A number worth sitting with
The American Pet Products Association's 2026 Dog Report puts a hard number on something most groomers have felt anecdotally for a couple of years: 51% of dog owners say they now handle routine grooming at home. Spending on salon and mobile grooming visits slipped in 2025 as more owners picked up clippers, wipes, and de-shedding tools between professional appointments, or instead of them.
It would be easy to read that as bad news for the industry. It isn't, but it does mean the old pitch, that grooming at home is too hard for most owners, is losing its force. Dog wipes and no-tears shampoo have gotten good enough that a huge chunk of routine maintenance no longer needs a professional. The businesses that will feel this hardest are the ones whose entire value proposition was routine upkeep: a monthly bath-and-brush with nothing else attached.
Where the pressure isn't showing up
Here's the part that doesn't make the headlines: none of this touches the things a salon can do that a bathtub and a set of wipes can't. Breed-specific cuts, hand-stripping, de-matting a neglected coat, sedation-free handling of an anxious or reactive dog, spotting a skin issue or a lump early because you see the dog every six weeks — that's still entirely a professional's job, and owners who are doing more at home are, if anything, more attentive to the parts they can't do themselves.
The at-home shift is really a segmentation event. It's sorting your client base into "wanted the convenience, now handles it solo" and "wants the outcome only a trained groomer delivers." The mistake is treating both groups the same way.
Three ways to respond, not react
Stop competing on the basic bath. If a client can get most of the way there with a cheap bottle of no-rinse shampoo, racing them to the bottom on price for a plain wash-and-dry is a losing game. Let that service exist, but stop building your marketing around it.
Make the skill visible. Anything that requires training, breed-standard trims, creative grooming, de-matting, handling dogs with anxiety or mobility issues, is exactly where the DIY wave can't follow you. Photograph it, post it, price it like the specialty work it is.
Sell the maintenance gap, not the whole routine. Owners doing more at home still need someone to catch what they can't see and fix what they can't manage. A quarterly coat-health check or de-matting and trim package, positioned as a complement to at-home care rather than a replacement for it, meets owners where the data says they actually are.
What this looks like on a booking page
The repositioning doesn't have to be dramatic to work. A menu that currently lists "Bath," "Bath & Trim," and "Full Groom" as near-identical line items priced a few dollars apart is, functionally, still competing on the commodity work. Splitting the menu instead around outcomes — "Maintenance Refresh" for dogs already kept up at home, "Coat Restoration" for de-matting and neglected coats, "Breed Standard Cut" for owners who want a specific, technical result — makes the skill difference visible before a client even books, rather than something they only notice once they're in the chair.
It also changes what a front-desk conversation sounds like. Instead of quoting a price for "a bath," the question becomes what the dog actually needs, which naturally steers price-sensitive at-home groomers toward the lighter, cheaper options and steers owners who want a specific look toward the higher-margin specialty work — without either group feeling upsold.
The takeaway
At-home grooming isn't shrinking the market for professional groomers; it's shrinking the market for professional grooming that doesn't need to be professional. The salons that reposition around skill, not routine, are the ones this trend actually helps, because it clears out the price-sensitive commodity work and leaves more room, and more willingness to pay, for what only a trained groomer can do.