Arriving in Shanghai with a pet

At the border: one animal, and a list that decides everything

China allows one pet — a dog or a cat — per person per entry. Not two, whatever some travel sites say. It needs an official health certificate from your country’s authorities, a rabies vaccination record, an ISO-standard microchip (11784/11785, fifteen digits), and a clinical examination done within fourteen days of departure.

Whether it then goes into quarantine depends on one thing: whether you are arriving from a country or region on China’s designated list. That list includes New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Ireland, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macao, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, Iceland and a handful of others. Arrivals from these need no rabies antibody test and can clear at any port.

Arriving from anywhere else — mainland United States, Canada, South Korea, France, Germany, Italy among them — you need a rabies antibody titre of at least 0.5 IU/ml from a laboratory China recognises. Get this wrong and the alternative is thirty days of quarantine at a designated facility.

Shanghai Pudong runs pet clearance around the clock and now takes pre-declarations through a customs mini-program, which is worth doing before you fly.

One thing to be careful about

You will still find guides — and even one page in the customs system’s own help section — describing a quarantine split where seven days are served at a facility and the remaining twenty-three at home. The regulation that authorised that arrangement was repealed with effect from 1 April 2025, and Shanghai’s own English guidance now describes only transfer to a designated facility.

We are not going to tell you which version an officer will apply on the day. We are telling you the sources disagree, so do not build travel plans on the home-quarantine version — confirm with the customs hotline (12360) before you book flights.

The part almost every English guide gets wrong

Shanghai’s dog ordinance lists the places dogs may not enter. The list includes office buildings, schools, hospitals, restaurants, shopping malls, waiting halls — and hotels. It also bars dogs from the metro, buses and trolleybuses; taxis are allowed only if the driver agrees. Guide dogs are exempt from all of it.

This is why "pet-friendly hotel in Shanghai" turns up so little that holds up. Venues outside that list may set their own policy — which is where serviced apartments and apartment-style residences come in, since they are not hotels in the ordinance’s sense. Arriving with a dog for a month? That is the category to search, and the one this site is built around.

Plan the airport run too: with the metro closed to you and taxis at the driver’s discretion, getting from Pudong to your door with a dog is a real problem to solve before you land, not after.

Cats are a completely different story

The ordinance above governs dogs. It does not cover cats — not the venue restrictions, not the licensing, not the one-per-household rule. At the border cats and dogs are treated alike, but once you are in the city, arriving with a cat is dramatically simpler.

If you are staying long enough to register a dog

Households in Shanghai’s urbanised areas may keep one dog, and certain breeds are barred from private ownership. Registration is annual and runs through the police or the city services app: five hundred yuan a year inside the Inner Ring Road, three hundred elsewhere, free in rural areas, with a reduction if the dog is sterilised.

The detail that catches renters out: registration requires proof of address, and tenants need their landlord’s explicit approval. Sort that before you sign a lease, not after the dog arrives — and expect a pet deposit on top of the usual one.

Out on the street the rules are specific: lead no longer than two metres, muzzle for large dogs, clean up, and give way in lifts and stairwells.