Dog Daycare for UK dog walkers
Run daycare your way — as a service, or as a short stay.
Ask ten dog daycare businesses how daycare works and you'll get ten answers. For some it's a dedicated day: the dogs arrive at nine, someone is with them until three, and nothing else can be booked in. For others the dogs are simply in your care while you carry on with your usual round of walks. PawLoop supports both, without a separate module to learn. Set daycare up as a normal service and it behaves like your walks — group capacity, recurring schedules, calendar colours, team assignment and availability protection. Set it up as a boarding type instead and it becomes a short stay, priced on drop-off and collection times, managed on the boarding schedule so your walking availability stays free.
What Dog Daycare does for your business
Group daycare with a capacity limit
Set your Daycare service as a group service with a maximum number of dogs, so several dogs share the same session and PawLoop stops you overfilling it.
Recurring daycare days
Bailey every Tuesday and Thursday? Create a recurring schedule once and PawLoop builds those daycare sessions into your calendar alongside your walks.
Availability protected when it should be
A daycare service occupies the assigned team member for its full duration, so nobody gets double-booked onto a walk during a 9am–3pm daycare day.
Or keep walking while dogs are with you
Book daycare as a short boarding stay instead and it uses the separate boarding schedule — dogs are in your care from 9am to 5pm while you carry on scheduling your normal walks.
Priced by how long they stay
The boarding route supports time-based price bands — flat rates such as £20 up to four hours and £30 up to eight, or straight hourly pricing — worked out from the drop-off and collection times.
Daycare as a service — the setup we recommend first
Create a Daycare service in Settings → Business alongside your walk types. Give it a name, a normal duration — six hours if your standard day runs 9am to 3pm — a price and a colour so it stands out on the calendar. From then on it books like any other service: choose the client and dog, pick Daycare, set the start time and assign a team member. It sits on your normal calendar with everything else.
Single or group, with a maximum group size
A single daycare service reserves that slot for one booking — nobody else can be added. A group service lets multiple dogs attend the same session, with a maximum group size you control. Most daycare businesses looking after several dogs together want the group option, and PawLoop keeps the session from being overbooked.
How a daycare service affects availability
This is the important difference. A daycare service counts towards the availability of whoever it's assigned to for the full duration. Daycare from 9am to 3pm assigned to Alex means PawLoop treats Alex as busy for those six hours and won't put a conflicting walk on top. That's exactly what you want when daycare is genuinely dedicated working time.
Recurring daycare days
Regular daycare clients are the norm, and the service route is the only one that supports recurring scheduling. Create a recurring schedule for the days the dog attends and PawLoop builds those sessions into the calendar week after week, alongside your recurring walks — no re-entering the same booking every Sunday night.
Daycare as a short boarding stay
The alternative is a Daycare boarding type. Configure time-based pricing bands — flat rates such as up to 4 hours £20, 4–8 hours £30, 8 hours+ £40, or hourly pricing if you charge by the exact length of stay — then book it from Boarding as a stay with a drop-off and collection time, for example 9:00am to 2:00pm. PawLoop works out the price from those times and manages it with your other stays.
Why the boarding route keeps your walks running
Boarding is managed on a separate schedule to your services. A dog in daycare from 9am to 5pm doesn't make a team member unavailable for that whole eight-hour block, so you can keep booking and completing your normal walks while the daycare dogs are with you. Recurring stays aren't supported, so this suits businesses where drop-off and collection times vary anyway.
Which setup should you use?
Ask one question: should daycare reserve a team member's time, or is the dog simply in your care while your normal walking schedule continues? Use a service if you have regular daycare clients, want recurring schedules, want daycare on the normal calendar, want single or group capacity, and want the person providing it treated as unavailable. Use boarding if daycare behaves like a short stay, times vary, you price by length of stay, and you need to keep scheduling walks throughout.
Dog Daycare questions, answered
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