Annual Report · 2026
State of UK Dog Boarding 2026
Data period: May 2025 – January 2026 · Published 15 January 2026
An independent analysis of the UK dog boarding sector, built from council animal-activity licensing registers and operators’ own published prices across England, Scotland and Wales. Every figure below is drawn from our live dataset of 2,174 council-licensed dog boarding operators.
Headline findings
2,174
council-licensed dog boarding operators tracked
£26
median kennel rate per night
52%
of rated operators hold a 5-star council rating
46%
offer home boarding (your dog stays in a carer’s home)
1. Licensing & coverage
Anyone boarding dogs commercially in England, Scotland or Wales must hold an Animal Activity Licence from their local council. Our pipeline tracks 2,174 council-licensed dog boarding operators across 70 towns and areas with at least three operators. Coverage is not uniform — some councils publish machine-readable registers, others require FOI requests — so the per-council picture is on the licensing coverage map.
2. Star ratings
Councils rate licensed animal businesses from 1 to 5 stars at inspection. Across the 1,746 operators in our dataset with a published rating, 52% hold the top 5-star rating, while 9% sit at 1–2 stars. A further 428 operators carry no published star rating.
Base: 1,746 operators with a published council star rating.
3. Pricing
The national median rate for boarding kennels is £26 per night. The middle half of operators charge between £22 and £31 per night, and published rates span from £10 to £103.
Base: 177 operators with a published kennel-night price. Prices are minimum published rates for a single dog. Area-by-area medians are in the price index.
4. What operators offer
Operators often hold more than one licence type. In our dataset 64% are licensed for boarding kennels, 46% for home boarding (the dog stays in a licensed carer’s own home), and 10% for daytime dog day care.
64%
Boarding kennels
1,392 operators
46%
Home boarding
996 operators
10%
Dog day care
214 operators
Methodology and limitations
Data sources: council animal-activity licensing registers (operators, licence status, star ratings) and operators’ own websites (price observations).
Coverage: the dataset does not cover every UK council. Councils requiring FOI access or manual extraction may be under-represented. Each statistic above states its base (sample size).
Prices: minimum published rate for a single dog, observed within the reporting period; they exclude surcharges and peak pricing. The priced sample is smaller than the licensed total because not all operators publish prices.
Star ratings: as assessed by the local council at the time of inspection; not updated between inspections.
Cite or reuse this data
These figures are free to cite and reuse under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to “Compare Dog Boarding Prices” and a link to this page. The underlying area-level data is published in our open data section.
For press enquiries or an embargoed advance copy of next year’s report: press@comparedogboarding.co.uk · Press page