Dog boarding & daycare in Denver, CO

Forty-five of the 48 Denver-area listings match a current Colorado state license. One of their 48 websites says whether anyone is in the building overnight.

Denver is a Tier A market, one of the few in the index where a license can actually be checked. Under Colorado's Pet Animal Care and Facilities Act, every commercial boarding kennel, daycare and boarding veterinary practice needs a license from the Department of Agriculture, and the department publishes its full list of active licenses and refreshes it weekly. Forty-five of the 48 listings here match a record on that list, and every one of the 45 runs to March 2, 2027. What the list does not carry is inspection history. The only public file with inspection dates and outcomes stops in 2018, so a license here tells you a facility is registered with the state, not how its last inspection went.

Three listings returned no record: Table Mountain Veterinary Clinic, VCA Southeast Area Animal Hospital and CityVet's Capitol Hill clinic. Each was searched by hand against the full list under every name we hold. No record found is a statement about that search, not about the business. All three are veterinary practices, and a clinic licensed under a parent company or an owner's name will not match the name on its sign.

The register also shows who holds the licenses, which the storefronts do not. Destination Pet holds the licenses for six listings trading under six names: BARK!, Canine Fitness & Fun Center, The Divine Canine, Heritage Pet, Two Ponds Pet Lodge and Church Ranch Veterinary Center. Bowhaus in Erie and two of the five City Bark locations are licensed to PetSuites of America. Three Camp Bow Wow locations, in Boulder, Golden and Littleton, are licensed to companies whose names end in Emprise, and two more, in Parker and Centennial, share one licensee.

The market is the counties of the Denver Census metro area plus places within 30 miles of downtown: 48 listings, 32 of them dedicated boarding and daycare facilities and 13 veterinary practices that board. All 48 have a website, and we reached and reviewed all 48. Every disclosure share below uses 48 as the denominator unless a field says otherwise.

On overnight staffing the count is one. Ralston Valley Canine says: "Two employees live on site and perform nightly bedtime checks". No site says plainly that nobody stays, and the other 47 say nothing either way. That is 2.1 percent, against 13.7 in Dallas, 20.9 in Chicago and 14.6 in Colorado Springs. Skiptown Denver headlines "24/7 Care", and curators set it aside because a page title makes no claim about a person in the building. A customer review on Beds-N-Biscuits' site says staff are on site around the clock, and we record that as a customer's word, not the operator's. Google lists five of these places as open 24 hours: A Dog's World, Wag Hotels, Club Pet Resorts DIA, Church Ranch Veterinary Center and VCA Deer Creek Animal Hospital. None of their websites says who is there at 3am.

The supervision numbers are almost empty. One site publishes a staff-to-dog ratio: Canine Fitness & Fun Center says "never more than 15 dogs to one staff member". Beds-N-Biscuits refers to "the safest staff-to-pet ratio" and gives no number. None of the 48 publishes a playgroup cap. One publishes a capacity, Tenaker Pet Care Center, with "room for up to 200 dogs and 14 cats at a time". None publishes what happens after an injury or a fight, and none says a vet is on site or on call. Skiptown's terms of service disclaim liability for injuries, which is a contract term and not an incident policy, so it is not counted.

Seven describe a play model. Three run open play all day, two open play with a rest period, and The Bark Club a structured rotation. The Woofhaus runs open play and says why: "No crates or forced nap time". Two say how long a boarded dog spends out of its room, and the two answers measure different things: Dogtopia of Lafayette offers "10-12 hours of supervised open play daycare", Tenaker pool access "once a day for 2 hours". Seven describe an option for a dog that does not do group play.

Admission rules are the most published policy in the market, and still published by fewer than half. Twenty-one sites publish a vaccination list, 43.8 percent against 47.0 in Dallas and 43.4 in Chicago, and all 21 require rabies, distemper and Bordetella. Canine influenza is required by three, Bowhaus, A Dog's World and Church Ranch, and recommended by Lone Tree Veterinary Medical Center. Leptospirosis is required by three. Two sites publish a Bordetella timing rule: Come Sit Stay Pet Resorts will not admit a dog "for at least 24 hours" after an intranasal dose, K9 Resorts in Lone Tree for ten days. No site requires a fecal test. Six say they verify records, and Skiptown wants them "on veterinary letterhead."

Fourteen publish a spay and neuter policy. Ten require it outright, at ages from six to twelve months, and three only for group play. Beds-N-Biscuits accepts intact dogs, and The Bark Club accepts them in group play "until 18 months of age". Of the 42 sites reviewed for evaluations, twelve publish a rule, and eleven of those require a trial day or temperament test. The twelfth, Ralston Valley, needs none, because its dogs "are never left unattended with other dogs, an interview is not required." Four publish a tour policy. Come Sit Stay takes walk-ins, "without an appointment Monday – Saturday", and Tenaker offers a virtual tour. Eight state a minimum age, from eight weeks at A Dog's World to four months at five others. On illness, CityVet's Capitol Hill clinic is unusually direct: "Coughing dogs are isolated; however, respiratory infections are possible while boarding".

Prices sit unusually close together. Twenty-two of 48 listings publish an overnight rate, 45.8 percent of the websites our pricing crawler reached. The median is $61 a night, with the middle half between $56 and $63, a spread of 1.13x against 1.4x in Dallas and 1.5x in Chicago. Among the city markets in the index, only Las Vegas and San Diego are narrower. Twelve of the 22 are Camp Bow Wow or City Bark locations, priced between $57 and $65, which goes a long way to explain the narrow band. The cheapest published rooms run from $33 a night at Tenaker to $89 at Club Pet Resorts DIA. Eighteen publish a daycare rate, median $43. Colorado Springs sits at a $48 boarding median, Dallas at $50 and Chicago at $60.

One structural caveat applies to every count. Fifteen of the 48 listings share a website with another listing: eight Camp Bow Wow locations on one domain, five City Bark locations on another and two VCA hospitals on a third. Four City Bark locations publish the same cancellation sentence word for word. The license register adds a second layer: six differently named listings answer to one licensee. A count of listings is not a count of decisions.

None of this is a ranking and none of it is a judgment. Colorado has decided that a boarding business must be licensed and that the public can see the license, and it has asked nothing about who is in the building at night, how many dogs share a yard, or what happens after a fight. An empty field here means only that nothing was published on a page we could read. What the index measures is narrower: which of these facts you can find out before you pick up the phone.