The Shelter Animals Count 2025 Mid-Year Report: What You Need to Know

Data is one of animal sheltering’s most powerful tools, both at the local and national levels. We’ve talked a lot about how data collection and reporting is essential to shelter operations, collaboration between organizations, and national advocacy for animal care, and no animal welfare group does data quite like Shelter Animals Count (SAC). After spending the first half of 2025 gathering and analyzing data from nearly 14,000 organizations, SAC has just released their 2025 mid-year report. Let’s talk about what we learned and how to apply it at your shelter.

Who is Shelter Animals Count (and Why Should You Care)?

Established in 2012, Shelter Animals Count (SAC) is an organization committed to collecting and sharing animal data. Each year, they release a mid-year report and a year-end report, which break down trends in key animal welfare areas, like intakes, outcomes, and adoptions. By digging deep into animal data on a biannual basis, SAC is able to illustrate how things like seasonal changes, shelter location, and animal sizes affect their outcomes and adoption rates, illuminating areas for individual shelters to make key welfare changes, highlighting the effects of intra-shelter collaboration, and revealing where national-level advocacy is still needed.

Breaking Down the Data: SAC’s 2025 Mid-Year Report

SAC just released their 2025 Mid-Year report, which includes 172 data points collected from nearly 14,000 participating organizations. This report breaks down key insights into intake rates and outcomes, highlighting how trends have changed since this time last year. Of particular note in this report was the expansion of animal-level data, which illustrated differences between animals based on size, age, and intake type. These key insights point toward size– and age-specific strategies to improve animal welfare in shelters.

Intake Highlights

During the first half of 2025, an estimated 2.8 million dogs and cats entered U.S. shelters and rescues. Compared with 2024 intake rates, this represents a 4% decrease. Breaking things down further, dogs and cats both showed modest decreases in intake numbers (5% and 3% respectively). This data shows that intake patterns are remaining consistent with trends seen in 2024, a hopeful trend that illustrates that efforts to reduce intakes and keep animals in homes are paying off, if only gradually.

Finding ways to continue to reduce intake rates can go a long way toward minimizing overcrowding, which has a positive effect on staff and animal welfare.

Key Insights

While intakes have decreased since last year, SAC emphasizes that this is not a reason for complacency. While decreased, intake rates are still higher than desirable, with most organizations still operating at or near full capacity. High intakes greatly affect animal shelters’ capacity for care, affecting everything from financial health to staff welfare.

These insights highlight the continued need for shelters to continue efforts to keep animals in homes and to reduce the number of stray animals roaming the streets. In particular, shelters should focus on promoting successful transitions into adoptive homes, robust capture and release programs, and community-based prevention and outreach programs to address the root causes of animal surrenders to shelters.

Outcome Highlights

Excluding transfers, 2.8 million dogs and cats had community outcomes in the first six months of 2025. This marks a 2% decrease in outcomes seen in the first half of 2024. Of the community outcomes seen in 2025 so far, 2.4 million were live outcomes, 2 million were adoptions, 317,000 were return-to-owner, and 366,000 were non-live outcomes. While outcomes have remained relatively consistent from 2024 to 2025, breaking down the data helps to illustrate key insights that have important implications to shelter operations and the animal welfare industry.

Key Insights

As we mentioned above, SAC has implemented advanced data analysis techniques in the first six months of 2025, allowing them to drill further into the data and gain insights into how size and age are affecting outcomes for dogs and cats. Here’s what they’ve learned:

Large Dogs Experience Notably Different Outcomes Compared to Small and Medium Dogs

SAC’s 2025 data was able to highlight key inconsistencies in outcomes for large dogs. Most notably, they found that small and medium dogs had higher adoption and transfer rates than larger dogs. Additionally, large dogs had the longest median length of stay. These findings highlight the need for size-specific strategies to get larger dogs moving more efficiently through shelters. Shelter managers should take this data into account in their pathway planning approach.

Kittens are overrepresented in rates of in-shelter deaths, pointing to the need for early intervention in this population.

Kittens Experience a Disproportionate Number of Non-Live Outcomes

Additionally, SAC found that a notable 30% of cats die in care by means other than euthanasia, with 65% of those deaths affecting these non-live outcomes being kittens under 5 months old. For reference, only 12% of dogs died or were lost in care in the first half of 2025, illustrating the disparity in the number of kittens who experience this outcome. This data helps to highlight the need for investments into early interventions for young kittens entering care.

Transfer Highlights

In the first six months of this year, 625,000 dogs and cats were transferred into sheltering organizations, with the majority of transferred animals being received by animal rescues. Of the 468,000 animals who were transferred out of shelters so far this year, the majority of them came from government shelters.

Key Insights

Many government shelters are overwhelmed by intakes, limiting their capacity for care and leading to higher rates of euthanasia when not managed. Transfers between rescues are an essential tool to increase live outcomes and reduce euthanasia rates, and SAC’s transfer data highlights the sheltering industry’s continued efforts toward collaboration between different types of shelters.

If you’re having trouble decoding the data, consider consulting the expert.

We’ve Got the Data; What’s Next?

Shelter Animals Count’s 2025 mid-year report highlighted key areas where the animal sheltering industry is improving–while also pointing to areas for improvement. Collaboration between shelters is an essential tool to keep animal data moving in the right direction, and data collection is a big part of building partnerships at a local and national level.

If you haven’t already, consider joining SAC’s charge toward data transparency at a national level by registering your shelter. Along with other shelters around the nation, you’ll be able to contribute insights from your organization to advocate for system-level change. If you’re struggling to figure out how to apply SAC’s data insights at your shelter, consider chatting with an expert in the sheltering industry. Shelter Behavior Integrations offers everything from hands-on support to online resources to help you start centering animal behavior in your shelter’s operations today.