Dog sitter vs boarding vs daycare: who has to record what

Two tabs are open. One is a kennel with a price per night and a photo of a clean run; the other is a sitter who will stay at your place and send pictures at bedtime. Both are selling on price and convenience. The difference that outlasts the trip is which of them is obliged to write anything down about your animal.

In England, boarding for dogs is licensed as three separate activities, and every one of them must keep a legal register of the dogs in its care. A sitter who works inside your own home needs no licence, so no register exists. Choosing a sitter does not remove the paperwork. It moves it onto you.

What is the difference between a dog sitter and boarding?

The Animal Welfare (Licensing of Activities Involving Animals) (England) Regulations 2018 name four licensable activities under the heading of boarding: providing boarding for cats, providing boarding in kennels for dogs, providing home boarding for dogs, and providing day care for dogs. A sitter who comes to your house appears in none of them.

Which one applies turns on whose roof your dog is under, and for how long. The operator’s own domestic home is home boarding, and DEFRA’s day care guidance says so plainly: a business that looks after dogs in the business owner’s own home is licensed under home boarding. The home boarding guidance fixes the edge of that, requiring the dog to be kept “inside a domestic home” which is not “in outdoor kennels”. Kennel boarding takes the overnight stays that fall outside a domestic home, and the kennel boarding guidance sends the daytime trade elsewhere: “businesses that provide day care for dogs and do not keep them overnight” need the day care licence instead. Day care is that daytime version, and Schedule 4 draws the line: no dog may be kept on the premises overnight. Your own house sits outside the whole list.

What is each one required to hold about your dog?

Schedule 4 of the same regulations sets out what the register must contain. For every dog: its microchip number, your address, phone and emergency contact details, the name and contact details of its normal veterinarian and any insurance, its medical and behavioural history including parasite treatment and exercise restrictions, its diet, any required consent forms, the dates of its most recent vaccination, worming and flea treatments, and details of any medical treatment it is receiving.

The three dog registers differ in two places worth checking before you book. Kennels and home boarders must record “the name, postal address, telephone number and email address of a local contact in an emergency”; the day care list in Part 4 stops at your own contact and emergency details. Day care also records the date of attendance, where the other two record arrival and departure.

Every yes in that table depends on the activity being run as a commercial business. The register is the operator’s own obligation. What a kennel asks you to hand over on the day is a separate list, and it is the subject of boarding your dog for the first time.

Which option leaves the record-keeping with you?

The sitter. DEFRA’s statutory guidance on dog day care licensing lists “businesses that look after dogs in their owner’s homes, such as, dog sitters and dog walkers” among the activities that do not require a licence. The home boarding guidance excludes the same people from the other side: “businesses that look after the dog within its normal place of residence, such as a dog sitter”.

The Schedule 4 register is a condition attached to a licence. Where no licence is needed, that condition never lands, so nothing in law requires your sitter to hold your vet’s number, a local contact for the night you are unreachable, or a note of the medication your dog is halfway through.

There is a second gap on the licensed side, and both guidance documents state it in the same words: if someone has a trading income below the HMRC trading income allowance, they do not require a licence for their activities. The person boarding two dogs a month in their spare room may be operating perfectly well and keeping no register at all.

What a daycare asks of you before the first day, from vaccination timing to the temperament assessment, is in dog daycare first day.

Does any of this apply outside England?

The split above belongs to England alone. It comes from a single statutory instrument that carries the country’s name in its own title, and nothing obliges another country, or another US state, to draw the same lines or to require a register at all.

The United States runs it state by state. Colorado, for one, has its own programme: the state Department of Agriculture describes the Pet Animal Care and Facilities Act as “a licensing and inspection program dedicated to protecting the health and well-being of pet animals in facilities throughout Colorado”. Read the rules where your operator trades before you assume a record of your dog exists anywhere but your own phone. Checking a boarding licence shows where those rules and registers are published.

What has to be written down either way?

Three things, and you are the one who writes them: the routine in enough detail that a stranger can run it, the current state of the animal on the day you hand over, and who may authorise veterinary treatment while you are out of contact, up to what amount.

A register describes who the dog is. Schedule 4 asks for the dog’s diet and for any medical treatment the dog is receiving, and both land there as facts about the animal; the times you run them on stay in your house. The evening meal is at six, the last dose went in at seven, the next one is due tomorrow. Whoever takes the dog needs that by the first evening.

The treatment clause carries the money and gets skipped anyway. Name who may say yes to surgery, and set the amount they can approve before they have to reach you. The contract side is worked through in what a pet sitting contract should cover, the handover in the pet sitter handoff checklist, and the wider system in the guide to sharing pet care.

Where Dana fits

Whichever option you choose, the record that follows your dog home is the one you keep. Dana holds the routine as tasks with times and doses, and every completed one carries who did it and when, so the week you were away reads back as a log. Shared care gives a sitter their own access that expires on the date you set, and the health record keeps the vaccine dates, the medication list and the microchip number in one place. The Records Vault, which ships with Pro, shares the certificate itself through a code-gated link that expires, so a kennel asking for proof opens it in a browser with the code you sent them.