What to Charge for Pet Sitting in Melbourne

Pricing is the first thing most new sitters agonise over, and the information available to help is mostly useless. Marketplaces publish "from" prices: the cheapest thing a sitter offers, for one pet, before the platform takes its cut. Cost guides publish modelled estimates with no sample behind them. Neither tells you what a Melbourne sitter actually earns.

So this post shows what Melbourne sitters were advertising on 13 August 2026, with the method stated so you can check it, then works through the arithmetic of what you keep.

What Melbourne sitters were advertising

The figures below come from the first page of Pawshake's Melbourne category pages, checked on 13 August 2026, 20 sitter listings per page. These are advertised starting rates: not averages, not earnings, and not the Melbourne market. A different day would produce a slightly different set.

Three caveats matter more than the numbers. The listed price is not take-home: Pawshake deducts a service fee from the sitter, so an advertised $50 night is not $50 in your account. The first page is not the market either, since Pawshake's own structured data declares wider ranges than the listings show, at $15 to $90 for day care and $10 to $50 for walking. And the walking figures are not comparable to anything, because no listing states a duration, so a $15 "from" price and a $30 one may cover very different work.

For contrast, two Melbourne operators publish full rate cards rather than floors. Melbourne Pet Nanny lists $60 per night, or $400 per week, for house-and-pet sitting within 15km of the CBD, and $90 per night or $500 per week for 15 to 30km out, with a two-night minimum and a 50 per cent deposit. Oz Pet Minders lists $24 for a 30 minute pop-in and the same for a 30 minute individual walk. Both sit well above the marketplace floors: a professional operator prices the service, not the search ranking.

Your "from" price is a filter, not a rate

The number you list is the cheapest thing you offer, and marketplaces sort and filter on it. Your floor then anchors every conversation after it, including the one where you quote for two dogs over Christmas.

Duration drives price at least as much as service type does. Airtasker's Australian dog walking cost guide, last updated 19 May 2026, sets out a ladder: roughly $15 to $25 for a 15 minute potty break, $20 to $35 for 30 minutes, $30 to $45 for 45 minutes, and $45 to $70 for an hour. It puts a typical 30 minute Melbourne walk at $25 to $40, and separates solo walks ($35 to $50 per 30 minutes) from group walks ($25 to $35 per dog). Those are cost guide estimates, not observed listings, so copy the structure rather than the numbers: price by duration and by solo versus group.

The commission arithmetic, done honestly

Mad Paws charges a sitter service fee of 20 per cent including GST for sitters who registered after 29 June 2017, and 15 per cent for those who registered before it. The fee is deducted once the booking is completed and the owner has confirmed the end of the stay.

Against a flat annual subscription, the break-even is just the subscription divided by 0.20:

• €199 a year plus VAT (our founding Pro rate, first 100 subscribers, locked until you cancel) breaks even at about €995 of gross bookings
• €299 a year plus VAT (the standard rate once those 100 places are taken) breaks even at about €1,495

We bill in euros, so if you price your sitting in Australian dollars, convert at the rate your own card issuer gives you on the day rather than at a figure we invented for a blog post. The shape of the comparison does not depend on the exchange rate anyway: a commission is a percentage of everything you ever earn, so it grows with you and never stops, while a subscription is one flat number that does not move whether you do twenty nights a year or two hundred.

Where commission genuinely wins

At the Melbourne rates above, a sitter doing 20 boarding nights a year grosses roughly A$1,000 and pays about A$200 of it away on a 20 per cent platform. That is a small enough number that a paid subscription is not worth buying yet, and the honest answer for a low-volume or occasional sitter is: do not buy one. A flat fee only wins once your volume clears the break-even, and below it you would be paying for capacity you are not using.

But note what that break-even is actually comparing, because it is easy to read it as "commission versus us". It is not. It is commission versus our paid plan. Our Free plan is €0, card-free, permanent, and also takes 0 per cent commission — so against that, a commission platform is never the cheaper option at any volume. At 20 nights a year the choice is A$200 in commission or nothing. The break-even above only tells you whether the paid tooling is worth buying yet, not whether to keep paying a percentage.

One deliberate omission: no Rover commission figure appears anywhere in this post, because we could not verify one from Rover's own published material.

The levers most Melbourne sitters leave on the table

Peak season. Demand clusters around Victorian school breaks. For government schools, Term 4 2026 ends on 18 December and Term 1 2027 starts for students on 28 January, so the long summer peak runs roughly 19 December to 27 January, with shorter breaks in early April, late June to mid July, and late September. Pawshake's own Melbourne cat sitting page notes the summer holidays can be super busy. A peak rate is normal published practice, not cheek: Oz Pet Minders publishes a $50 per day Christmas and Easter surcharge.

Extra pets. A second dog is more work, more risk and more cleaning. Oz Pet Minders charges $5.50 per additional pet per day. Paws N Claws, a Central Coast NSW operator rather than a Melbourne one, publishes $8 per extra pet per day on visits and $10 per extra pet per night on overnights.

Public holidays, short notice, time and travel. The same NSW operator publishes a $10 public holiday surcharge, $20 on Christmas Day, and $15 for bookings under 24 hours out. Oz Pet Minders charges $12 per extra 15 minute block and $1.50 per kilometre. Most new sitters absorb all of that silently.

Cancellation policy is a pricing decision

A late cancellation in the Christmas peak is not just a lost booking. It is a lost booking you turned other work away for. On The Pet Sitter you pick one of three policies:

• Flexible. Full refund if the owner cancels more than 24 hours before the start, 50 per cent within 24 hours.
• Moderate (the default). Full refund more than 5 days before, 50 per cent between 1 and 5 days, none within 24 hours.
• Strict. Full refund more than 7 days before, 50 per cent between 2 and 7 days, none within 48 hours.

If you cancel, the owner always gets a full refund. The trade-off is real: Flexible wins more first bookings, Strict protects income in periods where a cancelled week cannot be refilled. Independent operators often go stricter still — Melbourne Pet Nanny's terms give no refund inside three weeks, 25 per cent between three and six, and 50 per cent beyond six. Our trust and safety page covers how bookings work.

The underpricing trap

The temptation is to list at the bottom of the range to win your first booking. The lowest Melbourne boarding listings started at $20 a night, while half sat at $45 or below and the middle band ran $40 to $52. Sitting at the floor puts you in a crowd, and it creates a ratchet problem, because raising rates on existing clients is far harder than starting higher.

We have no data proving a higher entry price converts better — that is reasoning, not evidence. But the levers you can pull instead of price are well understood: good photos, fast replies, specific availability, and a clear description of what a booking includes. On The Pet Sitter those four things feed your profile score — what an owner sees the moment they open your link today, and what ranking will be built on when public search opens.

Tax and records: general information only

This is general information, not tax advice. Check ato.gov.au or talk to a registered tax agent about your own situation.

The most common misconception is that there is a dollar threshold below which pet sitting income does not count. The Australian Government's business.gov.au distinguishes a hobby from a business by factors such as intending to make a profit and repeating similar activities, and attaches no dollar figure to that distinction at all. If it is a hobby you do not need to declare it to the ATO; if you are carrying on a business you declare the income in your annual return and must keep records.

An ABN follows the same logic. business.gov.au states plainly that "Not everyone needs an ABN. To get one you need to be running a business or other enterprise." A hobby cannot get one, and without an ABN other businesses must withhold 47 per cent from payments to you.

GST is separate again. Registration is required once your GST turnover reaches $75,000, within 21 days of becoming aware you will pass it. That is a registration threshold and nothing else — emphatically not an amount you can earn tax-free.

What this means when you choose a platform

Work out your realistic annual gross first, then compare. If a fifth of it is less than the subscription, the paid plan is not worth buying yet — so create your profile on the Free plan instead, which at €0 and 0 per cent commission is never beaten by a percentage, and upgrade only when the paid tooling earns its keep. Above that point a flat fee wins, and the gap widens with every booking.

Being straight about where we are: we are early and we publish no sitter counts, because we do not have meaningful ones yet. Melbourne is where we started, not the limit of what we sell — the software is on sale worldwide and a sitter can subscribe today, wherever they work. What you are buying is the software to run your own pet care business, not inbound leads: public search, the suburb sitter listings and the jobs board are parked while we build, and are coming soon. What works today is your own profile page — it resolves publicly for anyone with the link, and your booking link can be shared anywhere, so an owner who already knows you can book you in full. After approval, search engines may index the profile only when search-engine visibility is enabled. Pro checkout is open, founding places are claimed at real checkout, and registering interest does not lock one.

Our pricing page shows every tier, the Rover comparison sets out the structural differences, and you can create a free sitter profile without a card.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much should I charge for pet sitting in Melbourne?

Melbourne listings observed on 13 August 2026 advertised boarding at a median of $47 a night, day care around $30 to $40 a day, drop-in style cat visits around $15 to $24, and walks around $15 to $22. These are advertised starting rates from one page of listings, before any platform fee, so treat them as a floor to price above rather than a target. Professional Melbourne operators publish considerably more, from $24 per 30 minute visit up to $60 to $90 a night for house sitting.

How much do dog boarders charge per night in Melbourne?

On the first page of Pawshake's Melbourne dog boarding listings on 13 August 2026, advertised starting rates ran from $20 to $120 a night, median $47, with the middle half between roughly $40 and $52. Those are "from" prices for a sitter's cheapest option, not average booking values. Melbourne Pet Nanny, by comparison, publishes $60 a night within 15km of the CBD and $90 a night for 15 to 30km out.

Is a flat subscription actually cheaper than a 20 per cent commission?

That depends which plan you mean. Against our founding Pro rate of €199 plus VAT you need to gross about €995 a year to beat a 20 per cent commission, and about €1,495 against the €299 plus VAT standard rate — below that, the paid plan is not worth buying yet. Against our Free plan the question does not arise: it is €0 and 0 per cent commission, so a percentage never costs less at any volume. A low-volume sitter should create a free profile rather than keep paying commission, and upgrade only when the tooling earns its keep. The 20 per cent is Mad Paws' published sitter service fee for sitters who registered after 29 June 2017.

Do I need an ABN to be a pet sitter in Australia?

It depends on whether you are carrying on a business, not on how much you earn. business.gov.au states that "Not everyone needs an ABN. To get one you need to be running a business or other enterprise," and notes that without an ABN other businesses must withhold 47 per cent from payments to you. General information only, so check with the ATO or a registered tax agent.

Do I have to pay tax on pet sitting income in Australia?

If you are carrying on a business, you declare the income in your annual return and keep records. There is no dollar threshold separating a hobby from a business; business.gov.au frames the distinction around profit intent and repetition instead. The widely quoted $75,000 figure is the GST registration threshold, not a tax-free amount. General information only, not tax advice.

Should I charge more at Christmas and during school holidays?

Yes, and Melbourne operators already do: Oz Pet Minders publishes a $50 per day surcharge over Christmas and Easter. Victorian government school Term 4 2026 ends on 18 December and Term 1 2027 starts for students on 28 January, so the summer peak runs roughly 19 December to 27 January. Shorter peaks fall in early April, late June to mid July, and late September.

How much should I charge for a second dog?

Australian operators publish extra-pet surcharges of roughly $5.50 to $10 per pet per day or night. Oz Pet Minders, in Melbourne, charges $5.50 per additional pet per day. Paws N Claws, on the NSW Central Coast rather than in Melbourne, publishes $8 per extra pet per day on visits and $10 per extra pet per night on overnights.