How much to charge for a bath and brush (the service that quietly eats your day)

Ask a groomer how much to charge for a bath and brush and the answer usually arrives as a shrug and a round number. Forty. Forty-five. Whatever the place across town does, minus five. It feels like the easy money on the menu — no clipper work, no scissoring, no shape to get wrong — so it gets priced like an afterthought.

Then you look up at 2pm on a Saturday, you’ve done four baths and one full groom, and the till says less than a normal Tuesday. The bath isn’t easy money. It’s the same tub, the same dryer, the same two hand-offs at the door, minus the part that pays.

How much to charge for a bath and brush: price the dryer, not the haircut

Every underpriced bath starts with the same mistake — timing the wash instead of the appointment. So time it properly once, door to door, on a real dog:

• Greeting, leash off, quick coat check and chat: 5–8 minutes
• Tub — wet down, shampoo, rinse, second wash if it’s a dirty coat: 15–25 minutes
• Drying: 15 minutes on a smooth coat, 45–60 on a husky or a golden
• Brush out, nails, ears, sanitary tidy if they’re included: 10–20 minutes
• Pickup, payment, notes, and wiping the tub and floor down: 8–12 minutes

That is 55 minutes for a small smooth coat and pushing two hours for a big double coat. Now apply the number you should already have from your hourly floor. Say you need $65 an hour on the table to cover the shop and pay yourself properly. The 55-minute dog is a $60 bath. The 110-minute dog is a $119 bath. If you are charging $45 flat for both, the second one is costing you roughly $74 in earned time every single visit.

Three bands, priced by coat instead of by weight

Weight-only pricing punishes you on exactly the dogs that take longest, because a 40-pound husky dries slower than a 70-pound boxer. Band by coat first, then adjust for size:

• Smooth and short coats (beagle, boxer, pug, staffie) — your base bath. Fast in the tub, fast under the dryer. This is the one you can genuinely offer at a friendly price.
• Medium and drop coats (cocker, cavalier, small doodle in good shape) — base + $15 to $20. The brush out is real work and the coat holds water.
• Heavy double coats (husky, shepherd, golden, chow) — base + $30 to $50, and be honest that it lands closer to full-groom money because it takes full-groom time. Add your de-shed treatment on top as a separate add-on, not as something bundled in for free.

Set a shop minimum underneath all of it — the smallest amount that makes it worth opening the door, cleaning the tub and taking the booking. For most solo groomers that number sits somewhere around 40 minutes of your hourly floor. Anything below it isn’t a cheap service, it’s a slot you gave away.

Write down what the bath is not

The bath and brush bleeds money in a second, quieter way: scope. The dog arrives, the owner says “can you just tidy the feet while he’s in there,” and forty dollars of work walks out on a forty-five dollar ticket.

Fix it with one line on your price list and one script at drop-off. Include the things you would do anyway — wash, dry, brush out, nails, ears, sanitary trim if that’s your standard. Exclude, in writing, anything that involves scissors, a shape, or a comb fighting a coat: face and feet trims, tidy-ups, dematting, and de-shedding treatments.

You’re not refusing. You’re naming the price before the work happens, which is the only moment a client will ever hear it without feeling ambushed. Say it in the same flat, friendly tone you’d use to say the shop closes at five, and almost nobody blinks.

A small ticket still costs you a whole slot

Here’s the part that separates a busy bath book from a profitable one. Bath clients cancel more casually than full-groom clients, because in their head it’s a small thing — and $50 feels like a small thing to lose. It isn’t. The slot cost you the same hour, and it’s the hardest hour to refill because nobody is browsing for a same-day bath at 8am.

Three habits keep that from happening. Take a card on file at booking for new clients regardless of ticket size, so the policy doesn’t only apply to the expensive dogs. Batch your baths into one part of the day rather than scattering them between full grooms, so a gap collapses instead of stranding you. And keep a short waitlist of bath-only regulars — they’re the easiest clients in your book to move on two hours’ notice, because they don’t need three hours free.

Price the bath off the clock, band it by coat, write down what it doesn’t include, and defend the slot like it was a $145 doodle. Do that and the bath stops being the service that fills your day without paying for it — and starts being the one that keeps your daily dog count sane.