Animal Care Technician Job Description: Duties, Requirements and a Template

Decide what the title means in your building before you write a word, because the same words describe different jobs in different settings.

If the seat you are filling is plain boarding-and-kennel care, the kennel attendant job description template is already written for that version — the two postings should only be interchangeable if the jobs are.

And if you are still deciding which hire you actually need, start with the guide to hiring an animal care technician, which walks the go/no-go calls this page assumes you have already made.

If the seat sits in a research facility, that is the laboratory animal technician role instead — that career guide covers it.

What is left is a posting with five blocks.

Four of them are below — role summary, duties, requirements, schedule and pay lines — and the fifth is the template itself.

Role summary

The summary tells a candidate which version of this title they are applying to.

Name the setting (veterinary hospital, shelter, or a clinic with a boarding wing), the animals (hospitalized patients, boarded pets, or a shelter population), and who the person reports to shift by shift — a technician, a shelter manager, or you.

Draw the scope line inside the summary.

In a hospital, this is the observation-and-report job: what this person watches between treatments, what they log, and what gets escalated to the medical team — immediately, not at the end of shift.

What the role never does — treatments, medications, restraint for procedures — belongs in the same sentence, because that boundary is what makes the seat safe to staff and safe to accept.

Keep the summary about the seat, not the person.

The EEOC states it is illegal to publish a job advertisement that shows a preference for, or discourages someone from applying because of, race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information — and its own examples of ads that may violate the law include ones seeking "females" or "recent college graduates."

The statutes say it directly too: the ADEA makes it unlawful to publish a job notice or advertisement indicating any preference, limitation, specification or discrimination based on age, and Title VII does the same for race, color, religion, sex and national origin, with a narrow bona fide occupational qualification exception for religion, sex or national origin.

Under the EEOC's ADEA rule, terms such as "young," "college student" and "recent college graduate" violate the Act unless a statutory exception applies — so an ad for a "young, energetic team" is age-coded, and the fix is to describe the schedule and the work honestly instead.

Coverage is headcount-dependent: Title VII and the ADA's employment provisions cover employers with 15 or more employees for each working day in 20 or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding year, and the ADEA covers employers with 20 or more, protecting people 40 and older.

Whether your state's fair-employment law reaches a smaller practice is a separate check with your state agency — but no version of this posting gets better because it hints at who you would rather hire.

Duties

List the duties as the shift actually runs, in the order the day runs.

At its core, the list is husbandry: feeding and watering to each animal's written sheet, cleaning and disinfecting cages and runs, walking and exercising, laundry and dishes, and restocking.

Write your version of that list rather than pasting a generic one.

Clinical adjacency, hospital version: hospitalized patients are on the ward because they are sick, injured or recovering, so between treatments this person is the watcher.

Log appetite, attitude, output and comfort; walk patients per the treatment sheet; move patients to and from treatment; and report anything off to the technician on duty.

If your team expects more than appetite-and-attitude observations — or expects laundry-only — say which.

Shelter version: anchor daily expectations to a written standard and name it.

The Association of Shelter Veterinarians' Guidelines for Standards of Care in Animal Shelters — first released in 2010, with the second edition published in December 2022 — are written for all personnel caring for shelter animals, so your cleaning, daily-exercise and observation lines can be posted against them.

Fear Free runs a Fear Free Shelter Program that is free for shelter, rescue and animal welfare employees and volunteers, and it certifies groomers and trainers as well as veterinary professionals — "Fear Free shelter training a plus" is a fair ask in a shelter posting.

Euthanasia-related duties: the AVMA publishes the AVMA Guidelines for the Euthanasia of Animals: 2020 Edition.

Whether non-veterinarian staff may perform euthanasia at all, and what certification a euthanasia technician needs, are set by each state — there is no single national credential.

If the seat includes these duties, name them explicitly and confirm your state's rules with your state veterinary board before you write the line.

The safety training you owe, not they: where the disinfectants and cleaning chemicals this role works with are hazardous chemicals under OSHA's Hazard Communication Standard — the product label and safety data sheet tell you — the standard requires employers to give employees effective information and training on the hazardous chemicals in their work area at initial assignment and whenever a new chemical hazard is introduced.

That training is your day-one obligation, not a candidate qualification — write it into your onboarding plan, not the requirements list.

On records: OSHA's log automatically captures work-related needlesticks and sharps cuts contaminated with another person's blood or other potentially infectious material, without the employee's name on the log; a stick from a needle used only on an animal is judged under the general recordability criteria instead.

Requirements

Require what the work needs, in the order a candidate reads it: reliability for the shifts posted, comfort handling animals that are scared, sick or painful, physical capability — lifting, floor work, staying on your feet — and dependable transportation.

Everything past that is your call: a diploma floor, animal-handling experience you do or do not require, a driver's license only if the role drives.

The template brackets those choices so you make them deliberately.

Two requirements earn their place only in specific seats.

First, controlled substances: a DEA registrant may not employ, in a role with access to controlled substances, anyone convicted of a felony relating to controlled substances, or anyone whose DEA registration application was denied, whose registration was revoked, or who surrendered a registration for cause.

Whether ward-and-kennel staff touch controlled substances depends on your protocol; if the role includes access, say so in the posting and screen to the rule.

Staff who handle drugs under the practice's registration do not need one of their own — federal rule waives registration for an agent or employee of a registrant acting in the usual course of business or employment.

Second, age: leave it out of the ad.

If you staff evening, weekend or summer shifts with minors, the child-labor rules below decide which shifts a 14-, 15-, 16- or 17-year-old can work — an offer-and-scheduling question, not a posting line.

Schedule and pay lines

The schedule block sells the shift: which days the ward or floor runs, when coverage starts and ends, and which of the evenings, weekends and holidays this person carries.

A posting that hides the Sunday feed rounds asks a new hire to accept a schedule they never agreed to.

And where the schedule requires a person to be present rather than productive — staying past close while an owner drives in to collect a boarded pet, for example — federal hours-worked rules treat waiting that is an integral part of the job as work time: the employee is engaged to wait, and the waiting time is paid.

Overtime is mechanical under the FLSA: non-exempt employees receive at least one and one-half times their regular rate for hours worked over 40 in a workweek, and averaging hours over two or more weeks is not permitted — two short weeks do not cancel a 46-hour one.

Weekend and holiday work itself carries no federal premium unless the hours cross 40; state daily-overtime and premium rules are a separate check with your state labor department.

Child-labor limits shape who can cover which shifts.

Federal rules allow 16- and 17-year-olds unlimited hours in any occupation the Secretary of Labor has not declared hazardous, while 14- and 15-year-olds in permitted non-hazardous jobs may work only outside school hours, no more than 3 hours on a school day, 18 hours in a school week, 8 hours on a non-school day and 40 hours in a non-school week, between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. — extended to 9 p.m. from June 1 through Labor Day.

When federal and state rules both apply, the stricter standard controls, and states may require work permits federal law does not.

The pay line names a number, not an adjective — VeterinaryHires counts listings that describe pay only in words such as "competitive" or "DOE" as not stating pay, so put the number in the posting.

Three benchmarks bracket this seat.

The federal code covering veterinary assistants and laboratory animal caretakers (SOC 31-9096) shows a national median of $38,150 a year, or $18.34 an hour, with the bottom tenth at $30,120 or less and the top tenth at $49,150 or more (BLS OEWS, May 2025) — one combined code BLS does not split.

The broader Animal Caretakers series (SOC 39-2021), which spans boarding kennels, shelters and pet stores as well as clinics, shows a national median of $35,360 a year, or $17.00 an hour, with the middle half at $29,820 to $40,050 (OEWS, May 2025).

And on this job board, the employer median posted for kennel attendant listings — the nearest first-party figure for ward-and-kennel work — was $15.00 an hour across 65 employers as of October 6, 2026.

Set your rate against your local market; the by-setting and by-state breakdown is on the animal care technician pay page.

Whether your state pushes the range itself into the posting is covered just after the template.

Do you have to put a salary range in the posting?

It depends on where the practice operates.

VeterinaryHires counted 14 states plus Washington, D.C. with a law requiring a pay range in job postings as of October 6, 2026, and the employer-size thresholds differ by state.

The states this page's sourcing covers:

California — employers with 15 or more employees must include the pay scale in any job posting, and pay scale means a good-faith estimate of the salary or hourly wage range the employer reasonably expects to pay for the position upon hire.

Washington — employers must disclose in each posting the wage scale or salary range (or the fixed wage, if only one is offered) and a general description of benefits and other compensation; the rule applies to employers with 15 or more employees and took effect January 1, 2023.

Illinois — employers with 15 or more employees must include the pay scale and benefits in any specific job posting; a hyperlink to a publicly viewable page with that information satisfies the rule.

New York — businesses with four or more employees must list compensation ranges for advertised job opportunities, promotions and transfers, per the state Department of Labor.

Colorado — compensation, benefits and how and when to apply must be disclosed in all job postings, internal and public, and ranges cannot lack a top or bottom: Colorado's own examples of non-compliant ranges are "$30,000 and up" and "up to $60,000."

New Jersey — postings for new jobs and transfers must include the hourly wage or salary, or a range of it, plus a general description of benefits and other compensation programs.

Massachusetts — employers with 25 or more employees in the state must disclose the pay range in job postings, effective October 29, 2025.

Even where no law forces the range, a number gives candidates something to compare — the $15.00 median above is the employer median the kennel attendant listings posted as of October 6, 2026.

Pay-posting law moves and turns on your employee count in each state; treat this as general employer information, not legal advice, and confirm the current requirement with your state labor department or employment counsel before you post.

Post it where its comparables live: on this board, ward-and-kennel listings sit under the kennel attendant title, so the kennel attendant listing page is where employers posting this same work are.

Read two or three before yours goes live — the postings that state the schedule and the rate read like jobs; the ones that state neither read like placeholders.

Two confirmations belong at the offer stage, not after the start date: that the schedule you promised is the schedule the first month actually runs, and that every duty you bracketed — euthanasia assistance, controlled-substance access, restraint — is written down with who trains it and who supervises it.

Where HazCom applies, the chemical-safety training is due at initial assignment, so it belongs in week one, not month two.

For the calls this template does not make for you — length, tone, where the benefits block belongs — the guide to writing a job posting walks the base version.

And the candidate-side view of this title across hospitals, shelters and research facilities is on what an animal care technician does — a useful check that your posting describes the job you actually have.

This template and the guidance around it are general employer information, not legal, tax or veterinary advice. Wage-posting, scheduling, minor-employment and controlled-substance rules are state-specific and change; confirm your practice's position with your state labor department, your state veterinary board or veterinary-savvy employment counsel.