How We Get Our Prices, and What's Still Missing

This is an insurance information site, which makes honesty about our data the whole point. Here's exactly how every figure on this site was obtained, what "advertised starting price" means, and — just as importantly — what we don't have yet.

What "advertised starting price" means

Every price labelled "advertised starting price" or "price from" on this site was checked by directly opening the provider's own website and reading the figure they publish for their cheapest available policy. We record the exact wording used on the page, the URL, and the date we checked it. We never present these as an "average cost" or "typical cost" — they're the entry-level price a provider is willing to advertise publicly, which is a different thing from what most customers actually pay.

Our current verified data (dog walker insurance)

Checked directly on each provider's website on 2026-08-02:

What we couldn't verify, and why we left it out

• Superscript: A '£6.73/MTH' figure appears only in the page's indexed <title>, not in the rendered page content fetched directly. Cannot be confirmed as currently live. Omitted.
• NimbleFins: Source article no longer live — domain now redirects permanently to clearscore.com. Cannot verify the previously-cited £54/year or £65/year figures. Omitted.
• AXA (dog-walking specific): AXA's dog walkers/pet sitters page requires a quote and publishes no 'from' price. Omitted for this use case; generic public liability anchor used instead, clearly labelled.

Our rule is simple: if we can't trace a figure back to a live, checkable source, we don't publish it. A gap on this site is more honest than a guessed number — especially given this is a YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topic, where a wrong figure can lead to a real financial decision.

Third-party figures — clearly attributed, never claimed as ours

Where we cite a figure from a comparison site (for example, MoneySuperMarket's reported market average for dog walker insurance), we always attribute it explicitly to that source, with a link and the date we checked it. We never present someone else's average as if it were our own research.

What the calculator's estimates are based on

Our calculator always returns a range, never a single figure. The base of that range is anchored to the verified starting prices above. The adjustments for cover level, legal structure, revenue band, employees and trade-specific extras are sector-standard estimates we've applied transparently — they are not the output of our own quote study, because that study hasn't happened yet (see below). We've chosen to say this plainly rather than dress up an estimate as verified data.

The quote study we're planning

The next step for this site is running our own structured quote study: obtaining real quotes across fixed profiles (a solo dog walker, a dog walker who also offers boarding, and a dog walker with one employee) at multiple cover levels, across several providers — roughly 50+ individual quotes. That dataset will let us publish genuine average costs, properly labelled as our own primary research, and refresh it periodically as prices change. Until that's done, we deliberately avoid publishing anything that looks like an "average" that isn't attributed to someone else's data.

Why the calculator never shows an exact premium

Real premiums depend on underwriting details no calculator can see from five form fields — your specific location, exact claims history, the finer details of your services, and an individual insurer's risk appetite on the day you apply. We regard a tool that pretends to know your exact premium as misleading. A clearly-labelled orientative range, built from real advertised prices, is the honest version of this tool.

Affiliate relationships and this methodology

This site earns commission through affiliate partnerships (see our disclaimer), but our verification process is identical for every provider regardless of whether we have a commercial relationship with them — we check the same way, cite the same way, and omit the same way when we can't verify something.