This Is the Most Expensive City for Dog-Sitters

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 1, 10:00AM EST

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This Is the Most Expensive City for Dog-Sitters — © jamesseattle / Flickr

According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, 48.3 million households have a dog. That compares to 76.8 million total households in the United States. The annual cost of owning a dog is between $1,400 and $4,300, depending on toys, grooming, food, veterinary visits and training. In short, owning a dog is expensive, given that the Census Bureau claims median household income in America was $67,521 last year.
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Some Americans are not with their dogs 24 hours a day and need to have their dogs walked by other people. Others have people stay in their homes to care for their dogs when they are away. Still others board their dogs when they have to be absent.

Data for CertaPet’s recently released “The Cost of a Dog Sitter in Cities Around the U.S.” study came from Rover.com. It included America’s 50 largest cities and compared the cost of boarding to the cost of dog-sitting. The data were for medium-sized dogs, which were described as being 14 pounds to 40 pounds. The period measured was when owners are away for two weeks.
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The survey is meant to answer this question: “Where do owners save the most by boarding their dogs?” The definition of boarding was “a dog stays overnight in a dog sitter’s home” versus “a dog sitter stays overnight in the dog owner’s home.”

The most expensive city for dog-sitters was Minneapolis, where the difference between the two numbers was zero. In other words, Minneapolis is the most expensive city for dog-sitters. The city where people saved the most by boarding their dogs was Philadelphia, where the figure was $336.70.

There appears to be no geographic pattern to the cities where dog-sitting is most expensive. After Minneapolis, these were the most expensive cities (and the annual cost savings in each):

Minneapolis ($0.00)
Indianapolis ($4.20)
San Diego ($21.00)
Salt Lake City ($32.90)
Nashville ($35.00)
Chicago ($35.70)
San Antonio ($38.50)
Washington ($47.60)
Virginia Beach ($49.70)
Louisville ($58.10)

Click here to see which are the smartest dog breeds in America.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.