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Free tool · Scoop King

How many hours a year
do you spend on dog poop?

A dog owner spends between 13 and 117 hours a year picking up dog poop, depending on how many dogs they have and how often they clean the yard. Move the sliders and find your own number.

Your yard

Rough is fine. The arithmetic is at the bottom of the page.

A week of build-up takes longer than a daily pass. Each extra dog adds about 70% of that, not 100%, because you are already out there.

What it costs you

Per year, at the settings on the left.

13
hours a year picking up dog poop
0.7
full days of your life, per year
$520
that time is worth, at your rate
274 lb
of waste you handle a year
52
trips to the yard a year
See what we charge instead →

How this is worked out

Hours a year is sessions × minutes × dog factor ÷ 60, where the dog factor is 1 + 0.7 × (dogs − 1). A second dog does not double the time, because the walk outside, the bag and the bin are already paid for. Waste is the EPA's figure of 0.75 pounds per dog per day, which is 274 pounds a year. Money is simply your hourly rate times the hours.

Everything here is your own input. We have not picked a scary number and worked backwards to it, and for one dog scooped weekly the honest answer is about 17 hours a year, not the 100 you see quoted elsewhere. It climbs fast with more dogs and more frequent cleaning.

Questions

For one dog in an average yard, a weekly clean-up runs about 15 minutes because a week of waste has built up, which works out to roughly 13 hours a year. A daily pass is quicker each time, about 5 minutes, but adds up to around 30 hours a year. Two dogs scooped weekly is closer to 30 hours.
About 274 pounds, based on the EPA's figure of 0.75 pounds a day.
It depends on what your time is worth and how many dogs you have. Weekly service is $89 a month, $1,068 a year. One dog scooped weekly costs you about 13 hours a year, so doing it yourself is cheaper on paper. Three dogs cleaned daily is around 117 hours, which at $30 an hour is $3,510 of your own time. Somewhere between those two the arithmetic flips.
Two. Waste doubles outright, and the time goes up about 70% per extra dog, because the trip outside is already paid for but the searching is not.

More numbers

We pulled together 25 sourced statistics on dogs, waste and pollution, plus an original per-city estimate for Temecula Valley: dog waste statistics.