Pet Spending in Mumbai Just Hit an All-Time High — Here’s Where It’s Going
Mallika Chatterjee
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September 30, 2026
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2 min read
If you live in Mumbai and feel like your pet’s monthly budget now rivals your own, you’re not imagining it. Pet spending in Mumbai — and across India’s biggest metros — has been climbing fast, and 2026 is shaping up to be the year it stops looking like a niche hobby and starts looking like a real household category.
Why Pet Spending in Mumbai Is Climbing So Fast
India’s overall pet care market was valued at roughly $3.6 billion in 2024 and is on track to nearly double to $7 billion by 2028, a growth rate hovering around 20% a year. Mumbai, as one of the country’s wealthiest and most pet-dense metros, is riding the front edge of that curve. More housing societies allow pets, more vets specialise in senior and exotic care, and more pet parents treat their dog or cat less like property and more like family — with its own line item in the monthly budget.
From Kibble to “Full-Stack” Care
The shift isn’t just about buying more food, it’s about buying different food and different everything. Premium and subscription pet food plans in India now range from roughly ₹1,000 to ₹15,000 a month, and brands report repeat-purchase rates as high as 56% once a pet parent switches to premium. Add grooming memberships, daycare, pet insurance, and wearable health tech to that list, and “pet spending” starts to look a lot like “family spending.”
What Mumbai Pet Parents Are Actually Buying
Talk to pet parents around the city and the pattern repeats: prescription or premium diets, grooming subscriptions instead of one-off visits, and increasingly, smart collars that do more than just track location. That’s where PAHI fits in — our GPS collar pairs location tracking with Pet’s Eye, an onboard HD camera, and Dotty AI, which flags unusual health or behaviour changes before they turn into a vet bill. In a city where pets roam building compounds, parks, and crowded streets, that kind of always-on visibility is quickly becoming as standard as a leash.
The Bigger Picture
India now has an estimated 32 million pet-owning households, up from 26 million just five years ago, and nobody expects that number, or the spending behind it, to slow down. Mumbai isn’t an outlier here. It’s a preview of where the rest of urban India is headed.
