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CGD Pro
Cat grooming expert and contributor to Cat Grooming Directory. Passionate about helping cat owners find the best grooming solutions for their feline friends.
CGD Pro
Cat grooming expert and contributor to Cat Grooming Directory. Passionate about helping cat owners find the best grooming solutions for their feline friends.
If you have not raised your cat grooming prices in two years, you are quietly working for less every month. Supplies are up. Insurance is up. Rent, utilities, software fees, fuel for the mobile rig — all up. And yet a lot of cat groomers are still charging the number they wrote on a chalkboard menu in 2023, holding their breath every time a client books, and praying the math works out.
Here is the uncomfortable truth: the groomers I talk to who are most afraid of raising prices are usually the ones who need to raise them most. Not because their work is underpriced relative to the market — although it often is — but because the fear itself is doing real damage. It is keeping you stuck in a price that no longer reflects the cost of doing the job, the risk of handling cats, or the years of skill you bring to a 90-minute appointment with a screaming Persian who has decided today is the day he dies.
This post is the "what and why" of raising your cat grooming prices in 2026. If you want the full system — exact email templates, the math behind a defensible increase, the scripts for the three or four pushback conversations you will actually have, and a week-by-week rollout plan — that lives in The Cat Grooming Price Increase Playbook inside the Groomer's Edge library. But you can do a lot with what is here.
The hard part of a price increase is almost never the math. It is the story you tell yourself before you send the email.
Most cat groomers I know fall into one of three loops:
The first is the I just raised them loop, where "just raised them" turns out to mean 18 months ago, before deshedding shampoo went up 22% and the credit card processor added a new fee schedule. The second is the I do not want to lose Mrs. Whoever loop, where one specific long-time client looms so large in your head that you let her unspoken opinion set the price for everyone. The third is the my clients cannot afford it loop, which is usually you projecting your own household budget onto a clientele who, statistically, are paying more for their cat's dental cleanings than for your entire grooming session.
The result is the same in all three loops: you stay stuck. Your hourly effective rate slides every quarter. You start resenting the appointments that used to feel fine. You take on harder cases at the same price because you cannot bring yourself to charge the matted-cat fee you wrote into your menu and never enforced. And eventually you either burn out, hike everything 30% in a panic, or both.
A price increase done well does not feel dramatic. It feels like exhaling.
The standard advice you hear in groomer Facebook groups is some version of "just raise them, your clients will be fine." That is true and also useless, because it skips every step that actually determines whether the increase sticks.
Three traditional approaches in particular tend to backfire on cat groomers:
The silent bump. You quietly change the number on your booking page and hope nobody notices. Some clients will not. The ones who do will feel ambushed at checkout, and an ambushed client is a client who leaves a one-star review about feeling "tricked," even if the new price is completely reasonable. Cat clients especially — many of whom already feel anxious about whether they are doing right by their pet — do not respond well to surprise pricing.
The across-the-board percentage. You raise everything 10% on January 1. Clean, simple, and it almost always leaves money on the table. A cat groomer's costs do not rise evenly across services. A long-haired deshed has gotten more expensive to deliver than a short-hair tidy in real terms — different shampoo, different time, different physical toll, different injury risk. A flat percentage treats those services the same, which means the harder work is still subsidizing the easier work.
The apology email. "We are so sorry, but due to rising costs we have to..." Stop. You do not have to apologize for charging a fair price for skilled work on an animal that bites. Apologetic pricing language reads to clients as uncertainty, and uncertainty invites negotiation. The clients who will respect your new price are the ones who feel you respect it first.
The better way is not faster. It is just less reactive.
Here is the high-level approach. The full version with worksheets is in the paid resource, but these five principles are the spine of any increase that actually works.
1. Price the service, not the client. Your prices are based on what it costs to deliver the service profitably, the skill required, the risk you carry, and what your market supports — not on what one specific client said three years ago about $85 being "a lot." Decouple the number from the relationship. The relationship survives a price increase. The relationship does not survive your slow-motion resentment.
2. Raise unevenly, on purpose. The services with the highest cost-of-delivery, the highest risk, or the highest demand should get the biggest increases. For most cat groomers in 2026 that means matted-cat fees, behavior-handling fees, and long-haired full grooms get larger bumps; basic nail trims and short-hair tidies get smaller ones. Uneven raises rebalance the menu so your hardest work is no longer your worst-paid work.
3. Give notice. Real notice. Existing clients should hear about a price increase 30 to 45 days before it hits their bill. New clients booking after the announcement date pay the new price immediately. This is the single biggest predictor of whether your retention holds — not the size of the raise, but whether clients felt warned.
4. Communicate value, not cost. Your email does not need to read like a budget memo. Clients do not care that your shampoo cost went up. They care that they get a calm, skilled, cat-experienced groomer who knows their cat by name and has not snapped a tendon trying to hold their Maine Coon still. Lead with what they get, mention the new price, end with gratitude. Three short paragraphs is plenty.
5. Expect a small, healthy loss. A well-communicated price increase loses about 5–10% of clients in the first 90 days — and the ones who leave are almost always the ones costing you the most to serve. This is not failure. This is the menu working. Plan for it, do not panic when it happens, and use the freed-up appointment slots to fill with new clients at the new price.
Even before you sit down to engineer a full increase, three things you can do in the next seven days that move you forward:
Audit your last 20 appointments. Pull your booking software or your paper calendar and write down, next to each one, the actual time the cat was on your table — including setup, the consultation chat with the owner, and breakdown. Then divide what you charged by that time. Do this for 20 in a row, and your effective hourly rate will stop being a feeling and start being a number. That number is the floor every conversation about raising prices should start from.
Enforce the fees you already have on your menu. Most cat groomers I talk to have a matted-cat fee, a behavior fee, or an extra-large-cat fee written into their pricing — and they almost never charge it. Before you announce a single increase, just start charging the fees that already exist. For a lot of groomers this alone is a 10–15% raise in monthly revenue with zero new conversations needed.
Write the announcement before you write the new prices. This sounds backwards. It is not. If you draft the email or text you would send clients first — short, clear, no apology — you find out very quickly whether the new prices you are considering feel defensible coming out of your own mouth. If you cannot write the announcement without flinching, the prices are not the problem. The framing is.
Add a tiny "thank you for being a long-time client" gesture. A free nail-touch-up at the next appointment, a handwritten card, a small bag of treats. It costs you almost nothing and it makes the increase email land softer for the clients you most want to keep. This is not bribery — it is acknowledgment.
Quick wins are quick wins. They will move the needle. But if you want the actual rollout — the spreadsheet that tells you exactly how much to raise each line item based on your real costs and time, the email templates and text scripts you can paste in (long version, short version, mobile-grooming version, salon version), the decision tree for handling the four pushback conversations you will get, and the 6-week implementation timeline that takes you from "I should probably raise prices" to "I have raised prices, kept my book, and stopped resenting my matted-cat appointments" — that is what is in The Cat Grooming Price Increase Playbook.
It also pairs with the Price Increase Calculator so you can model the numbers before you commit. The playbook is part of the Groomer's Edge subscriber library — sign in with the email you used for the newsletter and it is waiting for you.
How often should a cat groomer raise prices? Every 12 months at minimum, with a small increase, beats every 3 years with a panic increase. Annual is the rhythm most working cat groomers settle into once they have done it once and seen that the sky did not fall.
How much is too much for a single increase? For an annual raise, 5–10% on most services is the comfortable range. For a corrective raise after years of holding flat, 15–20% on certain services (matted, behavioral, long-haired) is reasonable, especially if you give 45+ days of notice and explain what they are getting.
Should I raise prices on existing clients and new clients at the same time? No — new clients booking from your announcement date pay the new price immediately. Existing clients get 30–45 days of notice before their next appointment hits the new number. Bundling those two timelines gives existing clients a head start, which is the whole point.
What do I say if a long-time client pushes back? Acknowledge them, do not apologize for the price, and do not negotiate. A line like "I really appreciate you saying that, and I understand it is a change. The new price reflects what it costs to keep doing this kind of work the way you have come to expect." Then stop talking. Most pushback is venting, not a request for a discount.
Will I lose clients? Probably 5–10%, and almost certainly the ones who were already your hardest, lowest-margin appointments. Plan for it. The math still works in your favor as long as the increase is meaningful and your new-client pricing is in place.
Do I need to give a reason in the announcement email? A single short sentence is plenty — something like "to keep providing the level of care your cat deserves" or "to reflect the time, skill, and supplies that go into each appointment." Do not write a defense. You are informing, not justifying.
Looking for the full templates, scripts, calculator walkthrough, and 6-week rollout? The complete Cat Grooming Price Increase Playbook is in the Groomer's Edge subscriber library. Not a subscriber yet? Start with the Groomer's Edge newsletter.