Is Your Pet Sitting Platform's Cover Actually Insurance?

Ask a room of pet sitters whether they are insured and a good number will say yes, the platform handles it. It is the most common assumption we hear, and it is worth checking harder than almost anything else in your business, because cover is also one of the headline things a 15 to 25 percent commission is sold as paying for. If you are handing over roughly a fifth of every booking, it is fair to know precisely what comes back.

Two very different things wear the word "cover". One is an actual insurance policy, underwritten by an insurer, with a limit, an excess and a policy number. The other is a promise from the marketplace itself to reimburse certain costs in certain circumstances, funded out of company revenue. From inside a sitter dashboard they look identical. In the terms they are not remotely the same thing.

What follows describes patterns in the published terms of the major pet care marketplaces in Australia, Europe and the United States, as they stood in August 2026. We are deliberately not singling out any one company, partly because the pattern is near-universal and partly because none of this is hidden. It is all in public terms that very few sitters have ever opened. Terms differ by platform and by country and they change, so treat this as general information rather than legal or financial advice, and go and read your own.

The four phrases to search for

Open your platform's guarantee or protection terms and use your browser's find function. These are the phrases that decide what you actually have, and variations of them recur across the market leaders on three continents.

1. "is not insurance"

The larger reimbursement schemes tend to say this outright, sometimes in capital letters, in the opening lines. The fuller wording usually runs along the lines of not being intended as an offer to insure or an insurance contract. Some go further and add that the scheme does not take the place of any insurance coverage you may already have.

That is not a loophole. It is a disclosure, and a legally necessary one. Calling something insurance when it is not carries real regulatory consequences, so the companies say so plainly. The gap is not between what platforms write and what is true. It is between what platforms write and what sitters believe.

2. "made and paid through the platform"

This is the condition that matters more than any dollar figure, and it is remarkably consistent across marketplaces in every market we looked at. Cover attaches to bookings arranged and paid for on the platform, usually paid in full before the service starts.

Read that with your actual client list in mind. The regular who books you by text every second Thursday. The family you have sat for since before you joined. The neighbour who pays cash. The client you met on the platform two years ago and now arranges with directly. For a working sitter that is often most of the week, and none of it is inside the scheme.

3. "solely responsible for carrying insurance"

Several of the largest platforms state directly in their terms that service providers are solely responsible for holding insurance sufficient for the legal requirements where they work, and that the platform's own scheme does not suffice for that purpose. At least one adds that it does not verify whether sitters hold insurance at all, and advises owners to ask sitters directly.

If you have been treating platform cover as the reason you do not need your own policy, that sentence is the platform telling you otherwise, in writing.

4. "in the sitter's care, custody or control"

Look for how the pet itself is treated. Pets are legally property, and standard broadform liability wordings exclude property in your care, custody or control, as our Australian insurance guide sets out in detail. Where a scheme does respond for the animal, the amount is usually a separate and much smaller sub-limit sitting underneath a very large headline liability figure.

The headline number is the marketing number. The sub-limit is the one that pays when a dog in your care is hurt.

Even where the insurance is real, you are not the one holding it

Some marketplaces do arrange genuine insurance with a real insurer and extend it to sitters on the platform. That is better than a discretionary scheme. It is not the same as being insured.

The distinction that matters: you are not the policyholder. The platform is. You are a person the platform's policy has been extended to cover, on terms you have not seen, under a contract you cannot enforce and cannot renew. Ask yourself a simple question about the cover you are relying on — have you ever read the policy wording? Most sitters have not, because it was never given to them. With a policy in your own name you get a product disclosure statement, a policy number, and the standing to argue.

One large platform's own help centre puts the position plainly to its sitters: it cannot guarantee a claim will succeed, because the decision belongs to the insurer, not to the platform you are asking. Everyone in that sentence is being honest. It is just not what "you're covered" sounds like.

And the terms themselves are narrower than almost anyone assumes. Across the published schemes on three continents you will find, in various combinations:

• An excess you pay. Around a thousand dollars per accepted claim on one platform's real insurance layer; a few hundred on the reimbursement schemes. On a modest incident that can swallow the whole claim.
• Notice windows measured in hours. Twenty-four to forty-eight hours to report the incident on some schemes, then ten to fourteen days to file veterinary documentation, sometimes counted from the injury rather than from when you learn how serious it is. Vet complications do not respect that timetable, and a sitter mid-crisis is not thinking about paperwork deadlines.
• Treatment caps that end before the animal is better. Thirty days of eligible treatment is common. Recovery frequently is not.
• Exclusion lists that cover a great deal of ordinary life. Pre-existing, chronic, breed-specific and orthopaedic conditions. Parasites. Preventable illness. Escape and bolting. Automotive incidents. Acts of nature. Non-economic damages of any kind. Your lost income while you deal with all of it.
• Death benefits that are not compensation in any meaningful sense. On one published scheme, a few hundred dollars for a dog, less for other pets — and a pet must be missing for thirty days before it counts as lost.
• Nothing for you. Your own injuries, your own property, your own equipment: excluded almost everywhere. These schemes exist to make an owner confident enough to hand keys to a stranger.
• It ends when the relationship ends. Leave, pause or get deactivated and cover stops that day, with no record of continuous cover to show anyone afterwards.

What happens when they say no

This is the part almost nobody thinks about until it is too late, and it is the strongest reason not to treat platform cover as your safety net.

If a licensed insurer in Australia declines your claim, you have a route. Under the General Insurance Code of Practice the insurer must tell you in writing which parts of the claim it does not accept and why, must hand over the reports and information it relied on within ten business days if you ask, and must decide your complaint within thirty days. If you are still unhappy, you can take it to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority. AFCA is free to complainants, membership is compulsory for licensed insurers, and if you accept its determination the insurer is bound by it. You are not bound — you keep the right to walk away and go to court instead.

Now consider a marketplace guarantee that states it is not insurance. It is not an insurance contract, the company is not a licensed insurer, and the scheme is not an insurance product. So none of the above applies. There is no code obliging written reasons. There is no free ombudsman. There is no regulator with jurisdiction over how the claim was handled. Public filings from one listed operator describe its guarantee programme as a commercial agreement for which the company is primarily responsible, backed by its own liability cover — which is an accurate description of a company deciding, at its own expense, whether to pay you.

If that decision goes against you, your realistic options are a chargeback, a small-claims action against a company with lawyers, or a review nobody with authority is obliged to read.

Be careful about what this does and does not prove. It does not prove that platforms routinely refuse valid claims, and this post is not going to pretend otherwise. Individual disputes are on the public record — court filings and complaint databases include claims declined on exclusion grounds such as an undetermined cause of death, property elements refused as ineligible, and at least one family who say they were offered around a thousand dollars against roughly twelve thousand they had spent. Some denials get reversed after a complaint. Some claims are paid quickly and generously without a fight. All of that is true at the same time.

What is missing is the number that would settle it. No platform publishes how many claims it approves and how many it declines, no regulator collects it, and nobody has audited it. You are being asked to rely on a discretionary promise whose track record is not disclosed and cannot be checked. That absence is not a technicality — for something you are treating as protection, it is the whole problem.

The pattern, and what it costs you

Put the market leaders side by side and the shape is consistent across Australia, Europe and the United States.

Cover attaches to the booking channel, not to you. It is designed around the owner's confidence, not the sitter's exposure. It applies only while you keep transacting on the platform. And in a good number of cases it is not insurance at all, by the platform's own description.

Now put that next to the price. A full-time sitter grossing around seventy thousand dollars a year hands roughly fourteen thousand of it to a twenty percent commission. A standalone public liability policy for a solo pet care operator generally runs a few hundred dollars a year. Those two numbers are not close, and the difference is not explained by cover.

A commission does buy real things, and this is not an argument that it buys nothing. Demand, discovery, payment handling, an audience you could not build alone — those arrive every week, whether or not anything goes wrong, and you can see them working.

Protection is different in kind, and that difference is the point of this article. Everything else the commission buys is delivered up front. Protection is a promise about a future event, and you only find out what you actually bought on the worst day of your working life, when a dog is at the emergency vet and you are reading an exclusion list for the first time. Then it has to clear the excess, the notice window, the documentation deadline, the treatment cap, the exclusions — and, on the schemes that are not insurance, someone at the company deciding whether to pay you at all, with no obligation to explain the answer and nowhere for you to take it.

So price it that way. Judge the commission on the bookings it brings you this month, because those are real and measurable. Do not price the protection at anything until you have read the terms, because on the evidence of those terms it is the thinnest thing in the bundle and the one most likely to be mentioned in the sales pitch.

What actually covers your business

A policy in your own name. That is the whole answer, and it is less dramatic than it sounds.

Your own cover follows you rather than the booking. It responds for platform work, direct clients, cash jobs and long-standing regulars in the same way. It survives you leaving any platform, or every platform. It produces a certificate of currency you can show a client, a council or a body corporate. And in most places it is a deductible business expense, which takes some of the sting out.

Two things to check before the headline limit, both covered in our guide to what pet sitter insurance actually covers:

• The care, custody and control position. Standard wordings exclude property in your care, and the pet is property. Find the write-back or the specific extension, and do not assume it is there.
• The animal-injury sub-limit. On specialist pet business policies this is a separate, much smaller number than the public liability limit. It is the figure to compare between quotes.

For most sitters the annual premium is one or two boarding weekends. Set against what a single serious incident costs, or against a year of commission, it is not a close call.

And in some places it is not a choice at all. Insurance is mostly a commercial necessity rather than a legal duty, but there are real exceptions and one of them lands squarely on our own market. In Victoria, the Code of Practice for the Operation of Boarding Establishments, made under the Domestic Animals Act 1994 and mandatory for every registered boarding business, states that all boarding establishments must carry a minimum of $10,000,000 public liability cover. The Code defines home boarding as a maximum of two animals boarded at the carer's own residence, where no other boarding is happening on the same property — so two dogs in a spare room sit inside the same rule as a commercial kennel. Part 10 exempts home boarding establishments from exactly five clauses of the Code, and the insurance requirement is not one of them. Section 63A of the Act makes running a domestic animal business that does not comply with its code an offence. In Scotland and Wales, where boarding is still licensed under the Animal Boarding Establishments Act 1963, many councils attach a public liability condition to the licence. In England the licensing regulations do not require it, though most councils ask to see a certificate anyway. San Francisco requires commercial dog walkers to carry a million dollars of general liability.

That list is not exhaustive and the rules move, so check your own council rather than trusting any blog, including this one. But if you board pets in Melbourne, do not treat insurance as optional paperwork — treat it as part of being registered.

Where we stand

We should be equally plain about ourselves, because we are a platform too.

We do not provide insurance and we are not going to imply that we do. We charge no commission on your bookings, which means we have no take rate out of which to fund a cover scheme, and we would rather say that than dress up a reimbursement promise as protection.

We do expect you to carry your own. Every other trade does. A plumber, a photographer, a cleaner, a personal trainer — none of them treats liability cover as an optional extra, because they are running a business and something in their care can go wrong. Pet care is no different, except that what is in your care has a heartbeat and a family. In parts of this industry it is also a legal condition of operating, as the Victorian boarding rules above show. Budget for it the way you budget for a car service: an ordinary cost of doing the work properly.

What we are trying to do is make that easier, and it is deliberately modest. We are working on a partnership that lets sitters hold a proper policy in their own name at a better rate than buying alone, covering all of their work rather than only the bookings that came through us. The point is control. You would be the policyholder. You would hold the wording, so you would actually know what is and is not covered before anything happens — which is the one thing platform cover never gives you. You would get the certificate, the renewal, and the standing to argue a decision. It would follow you if you left us tomorrow.

Three commitments about it, because a company writing this article should be held to them:

• We will not take a commission or a referral fee. A company built on charging you nothing for your bookings should not quietly earn a cut of your insurance either. If a better price can be had by handing that back, that is where it goes.
• It will be entirely optional. Not a condition of joining, not a condition of any plan, not bundled into a price, and not something you have to decline. If you never look at it, nothing about your account changes.
• You are free to use any insurer you like. Shop it, compare it, keep the policy you already have, or stay with a broker who has looked after you for years. What matters to us is that you are properly covered and that you know what your cover does — not whose name is on the policy. Upload the certificate and the verified badge appears exactly the same either way.

In the meantime, sitters with us can upload an insurance certificate and a police check. Our team reviews the documents manually, and once verified the matching badge appears on your public profile. More on our trust and safety page, or set up a sitter profile.

The honest summary: platform cover is worth something, but far less than the word "covered" implies. It is narrower than almost every sitter believes, it belongs to the platform rather than to you, it can be refused by someone you cannot appeal to, and it has never been a substitute for a policy with your name on it. Spend twenty minutes with your platform's terms this week. Search for those four phrases, then read the exclusion list to the end. Whatever you find, you will be making decisions about your business with better information than most people in this industry have.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does my pet sitting platform's guarantee count as insurance?

Often it does not, and the terms usually say so. The larger reimbursement schemes commonly state that they are not insurance, are not intended as an offer to insure or an insurance contract, and do not replace any insurance cover you already hold. Some marketplaces do also arrange genuine insurance with a real insurer and extend it to sitters. Open your own platform's terms and search for the phrase "is not insurance" to find out which kind you have.

Does platform cover apply to clients who book me directly?

Generally no. Across the major marketplaces, cover attaches to bookings that are made and paid through the platform, usually paid in full before the service begins. Direct bookings, cash jobs and long-standing regulars who arrange with you privately typically fall outside the scheme entirely.

Does the platform's cover protect me if I am injured?

Usually not. These schemes are built around the owner, the owner's pet and third parties, because their purpose is to make owners comfortable booking someone they have never met. Injury to the sitter, damage to the sitter's own property and the sitter's equipment are commonly excluded.

What happens to my cover when I leave a platform?

It ends. Platform cover is a benefit of using the platform and applies per booking, so it stops when you stop transacting there, and you keep no record of continuous cover. A policy in your own name continues regardless of which platforms you use or leave.

Do I still need my own insurance if I only work through a platform?

Yes, and several of the largest platforms say so themselves — their terms put the responsibility for adequate insurance on the sitter and state that the platform scheme does not satisfy it. Whether it is legally required depends on what you do and where. For a sitter who only visits clients' homes in Australia, no law requires it, so it is a risk decision. If you board pets in Victoria it is a different answer: the mandatory Code of Practice for boarding establishments requires a minimum of $10,000,000 public liability cover, and the Code counts home boarding — a maximum of two animals at your own residence, with no other boarding on the property — as a boarding establishment, which must also register with its council. Check your own council before assuming which case you are in.

Does public liability insurance cover a pet that is injured in my care?

Often not without a specific extension. Pets are legally property, and standard broadform liability wordings exclude property in the insured's care, custody or control. Specialist pet business policies add a separate animal-injury sub-limit, typically far smaller than the headline liability limit, and that sub-limit is the number to compare between quotes.

What can I do if a platform refuses to pay my claim?

Far less than you would with a real policy, and this is the most overlooked difference between the two. In Australia, a licensed insurer that declines a claim must give you written reasons, must hand over the information it relied on if you ask, and must resolve a complaint within thirty days — and you can then take it free of charge to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority, whose determination binds the insurer if you accept it. A marketplace guarantee that states it is not insurance sits outside all of that: no code, no ombudsman, no regulator with jurisdiction over the decision. Your realistic options are a chargeback, small claims, or a public review.

Do platforms actually refuse claims?

Some claims are refused, some are paid quickly and generously, and some refusals are reversed after a complaint. What nobody can tell you is how often each happens, because no platform publishes claim approval or denial figures, no regulator collects them, and no independent audit exists. Treat anyone quoting a denial rate — in either direction — as making it up. The honest position is that you are relying on a discretionary promise with an undisclosed track record.

Will The Pet Sitter make me buy insurance through you?

No. Any insurance partnership we set up will be entirely optional, will never be a condition of joining or of any plan, and will not be bundled into a price. You are free to use any insurer or broker you prefer, or to keep the policy you already have. We take no commission or referral fee either way, and the verified insurance badge on your profile works the same whoever you buy from.

Is a platform commission worth it for the cover it includes?

Judge it on the demand, not the protection. Demand, discovery and payment handling arrive every week and you can see them working. Protection is a promise about a future event that has to clear an excess, a notice window, a documentation deadline, a treatment cap and an exclusion list before it pays anything — and on the schemes that are not insurance, someone at the company still decides. A twenty percent commission on a full-time sitting income runs to many thousands of dollars a year; a standalone public liability policy for a solo operator generally costs a few hundred.