Four for one walker, unless you have a specific reason and the paperwork to back it. Then check your council, because in a lot of Australian local government areas the number of dogs one person may walk in a public place is decided for you.
That is the part most sizing advice skips. Boarding capacity and daycare capacity are yours to set. A group walk happens on somebody else's footpath, under a local law, watched by people who will report you, and your insurer has an opinion about the number too. Work out what you are allowed to do before you work out what is efficient.
The hand, not the van
Assume the limit is yours to choose and the real ceiling is still physical.
You have two hands and you need one of them. Six leads in one fist is not control, it is an arrangement that works until a cat, and the moment it stops working you are being pulled across a road by a group of dogs you are responsible for. Anyone who has done it knows the number where their arm stops being enough, and for most people it is four.
Then there is the drive. Say a four-dog round at $45 a dog takes ninety minutes door to door, so $180 for an hour and a half. Adding two dogs that live eight minutes further out turns it into a two-hour round for $270. The per-dog fee went nowhere and the hourly rate went from $120 to $135, which is a real gain but a much smaller one than the headcount suggests, and you are now walking six dogs for it.
Adding dogs on the same street is the version that works. Adding dogs in a new suburb is a second round wearing the first one's name.
Set the group size where the booking form can see it
A number you hold in your head is a number that gets broken by a self-service booking on a Sunday night.
- Open Schedules & Sessions and select the walker's session on the day.
- Set Pets at a time to the size of one group, then select Stage for Publishing.
- Select Publish Changes, tick the box in Before You Publish, then select Publish Changes.
The control is Pets at a Time on the session or the team member, and it means what it says: how many pets are in your care at the same moment, not how many you walk in a day. A walker doing a four-dog morning round and a four-dog afternoon round is set to four. Set it to eight and the booking form will happily put eight dogs on the same nine o'clock.
Change it when the team changes rather than when a single busy week tempts you.
Pair it with a suburb restriction on the walk service so the round stays a round. A booking from the far side of town is not a capacity problem, it is a route problem, and it is much easier to decline before it exists.
Reading the round once it is booked
If you are on Trips, the group is not something you tell it about. Trips reads a walk from the stops themselves: two or more that share a booked start and end, or that match a named session on the walker's hours. Stop numbers then restart in each walk, so the morning group is one to four and the afternoon group starts again at one. Getting started with Trips covers the views and what customers do and do not see.
That detail decides how you book. If your morning dogs are all entered at 8:00 to 9:00, they read as one walk and Magic Optimise puts them in drive order while keeping the group together. If they are entered at 8:00, 8:05 and 8:10 because that is roughly when you get to each house, Trips sees a shared clock instead of a group. Book the group on the group's time and let the run order sort out the doorsteps.
Trips is a paid add-on rather than part of the plan, and businesses on Pro, Flex or Max turn it on themselves from Settings. On a single four-dog round you may not need it. On three rounds across two walkers it is where the group sizes stop being a guess.
Before you act: the number of dogs one person may walk in a public place is set by your council and sometimes by state law, and your public liability cover may set its own limit. This is general information rather than legal advice. Check your local requirements and your policy before you increase a group.