How Much Do Pet Sitters Make? Per Day, Week and Month

Pet sitters earn by the service: a walk, a drop-in visit, a night of house sitting or a night of boarding each has its own rate, and income is that rate times the bookings you take, minus whatever the platform keeps. On SitterNation the platform keeps nothing from the sitter, so the rate you set is the rate you are paid.

Key takeaways

• There is no pet-sitter salary. Income is rate times bookings, and both are under your control.
• Boarding and house sitting are where full-time income comes from; walks and drop-ins fill the days.
• The same bookings pay 25 to 43 percent more on a 0% commission platform than on one that takes 20 to 30 percent. Over a year that is a month or more of income.
• A side gig of weekend boarding and a few weekday walks is a few hundred dollars a week; a full-time sitter hosting two or three dogs most nights earns several times that.
• You are self-employed: taxes and expenses come out of the gross. Plan for them.

How much do pet sitters make by service?

Four services account for most sitter income. Here is what SitterNation sitters currently charge for each; the figures update hourly and reflect real listed rates, not a survey.

Dog boarding, per night (the dog stays in your home):

House sitting, per night (you stay in the owner's home):

Drop-in visits, per visit (usually 30 minutes at the owner's home, often for cats):

Dog walking, per walk (30 minutes is standard):

Two things are visible in those blocks. First, the spread within each service is wide: sitters who give medication, host one dog at a time, or have years of reviews charge toward the top; new sitters start lower and move up. Second, the per-unit rate is only half the picture. A night of boarding is one booking that runs while you sleep; a walk is 30 minutes plus travel. Per hour of your attention, boarding and house sitting pay best, drop-ins next, walks last, but walks are the easiest to stack.

For comparison, Google's AI Overview for this query in October 2026 showed a national "earnings by service type" table of $20 to $35 per drop-in, $20 to $32 per walk, $75 to $150 per overnight and $35 to $65 per boarding night, attributed to Thimble, a small-business insurer. The live blocks above are what sitters near you actually list.

How much do pet sitters make per day, per week and per month?

Searches for this question split into "per day", "per week" and "per month", and the honest answer to all three is the same arithmetic: rate times bookings. What changes is which bookings you can fit.

Per day. A boarding sitter with two dogs in the house earns two nightly rates for that day. A walker doing four 30-minute walks earns four walk rates. A house sitter earns one nightly rate and can add a drop-in or a walk for another client in the afternoon. The PAA questions on this topic ("is $50 a day good for pet sitting?", "is $100 a day good for dog sitting?") are owner questions, but the sitter-side answer is that $50 is a boarding-night figure, not a walk figure, and $100 a day is what a sitter earns with two or three overnight dogs, not one.

Per week. Weekday walks and drop-ins run Monday to Friday; boarding and house sitting peak Thursday to Sunday and around holidays. A sitter who takes both has a seven-day week; a sitter who only boards has a long weekend.

Per month. Months are uneven. In the Chicago suburbs, demand for boarding and house sitting jumps around spring break, the summer travel weeks, Thanksgiving and the end of December; January and February are quiet for boarding and steady for walks. Full-time sitters plan on the year, not the month.

What SitterNation's own numbers show so far. SitterNation is new, and there are not yet enough completed bookings to publish earnings figures honestly, so here is what we can measure: the rates sitters list. As of November 2026, the median listed rate was $45 a night for boarding (69 sitter profiles, middle half $40 to $55), $60 a night for house sitting (39 profiles), $25 a drop-in visit (52 profiles), $25 a 30-minute walk (48 profiles) and $39 a day for in-home daycare (44 profiles). Boarding is the service the most sitters offer. As an estimate at those medians: a sitter who boards two dogs on twelve nights a month and walks one client every weekday would gross about 2 × 12 × $45 = $1,080 from boarding plus 22 × $25 = $550 from walks, roughly $1,630 a month, and keep all of it. Put your own rates and schedule into the pet sitter earnings calculator for your figure. We will replace these estimates with real booking figures once there are enough of them.

What does a side gig make compared with full-time pet sitting?

Here are two models with the arithmetic shown. The rates are illustrative round numbers so you can follow the math; replace them with your own from the blocks above.

Side gig: weekends and a few walks

Suppose you board one dog most weekends (two nights at $40 a night) and walk one regular client three times a week at $20 a walk.

• Boarding: 2 nights × $40 = $80 a weekend
• Walks: 3 × $20 = $60 a week
• Weekly gross: $140; over 48 active weeks, about $6,700 a year

That is squarely in the "side gig" band Google's AI Overview described for this query in October 2026 ($5,000 to $15,000 a year). Add a second weekend dog or a second walking client and it roughly doubles.

Full-time: boarding as the base, walks and drop-ins on top

Suppose you host two dogs on average, five nights a week, at $45 a night, do five 30-minute walks a week at $22, and cover three drop-in visits a week at $25.

• Boarding: 2 dogs × 5 nights × $45 = $450 a week
• Walks: 5 × $22 = $110 a week
• Drop-ins: 3 × $25 = $75 a week
• Weekly gross: $635; over 50 weeks, about $31,750 a year

A sitter who holds three dogs most nights, charges toward the upper end of the local range and keeps a few house-sitting clients for the weeks they cannot host at home will be well above that. Sitters on the r/petsitting thread that ranked first for this query in October 2026 reported grossing figures from a few thousand to well into five figures a year, with the highest from people running it as a full business; those are self-reported and unverified, but the spread matches the arithmetic.

The 0% commission difference, same bookings

Now hold the bookings constant and change only the platform's cut. Take the full-time sitter above at $635 a week gross.

The difference between 0% and 20% on the same bookings is $127 a week, or $6,350 a year: about ten weeks of this sitter's income, earned without a single extra booking. Against 30% it is $190 a week.

Put the other way round: a sitter on a 20% platform has to take 25% more bookings to match the take-home of a sitter on 0%, and a sitter on 30% needs 43% more. On SitterNation, sitters keep 100% of their rate; owners pay an 11% service fee, capped at $50 per booking, on top of the sitter's price. The Rover fees guide works through the same examples under Rover's 20% standard fee and its Chicago-area tiers, dated.

The pet sitter earnings calculator lets you put in your own rates and bookings per week and see the monthly and annual figures side by side with a commission platform.

Is there a pet sitter salary in Illinois?

Not in the way a job has one. The salary pages that rank for "pet sitter salary Illinois" are built from employed roles: Indeed's Illinois page listed $17.34 an hour in October 2026 and ZipRecruiter's listed $15.55 an hour, or about $32,000 a year. Those describe walkers and kennel attendants on a payroll, and Google's AI Overview quoted similar figures ($16 to $17 an hour, $32,000 to $34,000 a year).

Independent sitters are not on that scale. You set a rate per service, you choose how many bookings to take, and no one pays you by the hour. Per hour of your attention, a full house of boarding dogs pays far more than $17; a single 30-minute walk with 20 minutes of driving each way pays less. The hourly figures are useful for one thing only: if you are deciding between a job at a kennel and sitting independently, they are the number to beat.

Two Illinois-specific points. Licensing and registration depend on your municipality and on what you offer (boarding dogs in your home can fall under different rules than walking them), so check with your village or city before you list. And Chicago-suburb rates are not Chicago rates: suburban sitters generally charge a little less per night than sitters in the city but can host more dogs because they have the space, so the weekly figures often come out ahead.

What costs come out of pet sitter earnings?

The figures above are gross. Before you count them as income, three things come out.

Taxes. Independent sitters are self-employed and report their income on their tax return; the platform reports what it paid you. Self-employment tax applies on top of income tax, so set money aside through the year rather than at the end. This is general information: your situation is your own, and a tax professional will tell you what applies.

Expenses. Supplies (leashes, crates, cleaning), mileage to clients for walks and drop-ins, part of a phone plan, insurance, and for boarders, wear on the house. Many of these can offset income for tax purposes, and keeping receipts and a mileage log from the first booking is the easiest money you will ever save. The petsittertraining.com page that ranked for this query in October 2026 put a full-time sitter's income after expenses at $30,000 to $40,000; your figure depends on how much driving you do.

Platform fees, where they exist. On a commission platform the cut comes off every booking before you see it. On SitterNation there is none on the sitter side; the owner's 11% service fee (capped at $50) is added to their total, not subtracted from yours.

Insurance deserves a line of its own. Pet sitting liability insurance typically costs a few hundred dollars a year and covers you if a dog in your care injures someone or damages property. It is not required to list on SitterNation, but most full-time sitters carry it, and it is a selling point on your profile.

How do pet sitters increase their earnings?

The levers, roughly in order of impact:

1. Board, do not just walk. A night of boarding is the highest-value booking and it runs while you do other things. Sitters who can host two dogs at once earn twice per night for a little more work.
2. Keep 100% of the rate. Moving the same clients to a 0% platform is the largest single raise most sitters can give themselves, as the table above shows.
3. Take the services others skip. Medication (oral and injected), giant breeds, puppies, senior and special-needs care. Owners filter by medication and dog size and look for the rest on your profile, and each supports a higher rate.
4. Get repeat clients. A client who books monthly is worth more than ten who book once; owners who have found a sitter they trust do not shop around. Reply fast, send updates, and ask for the review.
5. Raise rates with reviews. New sitters price low to get the first bookings; after ten or fifteen reviews the rate should move up. The live blocks above show where the top of the local range sits.
6. Price the peaks. Holiday and summer weeks sell out; a modest holiday rate is normal and owners expect it.

The dog boarding cost guide, dog walker cost guide and dog sitting rates guide are written for owners, but they show what owners expect to pay for each service and why, which is exactly what you need to price well.

If you are in the Chicago suburbs and ready to start, become a sitter: you set your own rates and requirements, keep 100% of them, and owners find you by the services you offer. We are expanding to new metros; if you are outside the suburbs today, the same page tells you how to be first in line when we open near you.