How Far Do Cats Roam From Home? What GPS Studies Show

Most pet cats roam far less than their owners imagine. When researchers fitted GPS trackers to 925 pet cats in six countries, the average home range was just 3.6 hectares, and the team concluded that pet cats stay close to home, within roughly 100 metres (Kays et al., 2020). Some cats go further, especially unneutered males and cats in the countryside, and a few travel a kilometre or more. Missing cats are usually found close by too: in a study of 1,210 missing cats, half of those found alive were within 50 metres of where they went missing (Huang et al., 2018).

What GPS trackers show about how far cats roam

The best data on how far cats roam comes from projects in which owners fit their cats with small GPS loggers. The largest, the Cat Tracker project, followed 925 pet cats in the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, plus a few in Canada and Denmark, for at least five days each (Kays et al., 2020).

• •The average home range, the area a cat used regularly, was 3.6 hectares: roughly a circle with a radius of 100 metres around the house.
• •Only three of the cats ranged over more than one square kilometre.
• •Older cats roamed less, males and unneutered cats roamed more, and cats in the countryside had home ranges about 1.6 times larger than cats in towns.
• •Feral cats and wild cats of a similar size typically use areas 10 to 20 times larger. The researchers put the difference down to pet cats being fed at home.

A study in Norway tracked most of the cats in one neighbourhood: 92 pet cats with outdoor access in the town of Ås, each followed for around three weeks (Bischof et al., 2022). On average the cats spent 79% of their outdoor time within 50 metres of home. The furthest point each cat reached was 352 metres away on average, and the cat that strayed furthest went about 3.4 kilometres.

In Reading, in the UK, 20 neutered pet cats were tracked in summer and winter. On an average day each covered about 1.9 hectares, and the cats ranged over a larger area at night than during the day (Thomas et al., 2014).

Why some cats roam further than others

Every study found big differences between individual cats. In the Norwegian neighbourhood alone, home ranges went from 0.3 to 22.1 hectares (Bischof et al., 2022). These factors made a difference:

• •Neutering: unneutered cats moved more than neutered ones. The unneutered toms in the Cat Tracker study had home ranges of 7.6 hectares on average, against 3.6 hectares for neutered males, although only ten unneutered cats of either sex took part (Kays et al., 2020).
• •Sex: males roamed further than females in the Cat Tracker data, and in Norway males averaged 3.7 hectares against 1.5 hectares for females. In Reading, by contrast, the area covered per day did not differ between the sexes.
• •Age: older cats roamed less. No cat over seven years old in the Cat Tracker study had a home range larger than 25 hectares.
• •Town or countryside: cats in rural areas had home ranges about 1.6 times larger than cats in towns.
• •Time of day: the cats in Reading covered more ground at night than by day.

The country made only a small difference. Average home ranges in the Cat Tracker study were 2.5 hectares in Australia, 4.3 in New Zealand, 4.6 in the UK and 4.7 in the US.

How far do lost cats go?

Roaming is what a cat does in its own territory. A cat that goes missing is often doing something else: hiding after a fright, shut in somewhere, or lost outside the area it knows. The largest study of where missing cats turn up surveyed the owners of 1,210 missing cats, most of them in the US, Australia and Canada (Huang et al., 2018).

• •Of the cats found alive whose distance was known, half were within 50 metres of where they went missing and three quarters within 500 metres.
• •Indoor-only cats were found closest: a median of 39 metres away, and three quarters within 137 metres.
• •Cats allowed outside unsupervised went further: a median of 300 metres, and three quarters within about 1.6 kilometres.
• •The longest distance reported for a cat found alive was 25 kilometres, a rare exception.

Most of these cats were found outdoors: in a garden, hiding in shrubs and undergrowth, under decks and porches, or waiting outside their own home. 11% were found inside someone else's house, and less than 2% in a shelter.

What it means for your search: close and thorough first, then wider

The research points the same way every time: search close to home, carefully, before you search far. From their results, the authors of the missing-cat study suggest that a search radius of about 200 metres is likely to be enough for an indoor-only cat, while the search for a cat with outdoor access may need to extend to 2 kilometres or more (Huang et al., 2018).

1. Start at home and next door. Search your house, garden, shed and garage, then the neighbouring gardens, at dusk and after dark with a torch. Ask your neighbours to open their sheds, garages and cellars.
2. Cover your cat's everyday range. For an outdoor cat, that means the gardens, paths and hedges within a few hundred metres that it uses every day. For an indoor cat, search every hiding place within about 200 metres, slowly and more than once.
3. Then widen step by step. If an outdoor cat hasn't turned up after a few days, take your posters, flyers and questions out to one or two kilometres, and keep repeating the night searches closer to home.

A hidden cat rarely answers, so many pairs of eyes nearby matter more than covering distance on your own. In the same study, talking to neighbours, searching at night with a torch and checking neighbours' properties with their permission were among the methods most often credited with finding a cat quickly.

A poster with a large, clear photo, put up across your cat's likely range, reaches the people who live there. The free poster tool makes one from your photo in a few minutes.

To reach the neighbours you can't speak to in person, PawAlarm shows your cat as an ad on Facebook and Instagram to people living around the place it went missing, so the whole radius is watching for it.

Sources

• •Kays, R. et al. (2020). The small home ranges and large local ecological impacts of pet cats. Animal Conservation 23: 516–523. doi:10.1111/acv.12563
• •Bischof, R. et al. (2022). Mapping the “catscape” formed by a population of pet cats with outdoor access. Scientific Reports 12: 5964. doi:10.1038/s41598-022-09694-9
• •Thomas, R. L., Baker, P. J. & Fellowes, M. D. E. (2014). Ranging characteristics of the domestic cat (Felis catus) in an urban environment. Urban Ecosystems 17: 911–921. doi:10.1007/s11252-014-0360-5
• •Huang, L. et al. (2018). Search methods used to locate missing cats and locations where missing cats are found. Animals 8(1): 5. doi:10.3390/ani8010005