Why market size reports disagree: eight estimates for one market, reconciled

Market size reports disagree mainly because each firm defines the market differently, measures a different base year and geography, and builds the number with a different model, and most free summaries do not publish enough of any of those to reconcile them. We collected eight published estimates for one market, pet grooming services, from the firms’ own free report pages on 23 September 2026. The global figures for 2025 run from $3.6 billion to $8.44 billion, a spread of 2.3 times. The growth rates agree closely: every firm forecasts between 6.7% and 8.2% a year. The disagreement is almost entirely about how big the market is today, which is the part that depends on definitions.

Eight published figures for the pet grooming services market

Every figure below is quoted from the firm’s own public page. Base years differ, so the last column restates each global figure at 2025. Where a firm published a 2025 value, it is used as given. For the two that did not, we applied the firm’s own CAGR to its own base value; those two cells are our arithmetic, marked with an asterisk.

Firm (page date)	Stated value	Forecast	CAGR	Geography	Global value at 2025
Fact.MR (May 2026)	$3.6B in 2025	$7.9B by 2036	7.5%	Global	$3.6B
market.us (Oct 2024)	$5.7B in 2023	$11.0B by 2033	6.8%	Global	$6.5B*
SkyQuest (Jan 2025)	$6.17B in 2024, $6.61B in 2025	$11.35B by 2033	7%	Global	$6.61B
Future Market Report (Aug 2025)	$6.70B in 2025	$12.60B by 2033	8.21%	Global	$6.70B
Straits Research (Aug 2026)	$7.2B in 2025	$13.24B by 2034	7%	Global	$7.2B
Coherent Market Insights (Mar 2026)	$8.20B in 2026	$13.81B by 2033	7.7%	Global	$7.6B*
The Business Research Company (Sep 2026)	$8.44B in 2025	$12.31B by 2030	7.8%	Global	$8.44B
Mordor Intelligence (May 2026)	$2.19B in 2025	$3.23B by 2031	6.67%	United States only	not comparable

Two firms also publish a United States or North America figure on the same pages. Straits Research says the US market “was valued at USD 1.12 billion in 2025”. market.us gives North America a 42.3% share and “USD 2.4 Billion” in 2023. Future Market Report gives the United States a 22.4% share, which on its own $6.70 billion total is about $1.5 billion.

Compounding each stated value at its stated CAGR lands on that firm’s own forecast within rounding for all eight. The curves are internally consistent; they start from different places.

Differences that scope and definitions explain

What is counted. The Business Research Company’s definition covers establishments that groom pets “including the ancillary sale of products related to this service”, and its page says market value “includes the value of related goods sold”. Fact.MR defines the market as professional grooming services and says it “differs from pet grooming products because the revenue comes from service delivery”. One number includes shampoo and accessories sold at the counter; the other does not. That alone moves the total, and these two firms sit at the top and bottom of the table.

Which animals and which channels. market.us segments by dogs, cats, fish and birds and includes grooming delivered at “veterinary clinics”. Mordor’s US report segments by dogs and cats only and adds a channel for grooming bundled with boarding or daycare. Whether grooming inside a vet visit or a boarding stay is counted as grooming revenue is a definitional choice, and the free pages do not say how bundled revenue is split.

What the service mix is. The firms do not agree on which service is largest. Coherent puts bathing and brushing at 41.6% of revenue. Future Market Report puts bathing and hair trimming at 48.7%. market.us puts massage and spa services at 74.1%. Those shares cannot all describe the same set of transactions, which tells you the firms are carving the market into different categories before they size it.

Base year and geography. The figures span base years from 2023 to 2026, and one is US only. Restating everything at 2025 closes some of the gap between market.us and the rest, and none of the gap between Fact.MR and The Business Research Company.

Method. Fact.MR is the only firm here whose free page states a sizing formula: estimates “use pet population, grooming frequency, service pricing, salon utilization, and channel mix”. That is a bottom-up build, and bottom-up builds tend to come in lower when frequency and price assumptions are conservative. Future Market Report says it uses “both top-down and bottom-up approaches”. Coherent lists its primary interview groups and names the databases it consulted, including IBISWorld and Statista. The other pages link to a general methodology page rather than describing this report’s model.

Differences the public pages do not explain

• Two US figures for the same year. Mordor Intelligence puts the US at $2.19 billion in 2025. Straits Research puts it at $1.12 billion in 2025. Nothing on either free page accounts for a factor of two.
• A US figure against its own region. Straits gives North America 42% of a $7.2 billion market, about $3.0 billion, and the US $1.12 billion. On those two numbers Canada and Mexico would be larger than the United States. The page does not reconcile them; the full report may.
• Two values for one year on one page. Mordor’s page gives the 2026 US market as $2.34 billion in its summary and $2.24 billion in its FAQ. The $2.34 billion figure is the one consistent with its 6.67% CAGR and 2031 forecast.
• The residual global gap. Product sales explain part of the distance between $3.6 billion and $8.44 billion. How much, neither page says.

None of this implies bad faith. Free summaries advertise paid reports, which may carry the reconciliation. But a figure quoted from a summary arrives without the definition that makes it meaningful.

A primary anchor from the US Census

The 2022 Economic Census counts every US employer establishment and its receipts. Pet grooming falls in NAICS 812910, Pet Care (except Veterinary) Services, the industry that also covers boarding, training, pet sitting and dog walking. Census table EC2281BASIC reports for 812910 in 2022:

Measure	Value
Receipts	$10.11 billion
Establishments	24,655
Firms	24,098
Employees	169,960

Two limits matter. The count excludes businesses with no employees, which includes many independent and mobile groomers. It also classifies an establishment by its primary activity, so a grooming salon inside a pet superstore can be counted with the store rather than in 812910. The American Pet Products Association’s industry figures give a second anchor with a wider scope: $14.3 billion of US “Other Services” in 2025, a category that includes “boarding, grooming, insurance, training, pet sitting, pet walking”.

Set against these, the private US estimates of $1.1 billion to $2.4 billion describe grooming as roughly 11% to 24% of all US non-veterinary pet care receipts, before the uncounted sole proprietors. The Census product-line detail that would split grooming from boarding was not retrievable for this page, so the anchor bounds the estimates from above rather than confirming any one of them. That is still useful: any US grooming figure above about $10 billion would need to explain itself.

Whether Grand View Research, Mordor Intelligence or any other firm is reliable depends on the figure

Reliability is a property of a number and its documentation, not of a brand. The same firm can publish a well-documented estimate in one market and a thin one in another. Grand View Research, Mordor Intelligence, Fortune Business Insights, Precedence Research, market.us and MarketsandMarkets all publish free summaries of the kind in the table; we could not retrieve every firm’s pet grooming page, and firms without a row were not assessed. The same checks apply to all of them:

1. A stated definition. Does the page say what revenue is in and out: products, bundled services, which animals, which channels? A figure without a definition cannot be compared with anything.
2. A stated method. A formula (population times frequency times price) or a named top-down anchor is checkable. “Primary and secondary research” is not a method.
3. Named inputs. Mordor’s page links numbered citations to its sources, including the APPA figures. That is the kind of trail you want.
4. One figure, one story. Search the firm’s press releases for the same market. If the value or CAGR changes between releases without a new edition date, ask which one the paid report carries.
5. A primary anchor nearby. Census receipts, a trade association total or public company segment revenue will not match a market definition exactly, but they tell you the order of magnitude.

These reports are useful for what the table shows they agree on: direction and approximate growth, the list of segments worth thinking about, and the named companies in a market. They are weakest as a single point estimate of current size.

How to cite a range instead of a single number

Quote the spread, the definitions and a primary anchor together. For this market, a defensible sentence is:

Published estimates of the global pet grooming services market in 2025 range from $3.6 billion (Fact.MR, services only) to $8.44 billion (The Business Research Company, including related product sales), with forecast growth of 6.7% to 8.2% a year. US Census data put 2022 receipts for all non-veterinary pet care employer establishments, of which grooming is one part, at $10.1 billion.

That sentence survives a reader who checks it. “The market is worth $7.2 billion” does not, because the next source they open will say something else. To triangulate market size in practice: collect every published figure, restate them to one year and one geography, sort the differences into scope, method and unexplained, and bound the result with a government or trade-body anchor.

How Hyperresearch handles sources that disagree

Hyperresearch looks for this kind of disagreement before it writes. A run pairs opposing claims from its sources into a contradiction graph, sends an investigator into each ranked disagreement, and records the named tensions in the output rather than averaging them. Its independence audit counts syndicated copies of one press release as one voice, which matters in a market where the same figure is reprinted widely. How it works describes every step, and the verification receipt shows how each citation is checked against the source it cites.

The full process behind a run is on how it works.