What dog boarding actually costs, by state (2026)

• The most expensive states to board a dog are New Jersey ($68), California ($60) and New York ($59) — measured as the median advertised price, per night.
• The least expensive are Missouri ($31), Kentucky ($35) and Arkansas ($36). The gap between the priciest and cheapest state median is $37 per night — in New Jersey it costs about 2.2× what it does in Missouri.
• Adjusted for each state’s cost of living (BEA Regional Price Parities, services), New Jersey is the most expensive in real terms ($65.68 adjusted) and Missouri the least ($32.57) — so the ranking is not just a map of where everything is expensive.
• Across every facility in our directory that publishes a price, the national median is $45 per night.

Prices are the lowest advertised nightly boarding rateper facility. p25/p75 are the 25th and 75th percentile facilities in the state. The adjusted column deflates the median by the state’s BEA services price level (US average = 100), so states can be compared like-for-like.

Download the full dataset (CSV) — includes every state, the below-bar rows flagged.

20 states have priced facilities in our dataset but fewer than 10, so we report insufficient data rather than a number a handful of facilities would swing: Mississippi (n=9), Montana (n=9), Utah (n=9), Vermont (n=7), West Virginia (n=7), Louisiana (n=6), Nevada (n=6), Oklahoma (n=6), Idaho (n=5), Alaska (n=4), Delaware (n=4), Hawaii (n=4), Nebraska (n=4), New Hampshire (n=4), New Mexico (n=4), District of Columbia (n=3), North Dakota (n=3), Rhode Island (n=3), South Dakota (n=3), Wyoming (n=2). They appear in the CSV with sample sizes but no published stats.

What was measured. The lowest advertised nightly rate for boarding a dog at the facility, published on the facility's own website. Where a facility lists separate rates by species, the dog rate is used, never the cat or small-animal rate — collected June 2026 as part of the Find My Kennel enrichment pipeline. One price per facility; facilities that publish no price are excluded rather than imputed (1,062 of the 23,975 boarding facilities in our directory publish one).

What “advertised” means. These are list prices, not transaction prices: the base tier before holiday surcharges, size upcharges, or multi-dog discounts. They will skew slightly below what a typical stay actually costs, uniformly across states. In-home pet sitters (a sitter stays at the owner's home), cat-only boarders, and daycare-only rates are excluded — this index measures boarding facilities, not sitting services; a home-based boarder that takes dogs into its own home counts. In September 2026 every facility's rate was re-read from the June page captures with a species-aware extractor that records the dog rate and flags client-home services, and each rate was checked against the facility's own address so a same-named business in another state can no longer supply the number. That audit corrected 46 rates that had captured a cat or small-animal price, removed 113 rows (sitters, cat-only boarders, unpriced rows, and rows whose website belonged to a same-named business elsewhere), and removed 436 in-home sitting services from the directory itself. The table and data file reflect the corrected set.

Publication bar.A state’s statistics are published only at n ≥ 10 facilities. Below-bar states are listed as insufficient data — never interpolated, never borrowed from neighbors.

Cost-of-living adjustment.The adjusted median divides each state’s median by its BEA Regional Price Parity for services (2024 vintage), US average = 100. This answers “where is it expensive relative to everything else there” rather than “where are prices high.”

Known limitations. Facilities that publish prices online skew larger and more urban than the industry as a whole; rural cash-only operations are underrepresented. Sample sizes vary by state and are printed next to every number so you can weigh them.

Freshness. The underlying directory re-syncs monthly; this study re-publishes with each refresh of the price data.

The dataset is free to use under CC BY 4.0 — cite it as “Find My Kennel Dog Boarding Price Index, June 2026 (revised September 2026)” with a link to this page. If you’re a journalist and want a cut we don’t publish here (metro-level, a specific state’s facility list, the facility-level rows behind any number), email kyle@findmykennel.com.

data.csv · collected June 2026 · published June 2026 · revised September 23, 2026