Cat visits grow 2.7% as U.S. vet visits fall 1.9% in the third quarter

U.S. veterinary clinical visits fell 1.9% in the third quarter of 2026 from a year earlier, CATalyst Council reported on October 13th, 2026, citing Vetsource data from 6,595 practices. Cat visits grew 2.7%. Dog visits fell 3.3%.

This is the first quarterly read since the council narrowed its demographic forecast in July, and it lands close to what that forecast predicted. For anyone still budgeting for a traffic rebound, the quarter is, in our view, one more reason to stop.

Cats keep growing, and the total keeps shrinking

The numbers come from Feline Veterinary Market Insights: Volume VII, a report the release says is "available exclusively to CATalyst Council sponsors." We saw only the release, so the report's figures here are reported by a feline-focused nonprofit, drawn from a fixed Vetsource panel of practices that reported in every quarter from Q4 2022 to Q3 2026, normalized to Monday to Friday business days.

Feline clinical visits grew in each of the last twelve quarters, according to the release, and canine visits fell in eleven of them. Clinical visits count patients receiving medical care, wellness or not.

Cats reached 24% of companion animal clinic visits in the quarter, up from 21% in the third quarter of 2023. That is not a high-water mark. A February release from the council put feline share at 24.7% in Q4 2025, the highest single-quarter reading it had recorded, so the useful comparison is the same quarter across years.

The young-animal numbers split. Kitten visits from July to September were 0.9% below the same months of 2025, which the council says leaves them on track to finish fiscal 2027 about 11% above the 2018/19 pre-Covid baseline. Puppy visits fell 10.0%, on track to finish 44% below that baseline.

That projection is deeper than the roughly 38% gap our Puppocalypse white paper story reported in June, when kittens sat 8% to 10% above baseline. The council's fiscal year starts in July, and it says the July to September change has landed within 2.0 percentage points of the full-year change in each of the past three years. That is a decent track record, and still a projection.

The puppy gap now sets the floor for practice traffic

The June paper forecast combined clinical visit growth of -2% to 0% through 2031. The second edition in July tightened that to a -2% to -1% contraction through 2035, reported -1.50% for the fiscal year that ended June 30th, 2026, and flagged fiscal 2027 as the deepest single-year decline ahead, at -2.2%. Today's release cites a scenario of 1% to 2% annual declines in combined dog and cat visits over the next decade.

The first quarter of that year came in at -1.9% across all species. One quarter is not a fiscal year, and a quarterly all-species reading is not the model's combined dog and cat annual rate. So far, the two are in the same range.

The mechanism is cohort math, and the release spells it out. A small puppy class means fewer dogs, and fewer visits, at every later age, and a later rise in adoptions "does not add dogs to the earlier, smaller classes."

By our math, cats covered about a quarter of the canine decline. Assuming companion animal visits are essentially dogs and cats, a 24% cat share today implies about 22.9% a year ago. Weighting the 2.7% cat gain and the 3.3% dog drop by those shares gives about -1.9%, matching the council's all-species figure. On that basis cats added about 0.6 points and dogs subtracted about 2.5.

In our view, that ratio is the operator problem. At roughly one in four visits, cat growth at this quarter's pace cannot offset a shrinking canine book three times its size.

Feline capacity is a retention job, not a marketing job

The release points to headroom on the cat side. The release says cats make up 46% of the cats and dogs in U.S. households, per the council's State of the Cat survey of about 60,000 households, yet only about 33% of household cats visit a traditional practice each year. AVMA's owned cat population grew from 58.3 million in 2016 to 76.3 million in 2025, the cat population up 30.9%, against 13.7% growth for dogs.

The council frames the near-term question for practices as less about finding new cats than keeping the ones that arrive as kittens. Kitten visits have been above baseline every fiscal year since FY2021. Gina Fortunato, the council's executive director, put it this way: "The real question is how many of those kittens are still coming in as they age."

The council's answer is a free article it published on September 1st, The Kitten in the Room, with eight practical actions for turning a kitten visit into lifelong care. Neither the release nor the article reports a kitten retention rate. The article does cite the council's survey: only 51% of cat parents report keeping up with annual wellness visits, and 17% see no particular reason to return after the kitten vaccine series until something goes wrong.

We read that as pointing to the unglamorous parts of feline capacity: appointment slots, handling and waiting areas cat owners will tolerate, and reminders that follow a kitten past its vaccines. If we had to guess, practices that track kitten-to-adult retention as a number will see the cat line grow faster than those that treat cats as smaller dogs.

The release offers no near-term fix on the puppy side. Jon Ayers, who chairs the council's Data & Market Insights Committee, said in the release that "growing feline care has become a strategic necessity for practices." By the release's own cohort logic, a smaller puppy class stays smaller at every later age.

On the council's model, the decline runs through 2035. Cats slow it but do not stop it.

Photo: Veterinarian Pet Alliance via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0

Source: CATalyst Council via Business Wire