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IC Retention Rate measures what percentage of your independent contractors remain actively working with you over a given period, rather than departing voluntarily or being let go.
How It’s Calculated
Divide the number of contractors who were active at the start of a period and remained active through its end by the total number active at the start.
What’s a Good Benchmark
85%+ annually is strong for pet care contracting work, which tends to see higher natural turnover than many industries due to its often part-time, flexible nature. Below 65% annually usually points to a genuine retention problem worth investigating — pay, scheduling flexibility, workload, or how supported contractors feel day to day.
Why It Matters
Every contractor departure costs real, often underestimated money and time: recruiting, vetting, background checks, training, and the client-trust rebuilding that happens whenever a client’s familiar sitter is replaced by someone new. A business with weak retention is running a permanent, largely invisible tax on its growth, since so much effort goes into replacing people rather than building on an experienced, stable team.
This KPI lives on the OPERATE dashboard inside PetBizApp.
A Worked Example
A business calculates its trailing 12-month IC Retention Rate at 58%, below the healthy range, despite feeling like turnover is “just normal for this industry.” Exit conversations with departed contractors reveal a consistent theme: inconsistent scheduling, with some weeks offering plenty of visits and others leaving contractors with almost no bookings and no advance notice either way. The business introduces a minimum-guaranteed-weekly-visits commitment for contractors who’ve been active more than three months, along with earlier advance scheduling. Retention climbs to 79% over the following year, and the business also spends noticeably less on recruiting and onboarding simply because it needs to replace far fewer people.
How This Looks Different By Business Model
For a small team of 2-4 contractors, a single departure swings this percentage dramatically, so it’s worth looking at the specific reasons behind any departure rather than treating the raw percentage as statistically meaningful on its own. For a larger, growing team, this is worth tracking as a genuine trend line month over month, since patterns (a particular hiring cohort, a particular manager, a particular season) become visible at scale that wouldn’t show up in a handful of individual departures. For a business relying heavily on part-time or seasonal contractors, expect naturally lower retention and measure it against a realistic industry baseline rather than a standard employee-retention benchmark.
What Causes This Number to Fall
Falling retention usually traces to: inconsistent or unpredictable scheduling that makes the work unreliable as an income source; pay or per-visit rates that haven’t kept pace with the local market; a lack of support or communication from the business, leaving contractors feeling like an interchangeable resource rather than a valued part of the team; or genuine burnout from being over-scheduled without adequate breaks.
A Common Misconception
Owners sometimes treat contractor turnover as an unavoidable, unfixable feature of the industry rather than something a specific process change can meaningfully move. While some turnover is genuinely structural (contractors moving on to other opportunities, life changes), a meaningful share is usually driven by fixable operational factors — scheduling consistency chief among them — that a business can directly influence.
How to Improve This Number
Conduct genuine exit conversations with every departing contractor and actually track the recurring themes, rather than treating each departure as unrelated. Prioritize scheduling consistency and advance notice, which surveys and exit interviews across the industry consistently rank above pay as a retention driver. And check in proactively with contractors well before they’re considering leaving, not only after they’ve already decided to go.
Common Mistakes
Treating turnover as unavoidable rather than investigating specific causes. Not conducting real exit interviews, or not acting on what they reveal. And measuring retention against a generic benchmark rather than one realistic for contractor-based pet care work specifically.
Related: Active IC Count (HR View)
