Rover Taxes: What Dog Walkers and Pet Sitters Track, and What It's Worth
For anyone paid per walk or per stay — through Rover, through Wag, or through their own book of clients. You drive all day, you buy supplies out of pocket, and nothing was withheld from any of it.
Quick answer: How do taxes work on Rover income?
Rover and Wag pay you as an independent contractor, so no tax is withheld from a walk or a stay and the income is reportable whether or not a 1099 arrives. Against that income sit the ordinary costs of the work: the driving between clients — usually the largest single one — plus treats, bags, leashes, cleaning supplies, bonding and liability insurance, certifications, and the platform's service fee, which is reported in your gross but never reached your bank. The practical difficulty is not knowing the list; it is that most of these are small cash-or-card purchases that leave no paper trail unless something captures them as they happen. Estimates — confirm with your tax professional.
Free trial. Your books live in your own Google Drive.
You're self-employed, and nothing was withheld
This is the part that catches people in their first year. An employer takes tax out before the money reaches you. Rover and Wag do not — they pay you as an independent contractor, and the full amount of every walk lands in your account with nothing removed. What looks like good news in June is a bill in April.
The paperwork is genuinely confusing, and it is worth being honest about why rather than pretending it is tidy. Some sitters receive a 1099-NEC. Some receive a 1099-K. Some receive neither. Which one shows up depends on how the payments were processed and on reporting thresholds that have changed repeatedly at the federal level and differ by state.
We are deliberately not printing a threshold number on this page. It would date badly, and a wrong number is worse than no number. The part that does not change is this: you owe on the income regardless of which piece of paper arrives. Track what you earned, and treat any form that turns up as a cross-check rather than the source of truth.
Sources: IRS — Self-Employed Individuals Tax Center and IRS — Understanding Your Form 1099-K.
Estimates — confirm with your tax professional.
Mileage, which is usually the biggest one
A dog walker with six clients spread across a city drives all day for what looks, per walk, like a small fee. The driving is the dominant cost of this job and it is the one most consistently under-recorded, because no single trip feels significant enough to write down.
The specific leg people forget is the drive between two clients. Home to the first walk gets remembered. The 4.2 miles from the terrier in one neighbourhood to the labrador in the next does not — and across a full day, the between-client legs are often more total distance than the drives from home. Six appointments means five of those legs, every working day.
ExpenseBot reads the appointment addresses off your Google Calendar and estimates the distance at your country's rate — IRS in the US, CRA in Canada, HMRC in the UK. No background GPS app draining your phone while you are handling a lead. Because it works from calendar addresses rather than tracking you, the distances are estimates, which is the honest word for them.
The rates themselves change every year, so they live on the pages that own them: mileage tracker and mileage calculator.
Estimates — confirm with your tax professional.
The supplies you buy without noticing
Leashes. Poop bags, constantly. Treats — for the anxious one, for the one that will not come back, for all of them. Toys. A crate. A second set of towels because the first set is in the wash. Cleaning supplies after an accident. The replacement gear for whatever the boxer destroyed.
Boarding adds its own list: food, bedding, a baby gate for the stairs, and the fence repair after the escape artist found the gap.
None of these are large. That is precisely the problem. They are small, frequent, cash-or-card purchases that generate no paper trail at all unless something captures them at the moment they happen. A year of them is not a small number, but reconstructed from a bank statement next April they are indistinguishable from groceries — the line just reads the name of a big-box shop.
The costs of being allowed to do the job
There is a second category that has nothing to do with day-to-day supplies: the costs of being credentialed to do this work at all. Pet-sitter bonding and liability insurance. Pet first-aid and CPR certification. A business licence. A background check, which serious clients and platforms both expect. Professional-association dues.
These are ordinary costs of carrying on this trade, and unlike the supplies they almost always arrive as an email — which makes them the easiest category to capture automatically and the one people most often forget they paid for, because it happened once in February.
How each is treated is your tax professional's call. The job of this page is to make sure the record exists when you ask them.
Estimates — confirm with your tax professional.
The platform's cut is money you never saw
Rover and Wag take a service fee off the top of what the client pays. The consequence is a mismatch that surprises people every year: the gross figure reported for you can be larger than the amount that actually reached your bank. If you reconcile your books against your bank balance and nothing else, the difference simply goes missing.
You will notice we have not quoted a percentage. That is deliberate — platform fee structures change, and a number typed from memory into a page like this is exactly how misinformation ages into confident fact. Your own payout statements carry the real figure for your account. The durable point needs no number at all: gross reported, net received, and the difference is a cost of doing the business.
The general mechanics of platform fees are covered in more depth in our guide to platform fee deductions.
Estimates — confirm with your tax professional.
The pet-sitter and dog-walker capture checklist
Every cost in this trade falls into one of four capture routes. This table is about how the record gets made — not about what is deductible, which is a question for your accountant with your actual numbers in front of them.
| Cost | How it gets captured | What to keep |
|---|---|---|
| Driving between clients | Calendar — ExpenseBot estimates the distance between appointment addresses | The appointments themselves; keep addresses in the calendar entry |
| Treats, bags, leashes, toys | Photo at the counter; Gmail scan if ordered online | The receipt image — these are mostly paper and vanish fastest |
| Replacement gear a dog destroyed | Photo or Gmail scan | Receipt, plus a note of which client's stay it followed |
| Cleaning supplies after an accident | Photo at the counter | Receipt — small, frequent, and almost never recorded |
| Boarding costs: food, bedding, baby gate, fence repair | Gmail scan for online orders; photo for anything bought in person | Receipt, tagged to the stay it was for |
| Bonding and liability insurance | Gmail scan — insurers email renewals | The policy documents and renewal notices |
| Pet first-aid certification, background check, licence | Gmail scan — these arrive as emailed confirmations | Certificate and payment confirmation |
| Professional-association dues | Gmail scan | The annual invoice |
| Platform service fees | Manual, from your payout statements | The payout statements — they evidence gross against net |
| Phone and the plan that runs the app all day | Gmail scan — carriers email bills | Monthly bills; business-use apportionment is your accountant's call |
The rows that get skipped are always the paper ones — treats, bags, cleaning supplies. They are also the ones that recur most. That is the whole argument for photographing the receipt at the counter rather than putting it in a pocket.
Per-client and per-walk profit
This is the section that makes the exercise worth more than a tidier tax return. Tag your costs and your income to a client or a stay, and ExpenseBot rolls them up against each other. Suddenly you can see what each piece of work actually cleared.
Here is a deliberately round, illustrative example — these are not real rates, and your own numbers will look nothing like them:
Illustrative only — not real rates. Say a day of six walks bills $150 gross. The platform's cut comes off that before it reaches you. You drove roughly 30 miles across the day, most of it between clients rather than from home, and that mileage is estimated at your country's rate. You bought $12 of bags and treats on the way to the second walk.
The number that matters is not the $150. It is what remains after the cut, the driving and the supplies — and that number is invisible unless all three were captured.
Run that across a month and the comparisons get uncomfortable in a useful way. The repeat boarding client who needs replacement bedding twice, leaves a mess each time and lives forty minutes out can genuinely clear less than the three regular walks you turned down to take them. Without per-client rollups that is a feeling. With them it is a number, and you can act on it.
Related: profit by client and income and expense tracking.
How ExpenseBot captures it without you filing anything
ExpenseBot is an expense tracking app that reads receipts out of Gmail into a categorized Google Sheet in your own Google Drive, and tags each cost so it stays attributable to the client or stay it belongs to. For this trade there are three capture routes, all writing into the same sheet:
- Nightly Gmail scan. Connect a mailbox once and ExpenseBot scans it overnight for receipt emails and platform payout notices. It labels what it reads so nothing is double-counted, never sends email, and never deletes anything.
- Photo capture. Photograph the paper receipt at the pet-store counter and ExpenseBot reads the vendor, date and amount off it. This is the route that catches the category that leaks worst.
- Calendar-derived mileage. Your appointments already carry the addresses; ExpenseBot estimates the distances between them so the between-client legs stop going unrecorded.
Then tag as it lands — by client, by stay, by whatever the real shape of your book is. Tagging on capture is the difference between a rollup you can trust and one assembled from memory in April.
What it deliberately is not: ExpenseBot is not a general ledger, does not do double-entry accounting, does not run budgets or forecasts, and does not file anything for you. It is spend capture and record-keeping — the layer that hands a clean set of books to whoever does the filing.
At tax time
Everything lives in a categorized Google Sheet in your own Google Drive — you own it and you keep it if you ever stop using ExpenseBot. Reports export to QuickBooks Online, Xero or Sage in one click, or you can simply share the sheet.
Accountants use ExpenseBot free. If you have never separated the business side from the household side, that page is the one to read next — it is the single most common problem in this trade, because the treats for clients and the food for your own dog come from the same shop on the same card.
If you would rather start from a blank structure than from live capture, the expense tracker template is a reasonable place to begin.
Estimates — confirm with your tax professional.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to pay taxes on Rover income if I didn't get a 1099?
Income is reportable whether or not a form arrives. Rover and Wag pay you as an independent contractor, and the reporting thresholds that decide whether a 1099-K or 1099-NEC gets issued have changed more than once — and differ by state. Waiting to see what shows up in the mail is the wrong way round: track what you actually earned, and the forms become a cross-check rather than the source of truth. Estimates — confirm with your tax professional.
Can I deduct the driving between clients?
Business driving between appointments is ordinarily a business cost, and for a dog walker it is usually the largest one. The leg people forget is the drive from one client to the next — across a day of six walks that is often more total distance than the drives from home. ExpenseBot estimates the distances from the addresses in your Google Calendar at your country's rate (IRS in the US, CRA in Canada, HMRC in the UK). Because it works from calendar addresses rather than GPS, the distances are estimates. Confirm the treatment with your tax professional.
What about treats, bags and leashes I buy for clients' dogs?
They are captured like any other business purchase — photograph the receipt at the counter, or let the nightly Gmail scan pick up the emailed one if you ordered online. This is the category that leaks worst, because the purchases are small, constant, and mostly paper. Whether each one is expensed is a question for your tax professional.
Is my own dog's food a business expense?
No — that is a personal cost, and mixing it in is the most common mistake in this trade. The business side is what you buy for the animals you are paid to care for. The two get muddled easily because they come from the same aisle of the same shop on the same card, which is exactly why tagging at the moment of capture matters. See our page on separating business and personal expenses for how to keep the line clean.
Rover's fee came out before I got paid. Does that count?
The platform's cut is money reported as your gross that never reached your bank. Track the fee as a business cost so your books reconcile against what actually landed. We are not going to quote you a percentage here — platform fee structures change, and a number typed from memory is how a page like this goes stale and wrong. Check your own payout statements for the real figure. Estimates — confirm with your tax professional.
Can I see what I actually cleared on a boarding stay?
Yes — tag the costs and the income to the same client or stay, and ExpenseBot rolls the costs up against what you were paid. This is the number that changes decisions. The repeat boarding client who trashes the house, needs replacement bedding twice and lives forty minutes away can genuinely be worth less than the three walks you turned down to take them.
I've been walking dogs for two years and never tracked any of this. Can I catch up?
Partly, and the honest answer is that it depends on what still exists. Anything that generated an email — online supply orders, platform payout notices, insurance renewals — can be recovered by scanning your Gmail history, and ExpenseBot's historical scan is built for exactly that. What cannot be recovered is the paper: the counter receipt for treats in March of last year is gone. Start capturing now so this year is complete, and take whatever history the scan recovers to your tax professional.
Do I need a separate bank account for this?
It is not required to use ExpenseBot, and plenty of walkers run everything through one account. It does make life easier. What actually matters for the books is that each business cost gets captured and tagged when it happens, rather than reconstructed from a bank statement in April — a statement line reading the name of a big-box shop does not tell anyone whether that trip was leashes for clients or groceries.
Does this work if most of my clients are my own, not through a platform?
Yes, and it is arguably a better fit. Off-platform work has no payout statement doing part of the bookkeeping for you, so the capture and the per-client rollups carry more weight. You track the income alongside the costs and get the same per-client profit view — the platform is just one source of income among others.
Can my accountant get at this?
Yes, and accountants use ExpenseBot free. Your books live in a categorized Google Sheet in your own Google Drive, which you keep if you ever stop using ExpenseBot, and reports export to QuickBooks Online, Xero or Sage in one click. Everything on this page describes what a cost is and how to record it; what is deductible in your situation is their call to make with you.
Stop losing the small stuff
The bags, the treats, the drive between the terrier and the labrador, and the cut you never saw — all captured as they happen, in a Google Sheet you own.