Animal Care Technician Salary: Hourly Pay and Pay by State

Start with the catch that runs through every number on this page: the Bureau of Labor Statistics has no "animal care technician" occupation.

The title spans settings that land in two different federal groupings, and each carries its own wage tables.

Shelter, kennel and clinic-kennel jobs sit in Animal Caretakers (SOC 39-2021) — the code BLS defines as workers who feed, water, groom, bathe and exercise animals not raised for consumption, in kennels, animal shelters, zoos and similar settings — and VeterinaryHires' industry research notes that BLS files kennel staff under this same caretakers code.

Research-facility jobs sit in SOC 31-9096, Veterinary Assistants and Laboratory Animal Caretakers — the code covering workers who feed, water and examine animals in laboratories and animal hospitals and clinics, which sits explicitly outside the caretakers grouping.

Both codes are blends.

O*NET's sample titles for the caretakers code run from Dog Bather, Dog Groomer and Kennel Attendant to Zookeeper, so its median mixes boarding kennels with pet stores and zoos.

The combined code mixes clinic veterinary assistants with laboratory animal caretakers.

Neither is a quote for the title on a posting — but matched against the setting you would actually work in, both are usable market shapes.

What the title covers day to day is in the animal care technician career guide.

Two things to notice in the table.

The combined code's median runs about a band higher through the middle — its 25th percentile ($35,660) sits near the caretakers' median — but the ordering flips at the top: the caretakers code's 90th percentile ($50,060) edges past the combined code's ($49,150).

And the combined code is more compressed overall, which is what you would expect from an occupation dominated by one industry.

Use the hourly table against a posted hourly rate, and the annual table when you are comparing against salaried work or budgeting a year.

Same data, two units:

Treat the annual column as the full-time, year-round equivalent of the hourly rate.

That assumption matters more here than in most occupations, because BLS notes that part-time work is common for animal caretakers, that schedules may include evenings, weekends and holidays, and that facilities operating 24 hours a day, such as kennels and shelters, may need care around the clock.

Work fewer than full-time hours and your actual annual income lands proportionally below the annual column.

One more reading skill: mean versus median.

The caretakers code's mean wage was $17.94 an hour, or $37,300 a year — above the $17.00 median.

When a posting or an article quotes an "average," check which one it means; the median is the closer read on the middle of the market.

One corner of this occupation raises a pay question the tables cannot answer.

Groomers and bathers are counted inside the caretakers code — O*NET lists Dog Bather, Dog Groomer, Pet Groomer and Pet Stylist among its sample titles — and grooming is the corner of this market where commission pay exists.

The tables behind this page are hourly wage tables — they price neither commission arrangements nor tips — and the commission conversation belongs to grooming.

Two limits apply when you price a grooming offer against this page.

First, the wage tables are for employees: BLS's own job count for this occupation runs larger than its wage-table base precisely because the count includes the self-employed, whom BLS puts at 25% of animal caretakers.

Second, no source we checked — federal or industry — publishes salon commission splits or tip income, so there is no sourced national number to hold a commission offer against, and this page will not invent one.

The practical move is to build your own hourly equivalent: realistic weekly grooms × your share of each ticket ÷ hours worked, then read the result against the 25th–75th percentile band above.

Setting moves this market less intuitively than you would expect.

The industry employing the most animal caretakers is other personal services — 146,190 jobs, the group covering pet care such as grooming and boarding.

BLS's industry medians for the occupation run: arts, entertainment and recreation (the group covering zoos and aquariums) $37,460; retail trade (pet stores among them) $35,290; other personal services $35,190; and professional, scientific and technical services — the group that contains veterinary services — $33,350.

The clinic-containing group is the lowest of the four.

Drill into veterinary services itself and the caretaker median drops further: $32,150 across 33,720 jobs, 7.2% of the industry's employment.

A clinic paycheck does not lift this code — the intuitive assumption runs backwards here.

Shelters are harder to read: social advocacy organizations employed 10,170 caretakers, but the industry tables behind this page's numbers attach no median to that group, so shelter-specific pay has no federal line of its own here.

The roles themselves are in the shelter jobs guide.

The lab side is the real pay jump, and it lives in the other code.

Inside SOC 31-9096, medians reach $49,230 in scientific research and development services and $47,860 in educational services, against $37,930 in veterinary services.

Read those with two caveats: the code is combined, and it is overwhelmingly clinical — BLS puts 86% of its jobs in veterinary services, 5% in educational services and 1% in scientific research and development — so the national median of $38,150 is mostly clinic assistant pay, and the research medians come from a small slice of the code.

They are the best federal signal for research-facility pay, not a laboratory-technician wage.

Inside the veterinary services industry itself, the code counts 113,130 jobs, 24.0% of the industry's employment.

The rung above both codes is the credentialed veterinary technician, at a median of $47,380 — $22.78 an hour.

One step up within the clinic itself is the assistant role, and veterinary assistant pay has its own full breakdown, including the vet-services-only figure.

State medians for the caretakers code span a wide band — these are the endpoints of the May 2025 release:

Where the jobs are is a different ranking.

The five biggest state job counts for the occupation are California (25,710 jobs), Texas (20,450), Florida (17,210), New York (12,470) and Illinois (11,070).

California is the one state on both lists — among the five highest-paying and the five largest — while Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois do not appear among the wage leaders.

Two caveats before you use any state number.

These medians describe the whole caretakers occupation, grooming salon to zoo — the same blended shape as the national figure, not a shelter or clinic quote.

And District of Columbia is a district, not a state; BLS reports it alongside the states, which is why it heads the list.

VeterinaryHires publishes no separate count for the animal care technician title — the nearest listing category is kennel attendant, and that is where this title's openings live: browse current kennel attendant and animal care jobs.

The scale, as of October 22, 2026: 13,218 live veterinary job openings site-wide, 318 of them kennel attendant openings.

So compare any posted hourly rate against the percentile tables above rather than hunting for a title-specific figure.

The outlook behind those listings is steady: BLS projects 12% employment growth for animal caretakers from 2025 to 2035, from 365,300 jobs to 409,400.

And one habit is worth keeping from this page: when an offer arrives, work out which federal code the employer maps to, read that column, and weigh the tier's schedule reality — part-time work is common, and evenings, weekends and holidays are in the mix — against the annualized table before you sign.