Find a Groomer by State

Booking middlemen, and how to tell them apart

Search for a groomer in almost any town and the first results will not be groomers. They are marketplaces and lead sellers: national sites that buy advertising against your town's name, collect your inquiry, and either take a cut of the booking or sell your details on to whoever pays for leads that week. You do not choose the groomer, the groomer does not choose you, and the fee comes out of money that could have gone into the appointment.

A real salon is a room with a bath and a table in it. It has a street address you could drive to and somebody who answers the phone between grooms. Every listing in this directory is that kind of business, with an address and a number we hold on file. Where a listing's website goes to a booking platform rather than the salon's own site, we label it Booking page instead of passing it off as theirs, so you always know which one you are about to click.

For anything unusual, phone them

An online booking form is fine for a routine bath and tidy. For a coat that has already matted, a nervous or elderly dog, a puppy's first groom, or a cat, call. The photographs on a groomer's page are a style guide, not a promise: what is actually achievable depends on the coat in front of them on the day.

A phone call also settles the two things that cause arguments afterwards. If the coat is too matted to brush out, the humane answer is clippers and a much shorter cut than you wanted, and you want to agree that before the appointment rather than see it at collection. And a groomer who is not set up for your breed, or who does not take cats, would far rather say so on the phone than waste your afternoon.

Why you cannot usually book for tomorrow

Grooming is appointment-only almost everywhere, and a full groom takes a chair out of circulation for two to four hours. A one-person salon runs maybe five or six dogs a day, so the book fills weeks out rather than hours. That is why a shop two miles away can be genuinely unable to help you on Friday.

Two things move faster than a full groom: a bath and tidy, and a nail trim, which some shops take as a walk-in. If your dog is matted, say so when you call. It changes how long the appointment needs and what it will cost, and a groomer would far rather know before you arrive than after.

Why you can browse by county

Most directories only let you search by town, which quietly loses the shops that need finding most. A great many groomers sit outside any incorporated town, on a road between two of them. Browsing by city alone reaches about seventy-two per cent of the shops in this directory. Adding counties takes it to over ninety-six.

So every state here breaks down both ways: 2,531 counties and 10,641 towns and cities across 51 states. If the town you are looking at has nothing, open the county instead. The county page lists every shop in it, including the ones with no town page of their own. The local word changes as you move around the country and the pages use whichever is correct, so Louisiana reads Parish, Alaska reads Borough, and Virginia's independent cities stand on their own.

Are you a groomer?

If one of these 37,863 listings is your salon, it is already published and you can take it over. Claiming lets you set your opening hours, how far ahead you are booking, which pets you take and which you do not, what a groom costs, the services you actually offer, up to eight photographs of your own work, and a description in your own words that replaces the one we wrote. Claim your listing, or add your salon if it is not here yet.