By: NC Pet Project
North Carolina’s public animal shelters reported taking in 147,882 dogs and cats during calendar year 2025. They adopted out 71,705 of them, returned 15,338 to their owners, and euthanized 38,711. That is 26.2 percent of every dog and cat that came through a reporting shelter door, or roughly one in four.
Those totals come from a single state file, and that file is the only statewide animal shelter accounting North Carolina produces. It is also incomplete, still open to late filings, and harder to read than it should be. This post publishes the county-level numbers pulled directly from it, explains exactly what the file does and does not capture, and names every county missing from the state’s file.
TL;DR: Across 63 reporting counties, NC shelters handled 147,882 dogs and cats in 2025 and euthanized 38,711 (26.2 percent). Cats died at a far higher rate than dogs, 29.6 percent against 22.8 percent. Among counties handling at least 750 dogs and cats, euthanasia rates ranged from 2.2 percent in Stanly County to 62.0 percent in Johnston County. Reporting shelters spent $63.5 million, a median of $377.38 per animal, and spending did not predict outcomes. Thirty-six of North Carolina’s 100 counties are missing from the file entirely, including Wake, Forsyth, Iredell and Catawba. Meanwhile the state spay/neuter fund covered only about a third of eligible reimbursement requests in the first half of 2026. Sign the petition to fund prevention at the scale the intake numbers demand.
What North Carolina’s 2025 Shelter Numbers Actually Say
The North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services collects an annual report from every county and city animal shelter that receives state or local funding. The 2025 calendar-year edition was posted on July 27, 2026, and as of this writing it still carries that same date. Counties that file late may still be added. It covers 71 facilities across 64 counties, and 63 of those counties reported usable dog and cat numbers.
Two things about that scope are worth fixing in your head before you read a single number. The file is not a census of North Carolina animal sheltering. It is a census of the shelters that filed a form, which is a smaller and shifting group from one year to the next. And it counts far more than dogs and cats: shelters reported rabbits, goats, chickens, guinea pigs, horses, bats, raccoons, opossums and foxes, among dozens of other species. Wildlife intake in particular skews an untrained reading of the file badly, because animals like bats and raccoons are almost always euthanized for rabies testing, and including them inflates a county’s apparent kill rate for reasons that have nothing to do with pets.
Every figure in this report is therefore restricted to dogs and cats, aggregated from the individual facility lines rather than from any summary the state publishes. Where a county runs more than one reporting facility, and 71 facilities filed across 64 counties, the facilities are combined into a single county row.