Your Clients' Bosses Are Now Paying for Your Services. Do They Know You Exist?

Some employers are now paying for pet care as a workplace benefit. Here is what that means for dog walkers, sitters, and boarders — and how to get in front of it.

Something is quietly shifting inside HR departments at major U.S. employers, and it is directly relevant to your business.

CNBC reported this week that backup care — the short-term, employer-subsidized support employees use when regular childcare or eldercare falls through — has expanded to include pets. Companies including Best Buy, Merck, and Harvard University are now offering pet care as part of their employee benefits packages, routed through platforms like Wellthy and Bright Horizons.

The mechanics are straightforward: an employee who needs last-minute coverage for their dog can exchange a backup care credit for a subsidized booking with a vetted dog walker, sitter, or boarder — the same way they would book emergency childcare.

Bright Horizons, one of the largest backup care providers in the country, routes pet care bookings through Rover and Wag!, giving employees credits toward dog walking, pet sitting, boarding, and cat drop-in visits. Wellthy, which serves employees at major companies across the country, launched its Pet Care Concierge service in summer 2025, expanding beyond basic bookings to help employees navigate pet insurance, source therapy animals, and find emergency boarding and veterinarians. Around half of Wellthy's corporate clients now make pet care access available to their employees.

The data behind this expansion is not abstract. A survey of more than 1,000 full-time pet-owning employees found that 75 percent had missed at least one workday in the past year due to a pet care issue. As return-to-office mandates have spread following the remote-work era — during which pet ownership surged — the gap between what employees need and what their regular arrangements can provide has become an acute workforce problem. Smart companies are closing that gap by subsidizing care.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR PET PROS

A new client acquisition channel is forming, and it runs through corporate benefits portals rather than Instagram or Google. That is a meaningful shift.

Clients who come through employer backup care programs are, by definition, employed and urban, living in households where both work and care are competing priorities. They are also clients being actively directed toward professional services by their employer — not clients who stumbled across your profile while scrolling. That distinction matters. Backup care clients are not price shopping. They are need-matching, often with subsidized credits, and they tend to convert into recurring clients once they have had a good experience.

For dog walkers and pet sitters specifically: Bright Horizons routes its employee clients to Rover and Wag!, which means your presence and rating on those platforms has become, effectively, a B2B sales channel whether you realize it or not.

HOW TO USE THIS INFORMATION

- Consider reaching out directly to HR departments or office managers at large employers in your area. Introduce yourself as a local pet care resource for employees who are back in the office and need reliable coverage. This is an outreach angle that almost no independent pet professional is currently working. A short, professional email or a leave-behind one-pager can open doors that a social post never will.

- Update your website and booking language to speak to the working professional client explicitly. Phrases like "last-minute availability," "same-day booking," "reliable recurring visits," and "vetted and insured" map directly to what this client is looking for when they are under pressure.

- Create content that speaks to the return-to-office reality your clients are navigating. Something as direct as "Back in the office? Here is how we make sure your dog is covered" acknowledges your client's actual situation and tends to get shared among coworkers — exactly the word-of-mouth vector that grows a local service business.

CONTENT SPARK

Content idea: "Your company might actually pay for this." A short reel or caption walking your audience through the basics of pet care backup benefits and how to ask their HR department if they qualify. It educates your clients, positions you as a resource, and almost no one in the pet industry is talking about it yet.