The Pet Care Access Gap

• 55.4 million people (25.8%) live in a town whose nearest dedicated dog daycare is more than 10 miles away; 22.7 million are more than 25 miles away. The median town is 19.4 miles from one.
• Veterinary care is the least unequal service we measured — a median of 2.3 miles, with only 1.1% of residents beyond 10 miles. Boarding is close behind at 4.7 miles. The gap is not "pet care" in general; it is specific to the newer, more urban service categories.
• Self-serve dog washes sit at a median of 13.4 miles, with 36.9 million residents beyond 10 miles — a gap that tracks the fact that the format is still concentrated in farm-store chains and a few metros.
• For daycare the state spread is wide: the typical town in South Dakota is 83.7 miles from one, against 1.8 miles in District of Columbia.

Median is across places — the typical American town, not the typical American. The population columns carry the other reading: how many residents live in a town beyond that distance. Both are reported because they answer different questions and disagree sharply for services clustered in big cities.

Every state, ordered by how far its typical town sits from a dedicated dog daycare — the sparsest of the five services and so the one where geography bites hardest. The full table for all five services is in the CSV.

Download the full dataset (CSV) — all five services, every state, plus the national rows.

What was measured. For each Census place with a published population and centroid (19,333 of them, covering 214.8 million residents), the great-circle distance from the place centroid to the nearest live listing carrying each category in the Find My Kennel directory. Directory data vintage: September 2026.

Straight-line, not drive time. Every distance here is as-the-crow-flies. Real travel is always longer, so each figure is a floor on the true burden — the gap is at least this large, never smaller.

Contiguous US only. Alaska and Hawaii are excluded. A straight-line distance from an island or a roadless Alaskan village to the nearest facility is not a measure of access — our first cut put Honolulu 2,385 miles from a self-serve wash, which really means "we list none in Hawaii," measured across an ocean nobody drives. Rather than publish that as a finding, we scope the study to the 48 contiguous states and DC and say so.

Places, not people, are the unit. The medians describe the typical town. Because towns vary enormously in size, we report resident counts separately rather than implying the median American lives at the median distance. Residents outside incorporated places are not counted at all, so the population totals here (214.8 million) are smaller than the US population.

Dog daycare is undercounted, and that matters here. Our daycare category is derived from facility names because the upstream place taxonomies carry no daycare leaf. That means a boarding kennel that also runs daycare but doesn't say so in its name is not counted as one. Read the daycare row as dedicated dog daycare, and read the boarding row (4.7 miles) as the fair comparator for "somewhere to leave the dog." The true daycare gap is somewhere between the two, closer to the daycare figure in cities and to boarding in rural areas.

A gap is a floor, not a proof of absence. A distance here means we know of no closer facility. Our directory is built from open place data plus our own enrichment and does not claim to be exhaustive, so a genuinely unlisted rural operator would widen a gap that isn't really there. This biases every number in the same direction: toward overstating distance.

Freshness. The underlying directory re-syncs monthly and this study rebuilds with it, so the numbers move as facilities open and close.

Free to use under CC BY 4.0 — cite it as “Find My Kennel Pet Care Access Gap, September 2026” with a link to this page. Journalists wanting a cut we don’t publish (a single state’s full town list, metro-level distances) can ask via the contact details on our data page.

data.csv · see also our measured price studies.