The CDC Dog Import Form: Who Needs It, and What Else You Need

The CDC Dog Import Form is free, it takes a few minutes, and for a lot of dogs it is the only federal document needed to enter the United States. For others it is the smallest part of the file, and the document that actually decides whether the dog gets home has to be signed before it leaves. That difference is where most of the trouble in this area comes from.

The rules below are taken from CDC’s own pages, checked on the day of writing. They apply to dogs. Cats have no CDC import form.

It is an online form the importer completes, and submitting it emails back a receipt that can be printed or shown on a phone to the airline and to Customs and Border Protection. It is free. Each dog needs its own form, so three dogs means three submissions. It can be filled in on the day of travel, though there is no reason to leave it that late.

The person bringing the dog in completes it, whether that is the owner, the importer or the shipper. If someone is filling it in on behalf of an importer who cannot, CDC asks that the statements be read aloud and the importer confirm they understand and agree.

Everything follows from these, and answering them wrongly is how families end up rebooking flights.

That gives three routes with very different paperwork, and a fourth outcome: a dog that has been in a high-risk country in the past six months and is not vaccinated against rabies is not allowed in at all.

Since 1 August 2024 the CDC Dog Import Form receipt is the only documentation CDC requires for a dog that has been only in dog-rabies-free or low-risk countries in the previous six months. No health certificate, no titer, no reservation. The dog can arrive at any airport, seaport or land border crossing.

The receipt on this route is valid for six months and can be used for multiple entries, which is what makes it workable for a dog that crosses a land border regularly. The condition is the country of departure. If the dog leaves from a different country than the one on the receipt, that receipt no longer describes the trip and a new one is needed. A dog commuting between the United States and Canada can use one receipt until it expires; the same dog taking one trip to France needs a new form listing France.

This is the route that changed, and it is the one that catches American owners returning from a posting or a long trip.

Two documents are required. The CDC Dog Import Form receipt, and a Certification of U.S.-issued Rabies Vaccination form. The second is not the rabies certificate a veterinarian hands over for a city license. It is a specific CDC form, completed by a USDA-accredited veterinarian and submitted to USDA for endorsement, and it must be done before the dog leaves the United States.

That timing is the whole point. There is no way to arrange it from abroad. A family that flies out with the dog and no endorsed form has already lost the easy route home.

The change worth knowing: a USDA-endorsed export health certificate can still be used instead, but only if it was issued no later than 31 July 2025. CDC states that export health certificates issued after that date will not be accepted for re-entry. Anyone relying on advice written before that cutoff, and a great deal of published advice was, is working from a document that no longer functions.

If neither document exists, the dog is not simply delayed. It falls into the foreign-vaccinated route below, with a facility reservation and a specific airport, even though it was vaccinated in the United States.

This is the heaviest route and the one where the booking has to be built around the paperwork rather than the other way round. CDC requires all of the following for each dog.

Read the third and fourth points together, because that is the part that reshapes a move. The facility comes first and the flight is booked to match it. A cheaper routing into a different airport is not a saving, it is a refusal.

These do not vary, and two of them have caught dogs that were otherwise ready.

For a dog receiving its first rabies vaccine, CDC requires it to be at least 12 weeks, meaning 84 days, at the time of vaccination, and the certification form cannot be completed until at least 28 days after that. Those two waits stack on top of the six month age floor, which is why a puppy is a scheduling problem long before it is a shipping problem.

This is a small detail with a large consequence and it is the thing to check twice.

On the low-risk route the receipt lasts six months and covers multiple entries. On a high-risk route it is valid for a single entry, on the arrival date printed on it, at the port printed on it. Change the date, change the airport, change anything, and CDC requires a new form submitted as a correction to the existing one. A flight moved by a day makes the receipt wrong.

The form asks for a recent photograph of the dog showing its face and body, as a jpg, png or gif. For a dog under one year old that photograph has to have been taken within 15 days before travel, which is the one part of the form that cannot be prepared months ahead. Puppies change quickly enough that CDC wants a current picture, and a stale photo is a reason to be sent back to the form.

The list works by exception, and that is worth understanding rather than memorizing. CDC publishes only the high-risk countries and political units, currently a list of well over a hundred entries. If a country is not on that list, it is treated as dog-rabies-free or low-risk. There is no second list to find.

Two entries that surprise people by their absence: neither Canada nor Mexico is on the high-risk list, so a dog crossing either land border on an ordinary trip is on route one with the form alone. What matters is where the dog has been in the six months before arrival, so a dog that spent part of that window somewhere on the list is on a high-risk route even if it is flying in from Toronto.

The rules are not hard. The sequencing is, and it fails in the same three ways.

Two groups meet all three more often than anyone else: families on military or diplomatic postings, whose return dates move, and owners adopting a dog abroad, where the dog is foreign-vaccinated and the facility reservation has to be built into the flight. If you are in either position, the useful move is to settle the paperwork route before choosing flights.

Related reading on this site: driving a pet across the US and Canada border covers the land crossing in both directions, the American Airlines pet policy covers the carrier most often used for a dog flying without its owner, and our guide to bringing a pet to the USA sets out the wider entry process including the USDA side.

No. The CDC Dog Import Form applies to dogs. Cats have no equivalent federal form, though the destination state may have its own requirements and the airline will have its own.

Yes, if it is a dog. Canada is not on the high-risk list, so the form is the only CDC document needed, and its receipt covers multiple entries for six months as long as the dog keeps departing from Canada. The dog still has to be at least six months old and microchipped.

Before you leave, if there is any chance you will return with the dog and the destination is on the high-risk list, have a USDA-accredited veterinarian complete a Certification of U.S.-issued Rabies Vaccination form and get it endorsed. It can be used repeatedly while the rabies vaccine remains valid. Arranged after departure it cannot be done at all.

Only if it was issued no later than 31 July 2025, and only if it is endorsed and viewable in USDA’s database and shows the dog’s age of at least six months, its microchip number, and a current US rabies vaccination given after the microchip was implanted. Certificates issued after that date are not accepted for re-entry.

The outcomes CDC describes range from being denied entry to being sent to a registered animal care facility at the importer’s cost, and on the foreign-vaccinated route a 28 day quarantine where there is no valid titer. None of it is resolved at the counter, which is why the file is built before the booking.

Checked 7 September 2026. CDC updates these pages, and two of them changed during 2026, so verify before travel rather than relying on a summary.

For what happens at the border once the form is right, see clearing a pet through customs, which covers who checks what on arrival and what it costs when the paperwork fails.