TrustedHouseSitters Booking Fee 2026: What It Costs You

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Quick Facts

TrustedHouseSitters charges $12 per confirmed sit on Basic and Standard, and the sitter and the homeowner each pay it separately. Premium pays nothing, which makes Premium the cheaper membership from your sixth sit once the 25% discount is applied. The fee only starts on your next renewal, and if a sit is cancelled it is refunded in full whichever side cancels, under their Booking Fee Cancellation Policy. There is no way to avoid it on Basic or Standard.

Pricing Verified in September 2026

If you are interested in getting into house sitting, our book Travel More for Less puts the whole process in one place: clear, step by step guidance from your first questions to your first confirmed sit, and the reviews that open the door to the next one.

We were in Cortona, Italy when the email came in. Mid-sit, good dog, great house. Caro and I read it, looked at each other, and said: well, this sucks.

The timing was particularly sharp. And here they were, introducing a per-sit booking fee out of nowhere. We genuinely wondered whether we should keep promoting them.

We decided to push forward. This article explains why, gives you the honest numbers, and covers exactly how to avoid the fee entirely if you decide it's not for you.

What the TrustedHouseSitters Booking Fee Actually Is

TrustedHouseSitters introduced a per-sit booking fee for Basic and Standard members. Every time a sit is confirmed, both the sitter and the homeowner pay $12 USD or £9. This is on top of the annual membership fee, and it applies to every confirmed sit, not just the first.

The fee is not a one-time administration charge. It stacks. Do five sits a year as a Basic member and you are paying an extra $60 on top of your membership, before the homeowner has paid their share too.

Premium members are exempt. That exemption is now one of the main selling points of the Premium tier.

The fee applies after your next membership renewal. Sits confirmed before that date are not affected. That detail matters if your renewal is coming up and you are weighing whether to upgrade.

The Full Cost Breakdown: 1 to 10 Sits a Year

This is the table that actually answers "is it worth upgrading," because the answer changes depending on how often you sit.

Plan overview:

Every total below shows the calculation directly: base price plus the accumulated booking fee, so you can check the arithmetic as you go rather than just trusting a total.

Total cost at full price (no discount):

Total cost with our 25% discount code applied:

Using the discounted table: Standard crosses above Premium at 6 sits ($199 vs $194), and Basic crosses above Premium at 9 sits ($205 vs $194). Using full price: those crossover points shift to 8 sits for Standard and 11 sits for Basic. If you're using our 25% discount code, the lower breakeven points apply to you. Our complete THS pricing guide has the same tables alongside homeowner and combined membership pricing, if that's what you're after.

How to Avoid the Booking Fee Entirely

The only way to avoid the fee completely is Premium. There's no workaround, no setting to toggle, no loophole. Premium members simply aren't charged the $12 per sit, on either the sitter or homeowner side.

The reason this is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as "just pay more" is the discount. Full price, Premium is $259, a real jump from Basic's $129. With our 25% discount code, Premium drops to $194, which changes the calculation considerably. At that price, the table above shows Premium beating Standard from 6 sits onward and beating Basic from 9 sits onward. If you already know you're doing 6 or more sits a year, applying the discount and going straight to Premium is the simplest way to never think about this fee again.

If you're not at that sit count yet, the honest answer is that you can't avoid the fee on Basic or Standard, and you shouldn't upgrade purely to dodge $12 charges you're barely accumulating. Run your actual expected sit count through the table above before deciding.

Do Other House Sitting Platforms Charge a Booking Fee?

No. TrustedHouseSitters is the only major platform that charges a per-sit fee on top of membership. Here's how the market actually compares.

Our full Nomador pricing guide and HouseCarers pricing and review cover each platform's model in depth if you're comparing before you commit. THS's per-sit fee is the real outlier here, and it's the reason the Premium tier's flat-fee model has become genuinely more attractive than it was before the fee existed.

What Has Actually Improved Since the Fee Was Introduced

The fee funded real changes, and it's worth being honest about that even if the fee itself still stings.

A Report feature now lets sitters and homeowners report each other directly if a listing violates platform rules or a sitter isn't doing what they agreed to. This has been requested by the community for years, and it's now live.

An AI search feature lets you describe your ideal setup in plain language rather than filtering manually. We don't think it's the strongest addition yet, it feels early and not fully refined, and it has not moved much since. We look at where it stands now further down this article.

The Android and iOS apps have had regular updates with noticeably fewer bugs than a year ago. This is the kind of unglamorous improvement that doesn't get headlines but makes the platform easier to use every single day.

Listing volume has grown substantially. THS now runs between 9,000 active listings in the low season and 12,000 at peak, and the UK and USA alone make up almost 90 percent of that. The platform is investing heavily in marketing, and it shows: THS is growing faster than any other platform we track, and for sitters, more listings simply means more real opportunities.

None of this erases the fact that the fee also functions as a straightforward revenue increase, and it's fair to view it partly as a cash grab dressed up as investment. Both things are true at once. The platform is better than it was, and the company is also making more money from you than it used to.

How the Community Reacted, and Where Things Stand Now

When the announcement landed, the reaction was loud. Reddit threads, social media comments, review sites with one-star ratings. People were genuinely angry, and some of that anger was fair.

The issue wasn't just the fee. It was how THS communicated it. The announcement read like a generic corporate list: we need this fee to improve the platform, we are investing in the app, the usual. What it didn't include was anything specific, which features, when, how many support staff. If they'd said any of that clearly, the response would have been different. People can accept a price increase when they understand where the money is going.

Five months on, the tone has genuinely shifted. We're active in the TrustedHouseSitters community forum, and while there's still frustration on Reddit and in the forum, it's noticeably less than it was, and less frequent. People have largely accepted the change, and a fair number are now actively looking forward to what's coming next rather than relitigating the fee itself. THS's own support on the forum has been consistently fast and genuinely helpful, which has done more to rebuild goodwill than any official statement did.

Now that the fee has been running for several months, a few things have become clearer than they were when it launched.

The AI search feature has gone quiet. It arrived as one of the headline improvements the fee was meant to pay for, and we have seen very little sign of it since. As far as we can tell almost nobody is using it, which is not a surprise, because it was never good enough to replace the filters and it needed real work. Several months on it has not noticeably improved. A feature that no one reaches for is not really a feature.

The balance between owners and sitters has shifted. There are somewhere between 9,000 and 12,000 sits on the platform depending on the season, and there are not enough sitters to fill them. Sitters now hold the choice, which sounds like a good problem for them and is a real one for owners. You write a listing, you wait, and the applications do not arrive the way they used to.

We think some owners will drift away over the next year, and that is a prediction rather than a fact. If people keep paying for a membership and keep failing to fill their sits, the listing count stops being a growth story and starts working against the platform. It is the thing we would watch most closely over the next twelve months, and we will update this section as it plays out.

Being on Premium ourselves, the fee doesn't touch us directly, but watching the platform actually ship the features people had been asking for has shifted our view somewhat. We still think there's a cash-grab element to it. But for us, in practice, it's working.

Support is the part that has got worse. The AI assistant you reach through the help centre is a sensible idea in theory, because it can answer simple questions instantly, but in practice it has been horrendous. In most cases it did not solve what we needed, and it was painfully slow to work through. Getting past it to an actual person has become genuinely difficult, which is the wrong way round. That stings most on Premium, where the higher price is justified partly by better support, and paying the most while waiting the longest is a bad look.

Has the fee changed how often you sit, or which plan you're on? Drop it in the comments, we're curious how this has played out for people at different sit counts.

Who Should Pay the Fee and Who Should Upgrade

This is a maths question, but it's also a question about what kind of sitter you actually are.

Basic is a genuinely good option if you're testing the waters. You don't yet know if house sitting is really for you, and doing a couple of sits a year while absorbing the $12 fee is far cheaper than committing to a higher tier before you're sure. If that's you, stay on Basic and don't feel pressured to upgrade early.

Standard is our personal recommendation for most sitters, and it's not primarily about the booking fee math. The 24/7 vet line included on Standard and Premium is, in our view, worth the upgrade on its own if you don't have deep prior experience with animals. Having someone to call when you're unsure about a pet's behaviour, rather than guessing or waiting for the homeowner to reply, is genuinely valuable, and it's the reason we'd point most newer sitters to Standard over Basic even before running the sit-count numbers.

Premium only really makes sense once your sit count justifies it. If you're doing 6 or more sits a year, the cumulative fee cost on Standard already exceeds Premium's flat price, and Premium also includes the sit cancellation plan, covering up to $1,500 if a sit falls through under qualifying circumstances. For frequent sitters, that combination, no per-sit fee plus real cancellation coverage, is where Premium earns its higher price.

If you do decide to upgrade, use our 25% discount code for TrustedHouseSitters before you do. It takes the edge off.

Pricing verified in September 2026. Verify current rates on the TrustedHouseSitters website before purchasing, as these can change. Combined figures reflect both sitter and homeowner paying separately. Note: while the fee is listed as $12 USD / £9 GBP, TrustedHouseSitters applies its own conversion rates for EUR, AUD, and CAD. Check the final confirmation screen before completing a booking, as the amount you see can shift with the market.

Is the Fee Killing Weekend Sits?

This is something worth thinking about separately. A $12 fee on a two-night sit changes the maths entirely. The accommodation saving on a weekend is already small compared to a month-long sit, and adding a fee to both sides of the confirmation makes short sits feel less worthwhile.

From what we've seen in the community, some sitters are now handling repeat weekend sits with previous homeowners informally, outside the platform, to avoid paying a fee that costs more than the petrol to get there. That's understandable, though it does mean neither party gets the review or the platform protections. Our conflict resolution guide covers what you lose access to when a sit happens off-platform.

If weekend sits are mainly what you're after, this fee structure is worth factoring into your decision before you commit to a membership. A regional platform with no per-sit charge might serve that use case better. Our house sitting fees guide has the full breakdown of what every platform actually costs once every fee is accounted for.

Is TrustedHouseSitters Still Worth It in 2026?

For us, yes, more confidently now than five months ago. We're on Premium, so the booking fee doesn't come out of our pocket directly. But even setting that aside, the platform still has the largest global listing base we've found, now running between 9,000 and 12,000 sits depending on the season, with almost 90 percent of them in the UK and the USA and the rest spread across Europe and beyond.

The fee is annoying. We're not going to pretend otherwise. It adds friction to the confirmation process, and it adds friction on the homeowner's side too, which is the part that actually concerns us. A homeowner who's on the fence about confirming a sit doesn't need an extra charge at the last step.

But the honest comparison is still: $12 per sit versus the cost of a hotel, a hostel, or an Airbnb. On that basis, the platform still wins, and the improvements funded by the fee have made the day-to-day experience genuinely better than it was. You can read our full breakdown in the TrustedHouseSitters review if you want the complete picture of what the membership includes, and our pricing guide for the plan-by-plan detail including homeowner costs.

If the Fee Doesn't Work for You: Regional Alternatives

TrustedHouseSitters is the strongest global platform, but it's not the only option. Depending on where you're sitting, something else might serve you better, and none of these charge a per-sit fee.

France: Nomador has far more France listings than THS and no booking fee at all. If France is your main focus, Nomador is the better call. We cover this in depth in our house sitting France guide.

Australia and New Zealand: Aussie House Sitters and Kiwi House Sitters dominate their markets. Both are more affordable than THS and have better local coverage. Our house sitting Australia guide has the full breakdown.

UK: THS has the strongest UK coverage, but the regional UK platforms are worth comparing, especially if you're not planning to sit outside the UK. We cover them in our house sitting websites UK guide.

Global coverage with THS: if you're moving across multiple countries, THS is still the best single platform for that. The breadth of listings is hard to match. We cover the full international picture in our best platforms for international house sitting guide.

If Your Booking Fee Refund Does Not Arrive

Their Booking Fee Cancellation Policy is clear that the fee is refunded in full whenever a booking is cancelled, whichever party initiates it, back to the original payment method, and the version of the policy in force when your booking was confirmed is the one that applies. You should not have to ask for it either, because the refund is meant to be automatic once the sit is marked as cancelled in the system.

In practice, community reports suggest the automated system doesn't always trigger correctly. If your refund hasn't appeared within 7 to 10 days of the cancellation, here's the fastest path to resolving it:

Log into your account and go to the Help Centre at support.trustedhousesitters.com. Open Live Chat rather than submitting a ticket, since for billing issues it's consistently faster. Have your sit confirmation email ready before you start the conversation. If you hold a combined sitter and homeowner account, check both dashboards, since fees occasionally get stuck on one side of the system and don't appear as refunded on the other.

Keep any written confirmation of the cancellation on hand before you reach out, whether that's a message thread on the THS platform, a WhatsApp exchange, or an email. A clear, factual message gets a faster result than a frustrated one.

TrustedHouseSitters Platform Status: Mid-2026

For anyone wondering whether this is still a platform worth joining, here's what the numbers look like right now.

Active members: around in the hundreds of thousands across 140 countries. Active listings: between 9,000 in the low season and 12,000 at peak, with the UK and USA making up almost 90 percent of them. Platform trajectory: still growing, and growing faster than any other platform we track, backed by heavy marketing investment. The fee did not trigger the mass exodus some predicted, and the platform has meaningfully reinvested in the product since.

We'll keep this article updated. If the listing count drops significantly or the platform changes its fee structure, this section will reflect that.

Caro and I have completed 20 house sits across 12 countries, driven 19,000km in Australia and 24,000km in our 1998 VW T4, and saved over $26,500 in accommodation costs over three years of house sitting. If you've got a specific sit-count scenario you want us to run the numbers on, drop it in the comments below, or DM us @housesittersguide, we answer everyone. And if you're joining or upgrading, our 25% TrustedHouseSitters discount is worth using either way.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is the TrustedHouseSitters booking fee and how much is it?

  It's a $12 USD / £9 charge applied every time a sit is confirmed. Both the sitter and the homeowner pay it separately, unless one or both are on a Premium plan. It's on top of the annual membership fee, not instead of it.

• How do I avoid the booking fee completely?

  Upgrade to Premium. It's the only plan that removes the fee entirely, on both the sitter and homeowner side. Using our 25% discount code brings Premium down to a price that's genuinely competitive with Standard once you're doing 6 or more sits a year.

• Do Nomador or HouseCarers charge a booking fee?

  No. Neither Nomador nor HouseCarers charge a per-sit booking fee. Both use a flat annual membership only. MindMyHouse also has no booking fee. TrustedHouseSitters is the only major platform with a per-sit charge on top of membership.

• What's the exact breakeven point for upgrading to Premium?

  Using discounted prices, Basic crosses above Premium at 9 sits a year, and Standard crosses above Premium at 6 sits a year. Without the discount applied, those numbers shift to roughly 11 sits for Basic and 8 for Standard.

• Is the booking fee refundable if my sit is cancelled?

  Yes, in full, whichever side cancels. The Booking Fee Cancellation Policy says the fee is refunded in full whenever a booking is cancelled, regardless of who initiates it, back to the original payment method, and the version in force when your booking was confirmed is the one that applies. Community reports suggest the automated refund does not always trigger, so if it has not appeared within 7 to 10 days, go to support.trustedhousesitters.com and use Live Chat.

• When does the booking fee start applying to my account?

  After your next membership renewal. Sits confirmed before your renewal date aren't affected.

• Should I upgrade to Premium to avoid the fee?

  It depends on your sit count and your experience level. If you're new to pet care, Standard's vet line is worth the upgrade from Basic regardless of the fee math. If you're doing 6 or more sits a year, Premium's flat cost and cancellation coverage make it the stronger option overall.

• Is TrustedHouseSitters still the best platform despite the fee?

  For global coverage, yes, more so now than when the fee launched, with between 9,000 and 12,000 active listings depending on the season and genuine platform improvements funded by the added revenue. If you're focused on a specific region, a local platform with no per-sit fee may still cost you less overall.

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