Should You Open on Saturdays? 5 Things to Work Out First

The Question Behind the Question

"Should we open on Saturdays?" is almost never really about Saturdays. It is about whether the weekday diary is full, whether customers are asking, and whether the owner can face another day on the bench.

Those are all reasonable inputs. What usually gets skipped is the part that is not a matter of opinion: what a Saturday costs before a single pet arrives.

That number is published, it is dated, and it is worth knowing before the rest of the conversation.

Where this comes from. We founded and still help run a pet business, we speak with owners around Australia most days, and we read the same owner communities you do. The award figures below are cited to Fair Work. Everything else is observation and arithmetic, clearly labelled.

One important caveat. This is general information, not advice about your business. Award coverage depends on what your people are principally employed to do, and classifications differ. Run your own roles through Fair Work's Pay and Conditions Tool or get advice before you set a roster.

1. Saturday Costs More Before the First Pet Arrives

Fair Work states that the Miscellaneous Award (MA000104) covers employees working as pet groomers for a grooming business not covered by another award. We set out why in our guide to employment costs, including the common mix-up with the Animal Care and Veterinary Services Award.

Clause 20 of MA000104 sets the penalty rates, as a percentage of the minimum hourly rate:

What that is in dollars. MA000104 Level 1 is $25.74 an hour from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026. Saturday at 120 per cent is $30.89 an hour. For a casual, the weekday rate of 125 per cent is $32.18 and Saturday at 145 per cent is $37.32.

Either way, Saturday adds 20 percentage points, which at Level 1 is about $5.15 an hour, per person. Two people across an eight-hour Saturday is roughly $82 in extra wages, plus superannuation on top. That is the number to hold in your head for the rest of this article.

2. A Surcharge Only Has to Cover the Gap, Not Match the Penalty

This is where the maths trips people up, in both directions.

Seeing "145 per cent" makes a weekend surcharge sound like it needs to be enormous. It does not, and here is why: the penalty applies to the wage, not to the price of the service. Your rent does not rise on a Saturday. Neither do your products, your equipment or your insurance.

So the real question is not "what percentage is the penalty?" It is "how many extra dollars does this Saturday cost me, and how many appointments am I spreading that across?"

Work it in dollars. Take the extra wage cost for the day, divide it by the number of appointments you expect to complete, and you have the per-appointment cost of opening. Whether you then charge more than that, because the convenience is worth something, is a separate and entirely legitimate decision. Just make it knowingly rather than by picking a percentage that sounds about right.

3. There Are Three Honest Options and No Wrong Answer

Every business we speak to lands in one of three places, and all three are defensible.

What we hear most often is either a modest weekend surcharge, or simply not opening. The businesses that struggle are usually the ones that never made the decision at all: open on Saturday, same prices, penalty rates absorbed silently, and no view on whether it is working.

If you do surcharge, put it where people see it before they book, not at the counter afterwards. On the booking page, on the price list, in the confirmation. A surcharge that is a surprise is a complaint. A surcharge that was visible before booking is just a price.

4. Opening Saturday Should Not Mean Anyone Works Six Days

The most common way weekend trading goes wrong has nothing to do with money.

Saturday gets added on top of an existing Monday to Friday week. Someone promises themselves a weekday off in exchange, and then the diary fills that day too, because there is demand and it feels wasteful to turn it away. Within a couple of months, somebody is working six days and the rest day has become theoretical.

The structural fix is to roster Saturday into the week rather than onto it. Split rosters, so one part of the team works Monday to Friday and another works Tuesday to Saturday, keep everyone on five days with two consecutive days off, and mean it. This is also the only version that survives someone being unwell, because two people can cover the weekend rather than one.

Key Takeaway: If your Saturday only works when a specific person never takes a weekend, you do not have a weekend service. You have a single point of failure with a trading day attached.

5. The Test for Whether Your Saturday Actually Pays

Once it is running, the honest review is harder than it looks, because the obvious calculation flatters it.

The trap is the third step. If your Saturday is mostly weekday regulars who moved because the option appeared, you have added the cost of opening without adding any revenue. You have simply bought your existing customers a more expensive appointment slot.

New demand justifies a Saturday. Redistributed demand does not.

Both of those are answerable from your own booking history rather than from memory. What you want in front of you is what each day of the week actually earns on average, so you can see whether Saturday is genuinely carrying more than a weekday or simply holding the same people at a higher cost to run. Petboost works this out as part of its revenue forecast.

The fourth step matters just as much. If you are the weekend cover and you are not counting your own time as a cost, the day looks profitable because you are funding it personally.

The Bottom Line

Saturday is not a good idea or a bad one. It is a decision with a known price attached, and the price is public: 20 percentage points on every ordinary hour worked, more again for casuals, and 250 per cent if it falls on a public holiday.

Work out what that is in dollars for your business, decide deliberately which of the three options you are running, roster it so nobody works six days, and review it against new demand rather than moved demand. Whichever way you land after that is the right answer for you.

This is the fourth article in a five-part series on pricing and capacity in Australian pet businesses.

Sources

• Fair Work Ombudsman, Miscellaneous Award MA000104 summary. Penalty rates at clause 20. Verified 9 August 2026.
• Fair Work Ombudsman, Minimum wages increase from 1 July 2026. Verified 9 August 2026.
• Fair Work Ombudsman, Pay and Conditions Tool.
• Petboost, Employment costs for an Australian pet business, state by state.

Award rates and penalties are cited to Fair Work and were verified on the date shown. They change, and coverage depends on what your employees are principally employed to do. This article is general information, not advice about your business.