalent agency, and with your city or county.

Set the minimum age in the posting, and set it at 16 or above. Under the Department of Labor's child labor rules (29 CFR part 570), 16 is the general minimum age for non-farm work. Fourteen- and 15-year-olds may work only in specifically permitted occupations, the permitted list names no animal-care, kennel or daycare work, and anything not specifically permitted is prohibited — so this is, in effect, a 16-and-up job under federal rules. Federal rules also cap the hours 14- and 15-year-olds may work in the jobs they may hold: 3 hours on a school day and 18 in a school week. Those hours are allowed only between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. — or 9 p.m. from June 1 through Labor Day. States can be stricter still, and many require work permits. Where federal and state rules both apply, the stricter one governs. Confirm with your state labor agency.

Pay this role hourly. The shifts vary, weekends and holidays are part of the deal, and part-time schedules are common in the occupation — a structure that pays by the hour is the easiest to run fairly and the easiest for a candidate to evaluate.

For a number, the government benchmark is BLS's Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, and it measures the whole occupation rather than your role. Animal caretakers — SOC 39-2021, the group that includes groomers, bathers, kennel and daycare attendants, pet sitters and dog walkers — earned a median of $17.00 an hour nationally in May 2025, with the 10th percentile at $13.10 and the 90th at $24.07. The survey counts wage-and-salary jobs, so the self-employed are not in it. Our sources carry no kennel-attendant-only wage.

Two industry rows sharpen it. Within other personal services — the industry group that contains pet care services such as boarding and daycare, along with unrelated services — the May 2025 median for animal caretakers was $16.92 an hour. Within veterinary services it was $15.46, lower than in other personal services or in other miscellaneous retail — the group that includes pet stores alongside unrelated retailers — on the same survey.

Know who else is bidding for the same people. In 2025, according to BLS, other personal services was the largest employer group for animal caretakers, at 40 percent of jobs. Self-employment followed at 25 percent, then professional, scientific and technical services at 10 percent — veterinary clinics included. Retail trade accounted for 9 percent, and arts, entertainment and recreation 5 percent. In practice, your applicant pool also shops openings at the shelters, pet stores, daycares and clinics near you.

Mind the floors. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour; where your state's minimum is higher, you must comply with both and pay the higher rate. Check your state's current figure with your state labor agency before you print a range.

Then work the range backwards from your own numbers: what the hours you actually need cost at rates you can sustain, what comparable local postings list, and how much a person who stays a year saves you against running this hire again. Whatever you decide, post the range and the structure — hourly, plus how nights and holidays are handled. A posting that hides the pay reads like a posting with something to hide.

Our kennel attendant pay data page carries the same labelled BLS figure for animal caretakers (includes groomers) and links to the state-by-state figures for the occupation.

Candidates for this job rarely search for it by title. They are people already comfortable around animals who need the work to fit a real life, so source from the places those people already are:

• Your current team. Ask your best attendant directly — reliable people know other reliable people, and a referral bonus beats a week of sifting applications.
• Shelter and rescue volunteers, who know exactly what the job smells like.
• Students in vet-assistant, animal-science and agricultural programs at community colleges and high schools — the part-time hours fit around class schedules, and the feed times teach husbandry.
• Staff at nearby pet stores, daycares and clinics who want more hands-on animal time.
• Career changers out of housekeeping, kitchens and warehouses — the stamina and cleaning discipline transfer, and the dogs can be taught.

Post where those people look: your own careers page, the job boards grooming and pet care workers already check, school job boards, and the social accounts your facility already runs. If your area has an active shelter or training community with a jobs channel, use it too.

Write the ad around the actual job: the pay range and structure, the weekend and holiday rotation, the lifting and the laundry, what you provide, and where the role goes next. A candid ad filters better than a glossy one — the candidates you lose to honesty were leaving in month two anyway.

BLS lists compassion, customer-service skills, detail orientation, patience, physical stamina, problem-solving and reliability as the qualities that matter for animal care and service workers. Each one converts into a check you can actually run: a reference question about attendance, a scenario question about judgment, and a trial shift for stamina and cleaning standards.

Scenario questions do the heavy lifting, because the job is judgment under mild chaos. Three worth asking:

• A dog in run four has not touched breakfast. Listen for: check the chart, try the obvious, then report it up — to you, per your protocol — rather than waiting to see or swapping in a different food on their own.
• Two dogs in adjacent runs are escalating at the fence line. Listen for: separate them per your protocol and call for a second set of hands, not improvising with their own body between two stressed animals.
• An owner's medication note contradicts the label on the bottle. Listen for: stop and call — the owner, and the veterinarian if your protocol says so — rather than picking one.

Nail the schedule down in writing before any offer. Ask what the candidate can actually work — weekends, holidays, the early feed — and compare it against your rotation. An availability mismatch you discover after the start date costs you the whole hire.

If you run a working trial, pay it. Under the FLSA, employ includes to suffer or permit to work, and the hours-worked rules (29 CFR 785.11) say work not requested but suffered or permitted is still work time. Structure the trial as real, supervised work — feeding, cleaning, walking, with your protocols in hand — pay it like any shift, and keep unpaid evaluation to the interview itself.

Show the real room before the offer, not after. BLS notes animal care work can be physically or emotionally demanding and that workers risk injury when caring for animals; a candidate who has seen the noise, the laundry and the early feed is deciding with real information.

The quiet red flags: availability that shifts every time you confirm it, nothing good to say about any previous animal employer, no questions about the dogs, and visible disdain for the cleaning half of the job.

Onboarding is where a reliable hire becomes a reliable attendant. Put the written versions of everything in their hands in week one: the feeding chart, the cleaning sequence, the medication log, the incident escalation list. Pair every shift with your strongest attendant for the first stretch, and add one skill block at a time — cats after dogs, front desk after floors.

Copying the shape takes no chain-sized budget: PetSmart says PetsHotel onboarding covers operations, dog behavior, safe handling and customer service. That is the whole curriculum in four words — the building, the animals, the hands-on safety, the clients — at any facility size.

Give the job somewhere to go. PetSmart's own path runs PetsHotel Specialist to PetsHotel Lead, who holds the store keys, to PetsHotel Leader, who supervises and trains the hotel associates. Your version can be a single rung — shift lead, with the alarm code and a rate bump — and it will still answer the question every good attendant eventually asks.

Know what the big chains offer for the same role: PetSmart lists PetsHotel benefits including discounts, health programs, PTO, 50 percent off the associate's own pet's hotel or day camp stay, and additional incentives for overnight care. A small operation can match the spirit — the pet-care discount is nearly free to give, and a predictable weekend rotation is worth real money to someone with a life.

Beyond that, retention is mostly respect for the job's reality: schedules that hold, pay that lands on time, cross-training into daycare, bathing or the front desk when someone wants growth, and credit for the cleaning work nobody applauds. Every departure restarts the exact sourcing, screening and training cycle you just finished — the retention moves above are cheaper than the do-over.

This page is employer information, not legal, tax or insurance advice. Confirm licensing, wage, child labor and insurance questions with your state agriculture or labor agency, the Department of Labor, your insurer or counsel, as the question requires.