The numbers doing the rounds this month are worth pausing on. The US pet grooming services market crossed $11.5 billion in 2025 and is tracking toward roughly $13 billion by the end of 2026 — call it 7-9% annual growth, comfortably ahead of the broader pet care market. Inside that figure, mobile grooming is reportedly growing at 15-20% a year.
That is roughly double. And the easy reading of it, that clients want a van in the driveway, misses what is actually being bought.
What the client is paying the premium for
A mobile appointment is usually more expensive than the same groom in a salon. Clients pay it anyway, and when you ask them why, the answer is almost never "I like vans." It is some version of three things: my dog does not cope well with other dogs, I cannot get across town twice in one afternoon, and I know exactly when it is happening.
Strip out the vehicle and what is left is one animal at a time, at a named hour, with no waiting room. None of those are inherently mobile. They are service-design choices that mobile grooming happens to enforce by physical necessity.
That should be mildly annoying to anyone running a salon, because it means the fastest-growing part of your market is winning on attributes you could offer from a fixed address if you decided to.
The uncomfortable middle
Most salons run a model somewhere between two coherent extremes. At one end: high throughput, several dogs in the building, staggered drop-offs, a kennel or two, price per groom kept competitive. At the other: solo appointments, a fixed slot, a premium price, nobody else in the room.
The first is a volume business. The second is an access business. Both work. What does not work well is the accidental middle — a salon that has taken on the cost structure of the premium model, with fewer dogs in the building and longer slots, while still pricing and marketing like a volume shop.
If you have quietly drifted toward fewer dogs per day because the anxious ones take longer and the staff prefer it, you may already be running an access business at volume prices. That is the version of this trend that hurts, and it does not show up in a growth statistic.
Capacity is the constraint behind all of it
The other half of the story is the labour shortage, which industry commentary keeps naming as the primary limit on the sector. It is what caps how many chairs you can actually fill, and it is a large part of why prices have moved.
A shortage changes what a growth number means. When demand grows faster than qualified hands, the winners are not the businesses that added the most capacity — very few added any — but the ones that repriced the capacity they already had. Mobile operators tend to do this well because the constraint is unmissable: one van, one dog, a hard cap on the day. You cannot pretend you have slack.
A salon can pretend. There is always a theoretical extra dog if someone stays late.
What to actually do with this
Three things, in rough order of how quickly they pay.
Price the anxious-dog slot separately. If a reactive or elderly dog needs a quiet room and no overlap, that is a distinct product with a distinct cost. Many salons absorb it invisibly, which trains clients to expect premium handling at standard rates.
Count your real capacity, honestly. Not chairs — finishable grooms per groomer per day, at the pace your staff can sustain in a month with no callouts. Most schedules are built against an optimistic version of this number, which is why the day runs late and the late runs unpaid.
Sell the certainty, not the location. "Your slot is 10:00 and your dog will be the only one in the room" is the mobile pitch. It is available to a fixed salon that structures its day around it, and it is more defensible than competing on price with a van.
The part worth watching
Mobile growth is fast partly because the base is small — a segment can post 20% growth and still be a modest slice of the market. Do not read it as an exodus. Read it as a signal about what a growing share of clients will pay extra for, arriving through whichever channel offers it first.
Ask the last five clients who left you where they went, and whether the new place was cheaper. If it was not, the answer is in this article somewhere.