What dog grooming actually costs, by state (2026)

• The most expensive states to get a dog groomed are Massachusetts ($80), California ($75) and New Jersey ($75) — measured as the median advertised price, per groom.
• The least expensive are Arkansas ($35), Iowa ($40) and Michigan ($50). The gap between the priciest and cheapest state median is $45 per groom — in Massachusetts it costs about 2.3× what it does in Arkansas.
• Adjusted for each state’s cost of living (BEA Regional Price Parities, services), Massachusetts is the most expensive in real terms ($77.78 adjusted) and Arkansas the least ($36.72) — 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 $65 per groom.

Prices are the lowest advertised grooming priceper 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.

16 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: Louisiana (n=9), Nebraska (n=9), Montana (n=8), New Hampshire (n=6), Delaware (n=5), Hawaii (n=5), Maine (n=5), Mississippi (n=5), New Mexico (n=5), Kansas (n=4), West Virginia (n=4), North Dakota (n=3), Vermont (n=3), Rhode Island (n=2), South Dakota (n=2), Alaska (n=1). They appear in the CSV with sample sizes but no published stats.

What was measured. The lowest advertised grooming price published by each shop — on its own website. Grooming menus scale with dog size and coat, so this is the entry price: typically the small-dog base groom. Self-serve wash stations and bird-only groomers are excluded (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 (1,294 of the 51,193 grooming shops in our directory publish one).

What “advertised” means. These are list prices for the cheapest advertised groom. A large dog or a heavy coat costs materially more everywhere, so treat the numbers as a floor that is comparable across states — not what any particular dog will pay. In September 2026 rows whose website belonged to a same-named shop in another state were removed, so no price comes from a different business.

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 Grooming 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