What to Charge for Dog Grooming in Australia

A note on where these numbers come from. These are the starting prices built into My Pet Groomer's starter menus — what a new Australian salon sees on day one, before they change anything. They are a considered starting point, not a market survey, and they are not advice about what you should charge. Your rent, your suburb and your speed all move the answer.

Most groomers set prices the same way. You find out what the salon down the road charges, you go a few dollars under, and then you spend three years nudging it up whenever the pain gets bad enough.

It works, in the sense that you stay open. What it hides is which of your jobs are actually paying you, because a price list tells you what a dog costs and says nothing at all about what an hour costs.

So let us look at a real price list with the hours put back in.

The salon menu, with the hours showing

This is the dog menu a new salon gets in My Pet Groomer, with the duration each service is booked for, and what that works out to per hour.

| Service | Size | Price | Booked for | Per hour | |---|---|---|---|---| | Full Groom | Small, up to 10kg | $75 | 1h 30m | $50.00 | | Full Groom | Medium, 10–25kg | $95 | 2h | $47.50 | | Full Groom | Large, 25kg+ | $120 | 2h 30m | $48.00 | | Bath & Tidy | Small | $55 | 1h | $55.00 | | Bath & Tidy | Medium | $70 | 1h 15m | $56.00 | | Bath & Tidy | Large | $90 | 1h 30m | $60.00 | | Puppy's First Groom | All sizes | $55 | 45m | $73.33 |

Read the right-hand column, because it says something the left-hand column hides.

The full groom on a big dog is the best-looking job on the menu and the worst-paid hour on it. One hundred and twenty dollars is the biggest number on the list. It is also $48 an hour, the lowest rate you will earn all day.

Meanwhile the humble bath and tidy on a large dog — a job nobody photographs — pays $60 an hour, a quarter better. And the puppy's first groom, at forty-five minutes and $55, pays better than anything else you do.

None of that is an accident of our menu. It is the shape of grooming. Clipping and styling is slow, skilled and hard to speed up. Washing and drying is faster and scales with equipment. Price per dog and the difference is invisible. Price per hour and it is the most important thing on the page.

What to do with that

Not this: put the big full groom up to $150 and hope. You will lose the bookings and the hour will be worth nothing at all.

A few things that work better.

Charge for the coat, not just the kilos. Weight is a proxy and a rough one. A 10kg Cavoodle in a matted coat is a longer, harder job than a 30kg Labrador that needs a wash and a nail trim. Weight bands are a fine starting point — they are easy for clients to self-select and they stop the phone call where someone asks what it costs and you have to say "it depends". But a doodle surcharge, or a separate long-coat price, is not greed. It is the only way that hour gets paid. A price tier does not have to be a weight range — it is a name, a price and a duration, and you can hang it off a breed group or off nothing at all, so "Doodle & curly coat" is as valid a band as "10–25kg".

Sell the add-ons properly. A nail trim or a teeth clean added to an existing appointment is the highest-margin thing in a salon, because the dog is already on your table and the setup cost is spent. Add-ons should be offered at booking, where the client is already deciding and not standing at a counter with a card in their hand.

Look at your own mix before you touch a price. If two-thirds of your week is big full grooms, you are working your hardest hours at your worst rate, and the fix might be your schedule rather than your price list. Some salons deliberately cap how many large full grooms they take in a day and fill the rest with faster work. You need a month of real numbers to know, which is the argument for having the numbers.

Put the price up once a year, on a date. Groomers who raise prices "when it gets bad" raise them late, by a lot, and lose clients at the moment of the jump. Groomers who move everything five per cent each February get almost no complaints. Same money, much less grief. Pick the date now.

Mobile is not the premium people assume

Here is the mobile menu, run through the same arithmetic.

| Service | Size | Price | Booked for | Per hour | |---|---|---|---|---| | Mobile Full Groom | Small | $110 | 2h | $55.00 | | Mobile Full Groom | Medium | $135 | 2h 30m | $54.00 | | Mobile Full Groom | Large | $165 | 3h | $55.00 | | Mobile Bath & Tidy | Small | $85 | 1h 30m | $56.67 | | Mobile Bath & Tidy | Medium | $105 | 2h | $52.50 | | Mobile Bath & Tidy | Large | $125 | 2h 15m | $55.56 |

A mobile full groom on a large dog is $165 against the salon's $120 — a sticker price nearly forty per cent higher. Per hour it is $55 against $48. Better, but not the gold mine the headline number suggests, and it has to cover the van, the fuel and the fact that you drove there.

That is the honest shape of mobile grooming. The higher price is not a premium for the same work. It is a longer slot with travel priced into it, and the reason it still beats the salon rate is that nobody is paying shop rent.

If you are mobile, the number that decides your year is not your price. It is how many jobs you fit between the first driveway and the last.

What actually moves the number

Four things, roughly in order.

Where you are. Inner-suburban rent has to come out of the same hour. A price that is comfortable in a country town will not keep the lights on in Prahran, and a city price list in a regional area will lose you the client base you need.

How fast you are. Speed is worth more than price. Taking twenty minutes off a full groom without cutting corners is a raise you do not have to announce, and unlike a price rise nobody can shop around for it.

What you will not do. The groomers with the healthiest rates almost all have a line they do not cross — no severely matted coats without a shave-down conversation first, no aggressive dogs without a muzzle plan, no last-minute doubles. Every one of those is an hour that would have paid badly and hurt.

Whether you get paid at all. A no-show is an hour at zero dollars, which changes your effective rate more than any pricing decision you will make this year. A deposit at the time of booking is the single highest-leverage change most salons can make, and it is worth more to your hourly rate than putting every price up five per cent. We wrote about reducing no-shows separately.

Where to start

If you are opening, start near the table at the top and adjust within a month of real bookings. It is easier to come up than to come down, but not by much — and sitting on a price that is too low for a year is worse than either.

If you have been open a while, do not change a price today. Work out your last month's takings divided by your actual hours on the table. Most groomers are surprised, and the surprise is usually the big full grooms.

Then change one thing.

---

My Pet Groomer ships with these menus already built, priced by size and coat, so a new salon is taking bookings the same day rather than building a price list from a blank page. See what's included.