A homeowner hands you a set of keys, a garage door code, and instructions for the mail, the plants, and the thermostat, then leaves for three weeks. No dog to walk, no litter box to scoop — just a house that needs a human presence in it. That's the whole service, and it's a surprisingly durable one: house-sitting has grown from a favor between neighbors into a real small business, with sitters charging anywhere from $30 a night for a quiet weekend to $150 or more a night for a large property with a complex security system and a long list of maintenance tasks.
It's easy to lump house-sitting in with pet-sitting because the platforms and marketing often blur the two together. But if you're building a house-sitting business — especially a no-pets one — the financial shape of the work is genuinely different. There's no per-visit pet care to bill, no vet emergency fund to plan around, and no daily walk schedule to log. Instead, you're pricing a flat nightly (or weekly) occupancy fee, carrying insurance built around holding someone else's keys rather than someone else's dog, and managing a business where a single client relationship might represent hundreds of dollars in revenue concentrated into one multi-night stay. Getting the bookkeeping wrong here isn't catastrophic on any single job — it's that the errors compound quietly across a calendar full of short, high-trust engagements.
How House-Sitting Actually Gets Priced
Rates in this business are usually set by duration, not by task, which is the opposite of how a lot of home-service businesses price:
- Drop-in or hourly visits (mail check, plant watering, no overnight stay): roughly $15–$35 per hour
- Overnight sits (sitter sleeps at the property): typically $50–$100 per night, with high-end properties or high-demand markets pushing past $100–$150
- Weekend packages: commonly $100–$200 flat
- Weekly rate: usually $250–$500
- Extended/monthly sits: $500–$2,500+, depending on property size, location, and scope of duties
Because house-sitting income arrives in lump sums tied to specific stays rather than a steady drip of small transactions, your books need to treat each booking as its own mini-project: a start date, an end date, a flat or per-night rate, and any add-on fees (key pickup/drop-off, extra property walkthroughs, holiday surcharges). If you're tracking revenue as one undifferentiated "sitting income" number, you lose the ability to answer basic questions a lender or your future self will ask — like which property types or booking lengths are actually profitable once travel time and gas are factored in.
A simple ledger approach: one line item per booking, with the client/property as a tag or sub-account, the nightly rate as the unit price, and the total nights as the quantity. That structure alone gives you per-property profitability without any extra effort — you're just recording what you already know at the time you know it.
A Worked Example
Say you sit two properties in the same week: a three-night weekend stay at $75/night ($225 total) fifteen minutes from home, and a seven-night stay at $60/night ($420 total) forty-five minutes away that also requires two extra property walkthroughs at $20 each ($40). On paper, the second booking looks like the better week — $460 versus $225. But once you allocate travel cost (say $0.67/mile IRS mileage rate, and the second property requires more round trips for a longer stay) and the extra time on the road, the per-hour return on the nearby weekend sit can easily beat the "bigger" booking. You only see that if travel and add-ons are itemized against each specific booking rather than lumped into one undifferentiated expense total for the month. Over a year of bookings, this per-job view is what tells you whether to keep taking distant multi-week sits or to specialize in a tighter local radius at a slightly lower headline rate.
Deposits, Cancellation Fees, and Recognizing Revenue at the Right Time
Many house sitters collect a deposit to hold a booking, sometimes non-refundable past a certain cancellation window. From a bookkeeping standpoint, a deposit received before the sit begins isn't yet earned income — it's a liability (an obligation to perform the service, or refund the money) until the stay actually happens. Booking it straight to revenue the day it lands in your account will overstate income in the month you got paid and understate it in the month you actually did the work, which matters if you're trying to read monthly profitability accurately or if a booking spans a calendar year-end.
The cleanest approach: record the deposit as unearned/deferred revenue when received, then recognize it as income once the sit is completed (or once it becomes non-refundable, if your terms make that the operative trigger). Cancellation fees you keep under your policy get recorded as income at the point you actually retain them, not at the point the original booking was made. This is a small amount of extra discipline that prevents a lumpy deposit schedule from making your month-to-month numbers look far more volatile than the underlying business actually is.
The Insurance and Bonding Question — And Why It's a Real Expense Line
This is where house-sitting genuinely diverges from pet-sitting in the accounting. A pet sitter's biggest liability exposure is an injured or lost animal. A house sitter's biggest exposure is the house itself: a key that goes missing, a break-in that happens on your watch, water damage from something you should have caught, or a guest you weren't authorized to have over. That risk profile calls for a specific mix of coverage:
- General liability insurance — covers bodily injury or property damage claims arising from your work
- Lost-key / re-keying liability — a narrow but common add-on; some policies bundle in coverage up to roughly $2,500 for re-keying a client's locks if a key is lost or a lockout occurs
- Bonding — distinct from insurance. A liability policy typically only pays out for accidental damage; a fidelity/service bond is what protects your client if something is stolen or intentionally damaged. Being bonded is also a trust signal that lets you charge premium rates for higher-value properties.
Whatever combination you carry, treat the premiums as a recurring operating expense, not a one-time startup cost you forget about after the first year. If you're pricing jobs without factoring in the insurance and bonding line, you're effectively giving that margin away — and it's an easy thing to lose track of because the premium is paid annually or quarterly while your revenue posts nightly.
Tracking Costs That Are Easy to Undercount
New house sitters tend to price only the obvious cost (their time) and miss the expenses that erode margin over the course of a year:
- Travel — mileage or transit costs getting to and from each property, especially for sitters covering a wide service area
- Supplies — cleaning supplies, basic maintenance tools, a lockbox or key-management system
- Insurance and bonding premiums (above)
- Business licensing/registration fees, which vary by city and state
- Phone and communication costs — client coordination, emergency contact availability
- Software/CRM — client scheduling and contact-management tools, if you use them
The two most commonly cited mistakes in this line of work are underpricing relative to true costs, and simply failing to account for all expenses in the first place. Both are bookkeeping failures as much as pricing failures — you can't price accurately if your books don't already show you what a night of sitting actually costs you to deliver.
Business Structure and the Paper Trail
Most house sitters start as sole proprietors and formalize into an LLC once the business has steady repeat clients — LLC formation is worth considering specifically because you're holding physical access to someone else's home, which is a different liability category than most solo service businesses. Regardless of structure, a few habits keep the books clean:
- Separate business banking from day one, even before you incorporate. Mixing sitting income with personal spending is the single fastest way to lose the ability to reconstruct your actual profit margin later.
- Written contracts per booking, including the agreed rate, duties, and emergency contacts. These aren't just liability protection — they're also your source documents if a client disputes an invoice or a tax preparer asks for support on a deduction.
- An emergency and duties checklist per property (vet contact if there happen to be pets, homeowner preferences, backup sitter). This has an accounting angle too: if a property requires materially more work than a standard sit (multiple systems to monitor, a large yard, a security system to manage), that's justification for a documented rate difference, which matters if a client or the IRS ever questions why two similar-looking bookings were priced differently.
Taxes: What Changes and What Doesn't
If you're paid as an independent contractor — whether through a platform issuing a 1099-NEC or directly by clients — the IRS treats you as self-employed. That means:
- Self-employment tax of 15.3% applies to net earnings, covering both the employer and employee shares of Social Security and Medicare. You can deduct half of this self-employment tax as a business expense, which softens the hit somewhat.
- Schedule C is where you report income and expenses, and it's also where the travel, supplies, insurance, and licensing costs above actually reduce your taxable income — assuming they're recorded and documented.
- The Qualified Business Income (QBI) deduction can let eligible sole proprietors and LLC owners deduct up to 20% of qualified business income on their personal return, which is a meaningful reason to make sure your Schedule C net income is calculated correctly rather than left as a rough estimate at filing time.
None of this is unique to house-sitting, but the emphasis is different from, say, a retail business: because your expenses are relatively few and well-defined (insurance, travel, supplies, licensing), there's no excuse for a shoebox-of-receipts approach. A handful of consistent categories, tracked booking by booking, gets you audit-ready records with very little ongoing effort.
Keep Your Finances Organized from Day One
Between per-night rates, insurance and bonding premiums, and travel costs across a rotating set of properties, house-sitting income and expenses are simple in kind but easy to lose track of in practice if you're not recording them as they happen. Beancount.io provides plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and control over your financial data — no black boxes, no vendor lock-in. Get started for free and see why developers and finance professionals are switching to plain-text accounting.