Here’s what’s happening in animal shelters across the U.S.

We call this goal "no-kill," and collecting data across the nation is a big part of achieving it. To reach no-kill, a shelter needs to save at least 90% of the animals it takes in. We call this percentage a save rate.

Typically, no more than 10% of animals a shelter takes in can’t be saved because they have irreparable medical or behavioral issues that compromise their quality of life. That’s how we arrived at the 90% benchmark.

Each day in 2024 across the United States, 12,000 animals entered shelters, and 82% of them were saved.

To reach our goal of achieving no-kill nationwide, we would have needed to save 425,000 more dogs and cats last year. Roughly 7 million households are planning to add a pet to their family this year.

According to our data, communities want homeless pets to leave shelters alive:

• 80% of people feel it is very important or essential to have no-kill shelters in their area.
• 74% of people are more likely to support a shelter working toward becoming no-kill.
• 51% of people would donate to a local shelter or rescue group to ensure shelters become no-kill.

And we know it’s possible. In fact, in 2024, four states (Delaware, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont) maintained their no-kill status. An additional eight states (Connecticut, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming) were within 500 animals of being no-kill.

63% of the shelters across the U.S. were already no-kill in 2024, and that list continues to grow. But there’s still much more work to do to get the entire country to no-kill in 2025. Save rates vary depending on where you live, so it’s important to check to see how your community is doing.

Some lost and stray animals are brought into shelters by people trying to help or by animal services officers. Some are given up by their families for financial reasons or a lack of pet-inclusive housing. And some come in from other shelters in hopes that they will have a better chance of being adopted at a different location.

The number of homeless pets coming into a shelter is called intake, and knowing a shelter’s intake pattern is important to understand how to help it with lifesaving. The data has shown us that for many shelters, adoptions have stalled while intake has increased. In 2019, 2.6 million pets were adopted from shelters; in 2024, 2.3 million pets were adopted from shelters. That’s a 13.2% decrease.

There's not enough space for the homeless pets who need it most, especially among some of the most vulnerable animals entering shelters: kittens who require round-the-clock care, big dogs who are less likely to be adopted because of pet-restrictive housing and insurance policies, and cats who prefer to live outdoors (we call them community cats) who often don’t leave shelters alive because they’re not used to being around people.

In 2016, when Best Friends made the bold goal to lead the country to no-kill in 2025, 71% of homeless dogs and cats were making it out of America’s shelters alive. Since then, that number has increased to 83%. Increasing the national save rate from 71% to 83% since 2016 means that an extra 3.7 million cats and dogs have been saved in just eight years.

In 2023, 1.2 million cats and 1.1 million dogs were adopted from shelters. The number of cats being adopted from shelters is down 5.9% since 2019, and the number of dogs being adopted from shelters is down 16.8% since 2019.

We can help even more pets find homes in 2024 and beyond when we let people know the lifesaving impact they can have when they adopt a pet from a shelter — instead of buying a dog or cat from a breeder, online retailer, or pet store.

We can also make sure more pets leave shelters safely through fostering and giving them lifts to places where they’re more likely to be adopted. When pets are fostered in a home — even for a night or two — that frees up space in the shelter. And when they’re taken to other shelters or areas of the country where they’re more likely to be adopted, that saves even more lives.

As for community cats (the cats we mentioned earlier who prefer to live outdoors), many are unlikely to be adopted, which puts them at risk of being killed in a shelter. Housing these cats also diverts resources from caring for other pets and finding them homes. Community cats can live happy, long lives when they’re returned to their outdoor homes. That's why we need our communities to allow trap-neuter-vaccinate-return (TNVR) programs that prevent cats from reproducing.

Best Friends is committed to supporting lifesaving in shelters, and we see the challenges firsthand. We work with over 4,900 network partners, providing direct support through training, grants, hands-on help, and other programmatic support as needed. Our network partners have a save rate of 84% compared to shelters that are not network partners, which have a save rate of 79%.

Well-supported staff are crucial for effective animal sheltering in a community. Working in a shelter is not easy. It can take a toll, so we've also worked with shelter employees across the United States to understand how their work affects their mental health.

Animal shelter staff experience burnout and compassion fatigue at levels comparable to — or even exceeding — first responders like firefighters, police officers, and nurses. Burnout reduces the likelihood of shelter staff staying in their roles, according to original research conducted by Best Friends.

Our communities can support shelter staff when we volunteer and foster to help alleviate their burden. Donations also make it possible to provide the staffing resources needed to keep both people and pets safe in our animal shelters.