Dog walking route profit calculator
A $25 walk that takes thirty minutes looks like $50 an hour. Once you add the drive from the last client, finding somewhere to park, getting through the door and sending the update, the same visit can take forty-five minutes and be worth $33.33 an hour instead. This works out which of those two numbers your route is actually paying you.
It also shows what a tighter route is worth, which is the number most walkers have never seen. Nothing is sent anywhere and you do not need to give an email address to use it.
- One visit really takes
- 45 minutes, of which 15 are not walking
- Time you are not paid for
- 33% of every appointment
- A working day
- $150.00 over 4.5 hours
- A working week
- $750.00
What a tighter route is worth
| Driving between visits | Minutes per visit | Gross per hour |
|---|---|---|
| 10 min (yours now) | 45 | $33.33 |
| 5 min | 40 | $37.50 |
| 0 min | 35 | $42.86 |
Cutting five minutes of driving from the average visit is worth $4.17 more per working hour. Ten minutes is worth $9.52. Nobody pays a penny more, and no client notices any difference.
These are gross revenue figures, not profit and not take-home pay. Fuel, insurance, software, supplies, tax and your own time off all come out of what you see here. To work out what a visit has to earn once those are counted, use the pricing calculator.
Why driving is the number that decides your day
A client pays for the walk. You pay for everything around it. Travel and access time come out of the same hour the walk does, so two walkers charging exactly the same price can earn very different amounts per hour worked, and the one earning less usually has no idea why.
This is also why a nearby client can be worth more than a better-paid distant one. A $25 visit five minutes from your last stop earns more per working hour than a $28 visit twenty minutes away, and the table above shows it in your own numbers rather than in an example. Route density is the one lever that raises your hourly earnings without asking anybody to pay more.
What this does not tell you
Everything here is gross revenue. It is what comes in per hour of work, before fuel, insurance, software, supplies, replacement gear, quiet weeks and tax. It is not profit and it is not what lands in your account.
The reason it is still worth knowing is that the gap between the price on your website and the revenue per hour you actually earn is invisible until somebody counts it, and it is usually where a full week that still feels underpaid comes from.
Read next
- The dog walking pricing calculator works the other way round: it starts from what you need to earn and tells you what a visit has to charge once every cost is counted.
- How much should you charge for dog walking? explains the five step price floor behind that number.
- How to get your first 10 dog walking clients is about winning the ten households that make a tight route possible in the first place.
- Writing a dog walking cancellation policy covers the other half of route economics: what happens to that hour when somebody cancels the morning of.