How much is a pet boarding and daycare business worth?

Short answer: 3.27× SDE in realized sales — the strongest multiple in pet services — because weekday daycare and booked-out holidays behave like recurring revenue, if the occupancy is documented and the license transfers. Buyers pay for filled kennels they can count, not for a building full of potential. Run your figures in the valuation calculator and see the pet boarding and daycare page.

The number

BizBuySell's trailing-five-year closed sales (through Q2 2026) put Dog Daycare and Boarding Businesses at 3.27× SDE and 1.08× revenue, median sale price $412,500. The revenue multiple above 1.0 is the tell: buyers pay for capacity that fills. Size ladder for larger campuses — IBBA Market Pulse, Q2 2026: 2.0× SDE under a $500K price; 2.8× at $500K–$1M; 3.1× at $1M–$2M; 4.8× EBITDA at $2–5M; 5.8× EBITDA at $5–50M — where multi-site operators step up to EBITDA pricing.

Public comparison: Damodaran Online's Business & Consumer Services bucket (a proxy, January 2026) trades at 14.26× EV/EBITDA. Pet-care roll-ups chase exactly this occupancy math at scale; a single facility gets the concept's discount, not the roll-up's price.

Worked example — shown math, assumptions labeled:

• Revenue (assumption, a mid-size boarding + daycare facility): $550,000
• SDE margin (assumption): 28% → SDE = $550,000 × 0.28 = $154,000
• Multiple (BizBuySell realized, dog daycare and boarding): 3.27×
• $154,000 × 3.27 = $503,580

Real estate, where owned, is priced separately — do not let anyone bury it in the multiple.

How buyers actually value a pet boarding and daycare business

Occupancy is the business, and buyers split it by day type. Weekday daycare — dogs dropped off every workday by members on packages — is the transferable core: steady, prepaid-ish, and countable in the software. Overnight boarding sells kennel-nights and spikes at holidays; buyers take three years of monthly occupancy and treat Thanksgiving and Christmas as seasonality, not run-rate. The two lines get reported separately by any honest seller, because they have different labor, different pricing power and different multiples.

Capacity and compliance come next: licensed kennel capacity (the permit number, not the number of runs you can squeeze in), zoning that actually allows boarding at that address, indoor/outdoor play space, camera systems owners can watch — increasingly a purchase requirement, not a perk — and night staffing: a facility with a documented overnight lead prices very differently from one where the owner sleeps on site. Buyers read the incident and claim files, check unused daycare-pack liability (prepaid packages you owe, which come out of the price), and confirm the software's check-in history matches the tax return.

What raises the price — and what kills it

Raises it: documented weekday occupancy with a membership base; holiday boarding that books out weeks ahead, proven over three years; en-suite add-ons, grooming and training attached to stays, lifting revenue per dog-night; a night lead and trained staff who are not the owner; cameras, software and vaccination records in order — diligence that closes fast is worth money.

Kills it: zoning or licensing that does not transfer — a home-based book can be real cash flow and still be nearly unsellable; occupancy that is really two holiday weeks carrying eleven thin months; the owner as overnight staff, alarm system and head handler in one body; an incident history that surfaces in reviews before it surfaces in diligence; prepaid package liability larger than the seller admitted.

Move your number

Payments: packages, memberships and deposits are this trade's cash engine — card-on-file renewals, clean handling of package balances and fast checkout at pickup protect both margin and the liability ledger. That plumbing is the Finix payments team's work. Recurring revenue: weekday daycare memberships are the core buyers pay 3.27× for; automated waitlist offers for holiday boarding, rebooking prompts at pickup and win-backs for lapsed daycare members — run by AI and ops tools, not sticky notes — are ClaroPro's play. Systems: occupancy by day type, incident logs and staff scheduling in one system turn 'we're always full at the holidays' into three years of evidence; a Nova engineering team can build that reporting layer.

Separate your daycare from your boarding, then run the calculator for pet boarding.

This is an educational framework with shown math, not an appraisal; a real price is set by a real buyer on a specific day, after three years of occupancy reports print out. Every caveat here is on your side as the owner — they stop you overpaying for holiday spikes dressed as run-rate, and stop you underselling the weekday membership base that is the real prize. Never invent. Show the math. We're on the side of the business owner.