What dog daycare actually costs, by state (2026)

• The most expensive states to send a dog to daycare are California ($40), Washington ($40) and New Jersey ($39.50) — measured as the median advertised price, per day.
• The least expensive are Alabama ($20), South Carolina ($25) and Missouri ($25). The gap between the priciest and cheapest state median is $20 per day — in California it costs about 2.0× what it does in Alabama.
• Adjusted for each state’s cost of living (BEA Regional Price Parities, services), California is the most expensive in real terms ($38.99 adjusted) and Alabama the least ($20.68) — 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 $30 per day.

Prices are the lowest advertised daily daycare 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.

22 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: Arkansas (n=9), Rhode Island (n=9), Connecticut (n=8), Mississippi (n=7), New Hampshire (n=7), Vermont (n=7), Oklahoma (n=6), Utah (n=6), Alaska (n=5), Idaho (n=5), Montana (n=5), Nevada (n=5), Louisiana (n=4), District of Columbia (n=3), New Mexico (n=3), South Dakota (n=3), Delaware (n=2), Hawaii (n=2), Wyoming (n=2), Nebraska (n=1), North Dakota (n=1), West Virginia (n=1). They appear in the CSV with sample sizes but no published stats.

What was measured. The lowest advertised full-day daycare rate published by each facility — on its own website. Many are boarding facilities that also run a daycare program; the rate measured is the daycare full-day rate, never a half-day, walking, or overnight boarding rate (September 2026 audit) — 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 (846 of the 23,975 boarding & daycare facilities in our directory publish one).

What “advertised” means. These are list prices for a single full day: the walk-in rate before package, membership, or multi-dog discounts, and above any half-day rate. Regulars on packages typically pay less per day, so treat these as a comparable-across-states ceiling for one drop-in day. In September 2026 every rate was re-read from the June page captures with an extractor that rejects half-day, add-on and package prices and flags client-home services; rows whose website belonged to a same-named business in another state were removed.

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 Daycare 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