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Dover District Council animal licensing register

Dover District Council licenses 17 animal businesses in the categories we cover. 15 hold a 4- or 5-star rating — 88% of the register.

16 of those entries have no published address, so they appear on this page but not on any town page. That is the council's redaction rather than a gap in our data: home boarding and breeding are carried out from residential addresses, and councils withhold them for that reason. The other 1 is spread across 1 town.

1 entry carries no star rating. That is normal rather than concerning: operators keeping or training animals for exhibition are not star-rated at all, and newly licensed businesses may not yet have been inspected.

We last verified this register 2 months ago. Dover District Council has not published an update since, so treat expiry dates in particular as indicative.

By activity, the most common licence here is dog day care (16 businesses), followed by dog boarding (1). 2 of the licensable activities are represented across the authority.

5 licences come up for renewal within twelve months, and 6 have an expiry date already in the past. Longer licence terms are awarded to higher-rated operators, so a register weighted towards distant expiry dates is usually a well-rated one.

The council's own register is the authoritative source and we link to it below. Where our copy and theirs disagree, theirs is correct — councils sometimes amend entries without changing the published date.

By town

• Sholden — 1 licensed business

Full register

Star ratings are issued by the licensing authority and combine a risk score with a compliance assessment — they are not customer reviews and we never merge them with one. A new business cannot normally receive 5 stars regardless of quality, and a 2- or 3-star business is still fully compliant with the law. Ratings are reproduced exactly as published by the issuing council.

Rating distribution across Dover District Council

These are businesses licensed to board animals for payment under the Animal Welfare (Licensing of Activities Involving Animals) (England) Regulations 2018. They are not house sitters. A sitter who stays in your home and cares for your pet there does not need this licence — the licensing regime applies to boarding at the operator's premises, home boarding, day care, breeding, and sale of pets.

Where these figures come from

Last updated

2 August 2026

Basis

Listed asking rates, not transacted prices

• Local authority animal activity licence registers — English local authorities. Factual fields extracted from each council's published public register: trading name, licence number, licensable activity, star rating and expiry date. Where a council redacts an address — as they routinely do for home boarders operating from a residential address — the record is kept without a location and never geolocated by inference. Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0. Refreshed 1 August 2026.
• Postcode geography — Office for National Statistics / Ordnance Survey, via postcodes.io. Postcodes already published in council registers are resolved to a parish or ward and coordinates. Only postcodes the council itself published are looked up. Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0. Refreshed 1 August 2026.
• Source register: https://www.dover.gov.uk/Business/Licensing/Animal-Licensing/Animal-Licensing.aspx
• Re-use terms asserted by the council: Open Government Licence v3.0