The Best House and Pet Sitting Websites in Australia, Compared (2026)

There is no single best house sitting website in Australia, because the platforms Australians name in one breath run two models that cannot be compared on price. On exchange platforms nobody pays anybody for the sit and the only money is a membership, which on the Australian sites we could read runs from free to $89 a year. On paid marketplaces you pay the sitter a nightly rate and the platform takes a commission from the sitter plus a fee from you. Pick the model, then pick the site. Sitterly, which publishes this page, is one of the eight below.

Every Australian comparison page we could find on this topic is published by one of the platforms it compares, and this one is no different. So here is the working. Every competitor figure in the table below was read from that company's own live pages on 22 August 2026 and re-checked, except where the row says the figure could not be read. Where a number could not be read, we say so rather than estimate it.

The two models are not comparable on price, so pick the model first

Exchange platforms are TrustedHousesitters, Aussie House Sitters, Happy House Sitters, Mindahome and Sitterly. A sitter stays in your home, cares for your pets, and the accommodation is the whole of the exchange. TrustedHousesitters states it inside its own FAQ structured data: "our sitters sit for love, not money. After paying an annual membership, no money changes hands between our members."

Paid marketplaces are Mad Paws, owned by Rover since 11 November 2025, Pawshake and PetCloud. You pay the sitter's nightly rate, the platform takes a percentage from the sitter and a fee from you. What these three call house sitting is a paid in-home booking. On the Mad Paws page selling it, the words free, exchange and swap appear zero times.

Money is not the only difference. In an exchange nobody is buying a service, so what each side owes the other is whatever the two of you write down. In a paid booking you are buying a service, which changes what you can reasonably ask for. Our guide to what actually changes hands in an Australian house sit covers the middle ground.

One word to pin down: app. Marketplace apps connect owners and sitters, which is what nearly everyone means. Pet management apps track feeding and medication, and business tools handle a professional sitter's invoicing. Neither will find you a sitter. Every platform below is the first kind.

What each platform charges, checked on 22 August 2026

Three things the table cannot hold. Aussie House Sitters charges both sides, so it is not a one-sided paywall, its terms state at clause 5.1(c) that prices include GST, and it has no pricing page at all, that URL 404s, so the $49 and $89 are undiscoverable rather than paywalled. Mindahome, run by a team of four in Ferntree Gully since 2008, has the cheapest annual sitter membership we were able to read, at $69, non-refundable with "no exceptions" under its terms. TrustedHousesitters is the only UK parent entity in this set and the scale player in the exchange half, at three to five times the Australian prices. Pawshake is not Australian either: it runs under California law with a liability cap of US$100.

Sitterly's row is short because nothing sits underneath it. The whole of it is on the Sitterly pricing page: homeowners free permanently, sitters free during the growth phase, and a flat-fee subscription planned, which we would rather say now than spring on anyone later.

Four of the eight will not tell you the fee you actually pay

TrustedHousesitters charges a per-sit booking fee on Basic and Standard, to both sides, waived on Premium. On 22 August 2026 its Australian pricing page rendered the amount from an unresolved template variable, printing the literal text "{{symbol}}{{amount}} per sit". No dollar figure appeared, so the amount you would actually pay is not published anywhere we could read. Our look at whether TrustedHousesitters is worth it here goes through the tiers.

Mad Paws charges the owner a booking fee that exists in its terms and appears only inside the booking flow, with no figure published anywhere we could reach. Its terms do explain what the fee funds, so the fair criticism is the disclosure, not the fee. What changed after the Rover acquisition covers it.

Pawshake publishes the structure of its owner-side Member Service Fee, a percentage with a cap that tapers larger bookings, but not the rate, which appears at checkout. Its sitter-side 19% is stated plainly in three places.

PetCloud publishes the clearest number of the four, a booking fee "capped at $40". On 22 August 2026 that sentence sat inside one blog FAQ and on none of its services and prices, how it works, homepage or become a sitter pages. Its sitter-side commission is genuinely undisclosed.

A membership is a service you have paid an Australian business for, and consumer guarantees apply to services bought in Australia. The ACCC sets out what those guarantees are. General information, not legal advice.

We could not read Happy House Sitters' prices, so we have not printed them

Third-party sources describe Happy House Sitters as an Australian family owned exchange platform operating since 1999, and we could not confirm that from their own pages. Their robots.txt blocks our research agent by name, and on 22 August 2026 their server returned HTTP 403 to us while the domain was not blocked to ordinary browsers when we tested it. We did not disguise ourselves to get past a refusal that names us, so everything we hold on them is second hand and at least one figure circulating on third-party sites is stale. Their pricing page is public, so open it yourself, and be sceptical of any comparison that prints a figure without saying where it came from.

The protection you are buying is narrower than the headline

Happy House Sitters and PetCloud are absent because we did not establish a published figure for either, which is not the same as there being none.

Two patterns matter. The first is arithmetic, not criticism: exchange platforms hold no money, so they have no mechanism to compensate anyone, Sitterly included. The second is that marketing and policy disagree on the paid side. Three live Mad Paws pages contradict each other, one FAQ referring to a "10 million dollar liability insurance policy" and another saying they "provide insurance", while the Guarantee page states in capitals "THE MAD PAWS GUARANTEE IS NOT INSURANCE". All are their words, quoted together because quoting one alone would be unfair.

Either way, what you rely on during a sit is your own home and contents policy and your own vet arrangements. Whether a non-paying occupant affects your cover is a question only your insurer can answer against your product disclosure statement, and Moneysmart notes that is where a policy's exclusions are set out rather than in the summary.

No Australian platform we could verify screens every sitter as standard, including this one

Aussie House Sitters says it outright: "We do not screen our sitters. We are a meeting place for sitters and home owners to find each other only." The same site's place-an-ad page markets unlimited access to ID verified, five-star sitters. Both are live. Mad Paws treats police checks as optional and self-selected without publishing how many sitters hold one. On 22 August 2026 Pawshake's own check route carried a notice saying it was unavailable. PetCloud promotes "100% Police checked" without saying who pays or what it costs.

Sitterly's position, to compare like with like: verification is email, which is automatic, and an optional police check that members start themselves and an administrator reviews, and homeowners can filter sitter profiles by police check. Sitterly does not vet every user, supervise sits or guarantee anyone's safety.

What nobody here explains is what a check proves. A Nationally Coordinated Criminal History Check runs through the National Police Checking Service operated by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, and the ACIC states there is no standard validity period, because a check is a point in time check only: results "only reflect police records on the date and time the result is released". A badge earned in 2024 describes 2024. It is a record search, not a character reference.

Which one is right depends on which of these you are

One question settles most of it: are you trying to save money or buy accountability? Exchange does the first, paid does the second, and expecting both from one platform is where most disappointment here starts.

The RSPCA's guidance on caring for a cat while you are away frames that choice around the animal rather than the platform. And money earned through a platform is income, so the ATO's page on providing services in the sharing economy is the place to start, with your own position one for a registered tax agent.

Where Sitterly is the weaker choice

Sitterly is newer than every exchange platform here. Aussie House Sitters has run since 2004, Mindahome since 2008 and TrustedHousesitters since 2010, each confirmed from its own pages. Third-party sources put Happy House Sitters earlier still, at 1999, which we could not confirm. If listing numbers in your own suburb decide this, check each site's current listings for your area before paying, ours included, rather than taking our word for it.

Three more, plainly. Sitterly carries no cover and no guarantee, so if a stated vet limit with conditions attached is what you want, Mad Paws and Pawshake publish one and we do not. Sitterly does not offer dog walking, drop-in visits, daycare or boarding at a sitter's home, so if that is what you need, a paid marketplace is the place. And Sitterly reviews appear only once a booking is completed, so a newer platform has fewer.

One where a competitor simply wins. Sitters are free on Sitterly now with a flat-fee subscription planned, so today's price is not one you can lock in. The lifetime options at Aussie House Sitters and Mindahome are, and if certainty matters more than a free start they are the better buy.

True of all eight: none is in your home. Each is an introduction service with a messaging layer, and a sit is decided away from it, by whether you spoke to the person, whether expectations were written down before anyone said yes, and whether there is an emergency plan naming a vet and a spending limit.

Check any of these in ten minutes before you pay

A platform's own local figures are not a shortcut. On 22 August 2026 TrustedHousesitters published one average cost sentence, identical to the cent, on its pages for the City of Sydney, Boroondara in suburban Melbourne and Balonne Shire in south-west Queensland.

1. Search your suburb, not your city. Randwick rather than Sydney, Glenelg rather than Adelaide. TrustedHousesitters has no Australian suburb tier, so a locality page is as close as you will get.
2. Count only the listings that are genuinely current, and check their dates. Expired ads pad these sites.
3. Find the price without starting a signup.
4. Read the cancellation clause in the terms, not the reassurance on the homepage. It is this market's widest gap between what is marketed and what is promised.
5. Ask what verification means there: what is checked, by whom, when, and whether it covers every member or only those who opt in.
6. Message one person and time the reply. Sitterly shows a reply rating from 1 to 5 on profiles for this reason, and elsewhere an unanswered first message is your data point.

Is there a house sitting app, or only websites?

Five of the eight publish an iOS app on the Australian App Store, checked on 27 August 2026: Mad Paws, Pawshake, TrustedHousesitters, PetCloud and Mindahome. We could not find one for Aussie House Sitters or Happy House Sitters, and Sitterly does not have one yet either. Sitterly runs as a mobile site today, with an app stated as coming rather than shipped.

An app is worth almost nothing to you at the point where you are choosing. It changes none of the fees in the table above, it does not change what the cancellation clause says, and it does not change who is verified. What it does change is the part that comes after you have chosen: notifications when a sitter replies, and photo updates during the sit. If two platforms are otherwise equal for your trip, take the one with the app. If they are not equal on price, cover or supply in your suburb, the app is the wrong tiebreaker.

One thing to watch. On the paid platforms the app is where the booking flow lives, and the booking flow is where the owner fee finally appears. That is the same fee four of the eight will not publish on the open web, so downloading the app is sometimes the only way to see what you will actually be charged.

What "best value" means when nobody publishes the same number

Every platform in this market is the best value on its own page, because each one defines value as the thing it happens to be cheapest at. There is no published, comparable figure, so the honest version is to fix the question first.

Value here is the total you pay across a year, divided by the sits you will realistically get out of it in your own suburb. That second half is what the membership fees hide. A $49 lifetime membership is poor value if there are three homes listed near you, and A$229 a year is defensible if you sit six times and would otherwise have paid for accommodation. Work it from your own postcode and your own travel pattern, not from the headline.

On the same reasoning, the most reliable platform for you is the one with the most current listings where you actually are, not the one with the largest national number. Australian supply is concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne on every platform we looked at, including this one. Search your suburb before you pay anyone, on all of them, and count only the listings with live dates.

See where Sitterly sits on that table

Sitterly's row has nothing hidden under it: free for homeowners permanently, free for sitters during the current growth phase, with a flat-fee subscription planned and stated in advance. Put Sitterly's row beside the other seven and see whether it stands up. If it does, how a sit works is the next page, and a profile costs nothing.