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Methodology
What we collect, how we compute it, and — more importantly — what we refuse to claim from it.
The four sources
| Source | What it is | Licence | Refreshed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Local authority animal activity licence registers | 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. | Open Government Licence v3.0 | 1 August 2026 |
| Listed rate index | NOT YET COLLECTED. Reserved for publicly listed asking rates aggregated to a location x service median. No rate figures are published anywhere on this site until this source exists. | CC BY 4.0 | — |
| Supply and seasonality index | NOT YET COLLECTED. Reserved for counts of publicly visible open listings by area and month. | CC BY 4.0 | — |
| Postcode geography | Postcodes already published in council registers are resolved to a parish or ward and coordinates. Only postcodes the council itself published are looked up. | Open Government Licence v3.0 | 1 August 2026 |
Listed rates are not transacted prices
This is the single most important caveat on the site. We aggregate what sitters and businesses advertise. We do not know what anyone actually paid, and we do not model it. Published medians are medians of asking prices, which in this market tend to run slightly above final agreed prices — discounts for longer bookings and repeat customers are common and invisible to us.
This means we cannot and will not publish claims about price elasticity, market value, or "the average paid". Where you see those claims elsewhere, they are almost always asking prices too, relabelled.
Minimum sample sizes
A median of three listings is noise. We suppress any cell with fewer than 8 observations entirely — the page does not exist rather than existing with a bad number on it. Cells between 8 and 12 observations are published but withheld from search indexes, because they are useful if you have navigated to them and misleading if you land on them cold.
This is why coverage is patchy in rural areas. That patchiness is real, and hiding it behind interpolation would make the site less honest, not more useful.
Council registers
Licence records are republished from local authority public registers under the Open Government Licence, or under whatever terms the individual council asserts. We extract factual fields only — business name, licence number, licensable activity, star rating, expiry date — and attribute and date-stamp every record to its issuing council.
Councils update at wildly different speeds; some go quiet for months. We show the date we last verified each register rather than implying everything is current, and where a register has gone stale we say so on the page.
Star ratings are the council's, not ours
We reproduce council star ratings exactly as published and never blend them with any score of our own or with user reviews. The rating combines a risk score with a compliance assessment — a new business cannot normally reach 5 stars however good it is, and a 2-star business is still fully compliant with the law.
Supply figures are counts, not listings
Our seasonality data comes from counting public listings. We do not reproduce the listings themselves, and we never will: republishing another platform's inventory would be a database-right problem, a terms-of-service problem, and of no use to anyone who could simply visit that platform.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong — particularly a licence record about your business — tell us and we will fix it. Where our copy disagrees with a council's own register, the council is right.