Someone asked a good question in a Facebook group for dog daycare owners and staff this week. If you were designing a brand-new daycare from scratch, what would your top three must-haves be, from a staff perspective?
The most popular answer was one word, written three times. Drains.
When I read the thread, 27 people had reacted to that answer. The next most popular had eight, and it started with drains as well. Further down, someone listed three completely different things and then added, in capitals, that they agreed about the drains.
Most of the answers read as American. HVAC, which came up twice, means heating, ventilation and air conditioning. Very little on the list changes in Australia, although our summers make one of the answers more pressing here.
What I liked about the thread is that every answer is a job. Each one makes the hosing, the doors, the heat or the head count easier to manage, and that is most of a daycare shift.
One person listed their three and finished by saying they wished they had all of them now. That is the case for asking your staff before you ask a builder. You can hire another person next month. Adding a drain later means cutting the slab.
If you're designing or refitting a dog daycare, here is what they asked for, grouped, with what each item looks like in an Australian build. Several already have posts of their own, linked as we go.
Drains, and everything that goes with them
Staff put drains first because a daycare floor gets cleaned all day long. Every accident indoors turns into a mop and bucket carried across a room full of dogs if there is nowhere close for the water to go. Water that sits is where the smell comes from, and it's what people and dogs slip on.
What matters is where the water goes. Each room and each yard needs its own fall to its own drain, so no area ever drains through another. Use channel drains with grates you can actually lift, and put a hair and solids trap before anything a plumber has to come out for. Then ring your water authority about trade waste before the concrete goes in.
We went through falls, floor coatings and drainage in The Decisions You Cannot Undo. It was written for boarding kennels, and most of it applies to a daycare.
A drain on its own doesn't clean anything. Put a tap and a hose reel next to each one, inside and out, so nobody drags a hose through the middle of a playgroup.
Storage made the list too, and it belongs here. The mops, the disinfectant, the spare leads and the towels need to live beside the rooms that use them. When the cupboard is at the far end of the building, every clean-up starts with a walk.
One answer asked for a good, high-grade disinfectant and proper cleaning protocols to go with the drains. The protocol is the half that fails. Most disinfection problems in kennels come from a surface wiped dry after thirty seconds when the label asked for several minutes, which is why we called that post Contact Time Is the Bit Everyone Skips.
Heating and cooling
Three answers asked for proper temperature control, including one that wanted a temperature-controlled indoor room with easy access to the yards. Here, that mostly means cooling. A room of dogs playing hard on a January afternoon heats up quickly, and so do the people working in it.
Start by keeping the heat out. Insulate the roof before you size the air conditioning, because every bit of heat that never gets in is heat the air conditioner doesn't have to remove. After that it's airflow, with cross-ventilation and high vents so the hot air has somewhere to go. Shade the western side of the building as well.
Outside, size the shade for three in the afternoon, when the sun is low and coming from the west. A sail that looks right at noon leaves the yard exposed at the hour that matters. The Yard Will Cost You Twice covers the shade and the surface that goes under it.
Doors and toilet breaks
The most practical idea in the thread was two doors into every yard. The dogs inside crowd one door, so the dog coming in uses the other and never has to push through them. Anyone who has walked a new dog into a yard of excited ones will see why.
That's separate from the airlock at the front, which every daycare needs so that no single gate ever opens onto the street. Plan for both.
Direct access from the indoor rooms to outside came up twice, for toilet breaks and for play. If a toilet break means walking a group through reception or down a corridor, it happens less often than it should, and the floor inside is where you find out.
Yards sized for the person watching them
Two answers pull in different directions here. One wanted the largest piece of land they could get. Another wanted yards that are spacious enough but not oversized.
Both are right, because land and yards are different things. A single huge yard puts more ground between the person watching and the dog they need to reach, and when play tips over into a fight those seconds count. The land is for having more yards. Several yards, each sized for the number of dogs one person can properly watch, give you the room without losing sight of anyone.
If the small-dog yard and the big-dog yard sit side by side, put some distance between them or block the view. One person described the fence fighting they deal with now because their two yards are next door to each other. It's the same problem as mesh between kennel runs. Dogs who can see each other through a fence all day will fight through it, and the whole place gets louder.
Containment fencing made the list as well. Fences mostly fail at the bottom, where a dog gets a paw under and then a nose, or beside something a dog can use as a step.
Somewhere that isn't the play floor
People asked for kennels or suites set up properly for naps and time-outs, and for a feeding area away from the hustle of the day.
Plan the feeding room early. Feeding dogs in the middle of a group invites trouble over food, and a room with a door lets staff give the dogs who need a midday meal their lunch without clearing a yard to do it.
A time-out space works the same way. A dog who has had enough, or is heading that way, needs somewhere calm to reset, well away from the play. The bedding in those rooms matters more than it looks, and mostly comes down to how it washes and dries.
Noise, which didn't come up
None of the answers I could see mentioned noise, and it's the one I'd add. One study of working kennels found daytime peaks that regularly went past 100 decibels and often reached 125, mostly from barking, with cleaning adding to it.
Australia's code of practice on managing noise at work has a simple test. If you have to raise your voice to talk to someone about a metre away, the noise is likely to be hazardous to hearing. If that describes your indoor play room at nine on a busy morning, get it measured.
If you employ people, controlling that noise is part of your duty to them. We went through what that involves, including hearing tests, in Your Dryer Is Louder Than the Law Allows.
Noise is far cheaper to design out than to fix. An indoor room with hard surfaces everywhere echoes, and once the dogs start, it feeds itself. There are acoustic panels made to survive a hose, and the ceiling is where most of the echo happens.
The answers that weren't about the building
The rest were about people. One person asked for more education and training, better wages and benefits, proper staffing ratios, and experienced staff rather than a floor of teenagers and twenty-somethings in their first job. Another asked for effective training and certifications. The person who wished they had it all now wanted enough people to watch the dogs.
You can't pour any of that in concrete, but most of it gets decided before you open.
Pay comes first, because it decides who stays long enough to get good at this. If you're working out what a staff member really costs once super and workers compensation are added, we've done it state by state.
Training is easy to leave to the first shift. Write down what a new starter has to know before they're left alone with a yard, and teach it before they need it. Reading dog body language and knowing what to do when play turns into a fight are the two I'd put at the top. Our SOP framework is a reasonable place to start.
The ratio gets decided when the booking is taken, usually the day before. By the time you notice you're short on the floor, the dogs are already booked. So the number of dogs per person has to live in whatever takes your bookings.
This is the one part of the thread our software touches. We sell booking software to daycares and make money if you choose ours, so weigh the next two paragraphs with that in mind.
In Petboost, each person on the roster has a Pets at a Time number, which is how many dogs they can safely watch at once, and the system won't book more daycare dogs onto them at once than that. Each yard can be set up as its own resource with its own limit, so the small-dog yard and the big-dog yard fill separately. A large-dog service can count as two places instead of one, and you can cap how many dogs with a particular attribute are in at the same time. When a yard is full, online booking stops offering those times.
Gingr, a facility system from the US, does much of this too. It has a cap for the whole facility and limits per lodging, by head count or by weight. It can also limit how many dogs with behaviour or special-needs icons book each day, and it stops online bookings once you're full. Whichever you use, set it from the roster first: a yard with room for twenty dogs only holds as many as the person watching it can handle.
Ask the person holding the hose
If you're planning a new daycare or a refit, walk the plan with your most experienced staff member before it goes to the builder. Ask them to take you through a morning on it: where the dogs come in, where they go to the toilet, where lunch happens and where the hose is. They'll spot things on paper that you and the builder won't.
Before anything is drawn, check the planning pathway with your council, because it varies by state. In Victoria, a dog daycare is domestic animal boarding, which the planning scheme files under agriculture. In NSW, the metro councils we checked have no separate animal business permit and deal with pet businesses through planning approval. Which councils require a permit and the Victorian planning guide go through both.
How capacity works in Petboost → · Petboost for dog daycare →
Sources
- Work Health and Safety (Managing Noise and Preventing Hearing Loss at Work) Code of Practice 2015, Federal Register of Legislation. The one-metre test, and the exposure standard: an eight-hour average of 85 dB(A), or a peak of 140 dB(C). State and territory regulators publish their own versions.
- G. Sales, R. Hubrecht, A. Peyvandi, S. Milligan and B. Shield, Noise in dog kennelling: is barking a welfare problem for dogs?, Applied Animal Behaviour Science 52(3-4), 321-329, 1997.
- Gingr, Avoid overbooking chaos with Gingr's capacity management tools. Checked 11 September 2026.
The thread that prompted this post is a discussion in a Facebook group for dog daycare owners and staff. The people in it are not named here, and nothing has been quoted that would identify them.