The Hurricane-Season Pet Prep Calendar: Dated Rows, Built on Your Basin's Published Season

This is a calendar, not advice about when to shop. Every row below carries a date, and every date traces back to something an agency published: a season start, the day a forecast product switches on, a peak, a county form opening. The first thing it will tell you is that your calendar and a stranger’s calendar are not the same document. The Atlantic season and the eastern Pacific season start 17 days apart. The Central Pacific runs on a third set of dates. Guam does not get a start date at all. So the page opens by making you pick a basin, and only then hands you dated rows.

If the question you actually have is which items to buy and when the shelves empty, that is a different page: when to buy pet emergency supplies for hurricane season owns the purchase window. If you want the storm-tier playbook, the watch and warning stages, and the supply math per animal, that is hurricane pet preparedness. This page assigns dates and nothing else.

Step one: name your basin, because the season dates are not national

Everything downstream depends on this. Here is what the agencies published, with the date we read each page.

Basin	Official season	Routine Tropical Weather Outlooks	Peak	Read from
Atlantic. NHC: the basin “includes the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of America”	June 1 to November 30	15 May to 30 November	September 10; most activity mid-August to mid-October	NHC Tropical Cyclone Climatology and NHC product descriptions, read August 5, 2026
Eastern Pacific. NHC: the basin “extends from Mexico and Central America westward to 140°W”	May 15 to November 30	15 May to 30 November	Late August, less pronounced than the Atlantic’s; most cyclones late June to early October	NHC Tropical Cyclone Climatology and NHC product descriptions, read August 5, 2026
Central Pacific	June 1 to November 30	1 June to 30 November	Not stated on the pages we read	NWS Hurricane Safety and NHC product descriptions, read August 5, 2026
Guam, Northern Marianas, Micronesia	No season dates published on the page we read; typhoons occur all year	Not covered on the NHC product page we read	NWS puts the main season in July through November, with a peak from mid-August to mid-September	NWS Hurricane Safety, read August 5, 2026

NHC’s climatology page states the Atlantic and eastern Pacific dates directly. Of the Atlantic it says the official hurricane season for the Atlantic basin is from June 1 to November 30, “but tropical cyclone activity sometimes occurs before and after these dates, respectively”, and that “The peak of the Atlantic hurricane season is September 10, with most activity occurring between mid-August and mid-October.” Of the eastern Pacific it says the official season runs May 15 to November 30, “but tropical cyclones occasionally occur before and after these dates, respectively”, and that “A peak in activity is noted in late August, but this peak is less pronounced than the peak in Atlantic activity.”

The Central Pacific dates come from a different NOAA page. The National Weather Service’s hurricane safety page says that in the Central Pacific Ocean an average of 3 tropical storms, 2 of which become hurricanes, form or move over the area “during the hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30 each year.” The same paragraph is where the year-round exception lives: it says Guam, the Northern Marianas and Micronesia “experience typhoons all year round”, and puts the main season in July through November with a peak from mid-August to mid-September.

That last line is the reason this page refuses to print one calendar. A household in Dededo and a household in Fort Myers cannot use the same sheet of paper. One has a season to aim at. The other has a year.

Step two: the deadline row, and why it is not June 1

The natural instinct is to make the season start the deadline. There is a better published date to use, and in the Atlantic it buys you 17 days.

NHC’s tropical cyclone product descriptions page states when the daily forecast products switch on: “The Tropical Weather Outlook is issued every six hours from 15 May–30 November for the Atlantic and Eastern North Pacific basins, and from 1 June–30 November for the Central North Pacific Basins at 0000, 0600, 1200, 1800 UTC.” The same page lists the local issuance times, labelled per basin with those same date ranges.

Read that against the season dates and a gap appears in exactly one basin:

Basin	Routine outlooks begin	Season begins	Gap
Atlantic	May 15	June 1	17 days
Eastern Pacific	May 15	May 15	Same day
Central Pacific	June 1	June 1	Same day

An Atlantic household gets a genuine grace period built into the federal product schedule, and most people never notice it. From May 15 there is a routinely issued product describing anything the Atlantic is thinking about, seventeen days before the season formally opens. That is the last honest moment to be finishing pre-season work rather than starting it.

So this calendar uses the routine-outlook start date as the pre-season deadline in every basin. It is our choice, anchored to a published date, and we are naming it as our choice rather than dressing it up as an agency rule. Across the NOAA, Ready.gov, ASPCA and county pages listed in Sources, which is the set we read for this article, we did not find a pet-specific pre-season deadline published by any of them. NOAA publishes dates. Ready.gov publishes a task list. Neither document joins to the other, so the join is below.

For an eastern Pacific or Central Pacific household there is no grace period, which changes the shape of the pre-season block. Everything has to be finished by the day the season opens, so the work has to start earlier in the spring than an Atlantic reader’s would.

Step three: the dated calendar

Four calendars follow. Use one.

Calendar A: Atlantic basin

For households on the US East Coast, the Gulf Coast, the Caribbean, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

Date	Row	Why this date
Late winter and early spring	Start carrier conditioning and start building the prescription buffer through normal refills. These are the two rows with no fixed completion date.	Everything else on the pre-season block is an afternoon’s work. These two are not.
May 1	If you are in Palm Beach County, Florida: the pet-friendly shelter pre-registration form opens. If you are anywhere else: confirm this season’s rule with your own county.	Palm Beach County Animal Care and Control publishes that its online pre-registration form “opens every May 1st, providing a month’s advance notice before the start of Hurricane Season.”
Early May, dates change each year	NOAA’s hurricane preparedness campaign week. For 2026, NOAA’s hurricane preparedness page carries campaign materials dated May 3 to May 9, 2026.	A free annual prompt on a page NOAA keeps current. That page showed “Last updated June 11, 2026” when we read it on August 5, 2026, so check it for the current year’s dates rather than reusing 2026’s.
May 15	Pre-season deadline. Every row in the pre-season block, listed in full under “The rows explained” below, is finished today.	Routine Atlantic Tropical Weather Outlooks begin, per NHC’s product descriptions. This is 17 days before the season opens.
Around May 21, varies by year	NOAA’s Atlantic seasonal outlook is issued. The 2026 outlook carries “Issued: 21 May 2026”.	Not a landfall forecast and not a reason to change the calendar. Read it once, then go back to the dates.
June 1	Atlantic season opens.	NHC: the official season for the Atlantic basin is June 1 to November 30.
June 20	Average date by which the first Atlantic named storm has formed.	NHC’s Table 1, progress of the average Atlantic season, 1991-2020. NHC cautions that formation dates in individual seasons “could vary considerably from these average dates.”
July 15	First rotation check. Food and water swapped on the ASPCA’s two-month interval, counted from May 15.	ASPCA disaster preparedness: rotate food every two months, replace stored bottled water every two months.
Early August, varies by year	NOAA updates the Atlantic outlook. The 2026 outlook says “This outlook will be updated in early August to coincide with the onset of the peak months of the season (ASO).”	Informational row. It does not move any other date.
August 11	Average date by which the first Atlantic hurricane has formed.	NHC Table 1.
Mid-August	The most active stretch of the Atlantic season begins.	NHC: most activity occurs between mid-August and mid-October.
September 1	Average date by which the first Atlantic major hurricane has formed.	NHC Table 1.
September 10	Statistical peak of the Atlantic season.	NHC.
September 15	Second rotation check. This one lands inside the peak window on purpose.	Two months on from July 15.
Mid-October	The most active stretch ends.	NHC.
November 15	Third rotation check.	Two months on from September 15.
November 30	Season closes and routine outlooks stop. Run the close-out block below.	NHC and NHC product descriptions.

Calendar B: Eastern Pacific basin

For households in the basin NHC defines as extending “from Mexico and Central America westward to 140°W”, and for households on the California coast, whose coastal tropical storm and hurricane watches and warnings NHC issues from this basin.

That second group deserves a sentence of its own, because the basin definition above reads like it excludes them and it does not. NHC’s watch and warning breakpoints page, read August 5, 2026, states that “The U.S. National Weather Service designates the locations along the U.S. East, Gulf, and California coasts, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii.” The list behind it, NHC’s Official Defining Points for Tropical Cyclone Watches and Warnings, stamped “Updated: 4/6/2026” and read the same day, carries California breakpoints under two forecast offices: San Diego, running from the “U.S./Mexico Border” north to the “Orange/Los Angeles County Line, CA”, and Los Angeles / Oxnard, running from that county line north to “Point Piedras Blancas, CA”, plus “Catalina Island, CA”. Those points have been used: in NHC’s eastern Pacific advisory series for Tropical Storm Hilary, Advisory Number 19 of EP092023, issued 800 PM PDT Sun Aug 20 2023 and read August 5, 2026, a Tropical Storm Warning was in effect for the “California/Mexico border to Point Mugu” and for “Catalina Island”. So a San Diego or Los Angeles household is on this calendar, with a May 15 deadline, not on Calendar A’s June 1.

North of Point Piedras Blancas the 2026 breakpoint list carries no US Pacific coast entries, so an Oregon or Washington coastal household should ask its own National Weather Service forecast office which hazard calendar applies rather than assuming this one does. That is also the office to ask about inland watches and warnings anywhere on the Pacific coast: the Hilary advisory itself directs readers to “monitor products issued by your local National Weather Service forecast office” for area-specific and inland products.

Date	Row	Why this date
Late winter and early spring	Carrier conditioning and prescription buffer start here, and they start earlier than an Atlantic reader’s would.	There is no May 15 to June 1 grace period in this basin. The deadline and the season start are the same day.
Early May, dates change each year	NOAA’s hurricane preparedness campaign week, dated May 3 to May 9 in the 2026 materials.	Same national campaign, same caveat about checking the current year.
May 15	Pre-season deadline and season opening, on the same day.	NHC: the official eastern Pacific season is May 15 to November 30. Routine outlooks for the Eastern North Pacific also begin 15 May.
June 10	Average date by which the first eastern Pacific named storm has formed.	NHC’s Table 2, progress of the average eastern Pacific season, 1991-2020.
Late June	The stretch in which most eastern Pacific cyclones occur begins.	NHC: most tropical cyclones occur between late June and early October.
June 26	Average date by which the first eastern Pacific hurricane has formed.	NHC Table 2. Compare this against the Atlantic’s August 11 before assuming one coast’s calendar travels.
July 15	First rotation check, counted two months from May 15. Also the average date by which the first eastern Pacific major hurricane has formed.	ASPCA two-month interval; NHC Table 2.
Late August	Peak in activity, which NHC describes as less pronounced than the Atlantic’s.	NHC.
September 15	Second rotation check.	Two months on from July 15.
Early October	The main activity stretch ends.	NHC.
November 15	Third rotation check.	Two months on from September 15.
November 30	Season closes and routine outlooks stop. Run the close-out block.	NHC and NHC product descriptions.

Calendar C: Central Pacific basin

For households in Hawaii and the surrounding Central North Pacific.

Date	Row	Why this date
Late winter and early spring	Carrier conditioning and prescription buffer.	Same reason as the other basins. Neither finishes on a deadline day.
Early May, dates change each year	NOAA’s hurricane preparedness campaign week.	The campaign is national even though the season dates are not.
June 1	Pre-season deadline and season opening, on the same day.	NWS hurricane safety: the Central Pacific season runs June 1 to November 30. NHC product descriptions: routine Central North Pacific outlooks run 1 June to 30 November.
August 1	First rotation check, counted two months from June 1.	ASPCA two-month interval.
October 1	Second rotation check.	Two months on from August 1.
November 30	Season closes and routine outlooks stop. Run the close-out block.	NWS and NHC product descriptions.

Two rows that appear on the Florida calendars are missing here for a reason, and it is worth stating rather than leaving as a silent gap. NHC’s climatology page publishes the average-season benchmark tables for the Atlantic and eastern Pacific; the Central Pacific section of that same page is a separate set of graphics covering 1971 to 2008, and we did not find equivalent benchmark dates there. So there are no average-first-hurricane rows above.

The other missing row is rabies. The Hawaii Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity’s animal quarantine page states that “Hawai‘i is rabies-free” and that Hawaii’s quarantine law “is designed to protect residents and pets from potentially serious health problems associated with the introduction and spread of rabies.” That is a state fact about rabies status, not a statement about what a shelter will ask for at a door, so the row to put on a Hawaii calendar is a dated reminder to confirm your own county’s shelter requirements directly rather than importing a mainland county’s rabies-tag rule.

Calendar D: Guam, the Northern Marianas and Micronesia

This is the one that breaks the format, and that is the point.

NWS’s hurricane safety page says these islands “experience typhoons all year round”, with a main season it places in July through November and a peak from mid-August to mid-September. There is no season-start date to aim a deadline at, so the pre-season block cannot exist as a block. What replaces it:

• The rotation clock runs year-round. The ASPCA’s two-month interval does not pause in February. Pick two dates you will not forget, run them six times a year, and never bank on an off-season to catch up in.
• The documents, registry and carrier rows become annual maintenance instead of pre-season tasks. Set them on a birthday, a vaccination anniversary, or any fixed date you already keep.
• The July through November window gets the same treatment other basins give their peak. Tighten up before it, not during it.
• The paperwork question is still local. The two Florida counties quoted below are Florida counties. Ask your own emergency management office what its shelters require and whether anything has to be filed in advance.

If your hazard is not a tropical cyclone at all, none of these four calendars is yours. An inland household is on a different hazard clock, and the season dates above have nothing to say about it. Start instead at the pet emergency playbooks hub and pick the hazard you actually face.

One assumption to correct before you leave this section, because it is the one that costs a household its whole pre-season block: being on the Pacific coast is not a reason to skip this page. Calendar B is the California coast’s calendar, for the breakpoint reasons set out above it, and its deadline is May 15 rather than June 1. That is the same date our when to buy pet emergency supplies for hurricane season page gives Pacific-coast readers for the buying half of the same job.

The rows explained: where each date came from, and what it costs you to miss it

The pre-season block, gathered in one place

Every calendar above points a bolded deadline row at “the pre-season block”, so here it is as a single list rather than a phrase. These are the rows that have to be finished by your basin’s deadline: May 15 for the Atlantic and eastern Pacific, June 1 for the Central Pacific, and, for Guam, the Northern Marianas and Micronesia, a fixed annual date you pick yourself because there is no season start to aim at.

• Confirm this season’s shelter rule with your own county, including whether a form exists and the day it opens.
• Write down each animal’s expiry dates: rabies certificate, county license, and anything else the county names.
• Reorder dates, one per prescription, back-calculated from your fill length and your pharmacy’s early-refill rules.
• The records, registry and photo row: microchip contact audit, documents in a waterproof container and available electronically, and a current picture of you with your pet.
• The vehicle fit check: the carriers you own, in the vehicle you will drive, with the people who will be in it.
• The large-animal rows if you keep any: trailer readiness, identification, paperwork, destination confirmed.
• Any registry that expires, such as the Texas one described below, re-filed for this year.

Two more rows belong to the block but cannot be completed on the deadline day, which is why the calendars start them in late winter: carrier conditioning and building the prescription buffer through ordinary refills. Each row above has its own subsection below, with the source the date came from. Kit rotation is deliberately not on this list; it is a during-season row on a two-month clock, covered further down.

Shelter access is a local paperwork deadline, and two counties in one state do not answer it the same way

This is the row most likely to be wrong on a calendar copied off the internet, because the answer is set county by county.

Palm Beach County, Florida’s Animal Care and Control pet-friendly shelter page publishes a pre-registration form and states that “The Online Pre-Registration Form opens every May 1st, providing a month’s advance notice before the start of Hurricane Season.” The same page adds, in its own words, that “pre-registration does not guarantee your pet a spot at the Pet Friendly Shelter”, and that the shelter “should be used as a last resort option in the event of a storm or other natural disaster.” It also names categories it does not take: equines, livestock, small barnyard animals, exotic pets and reptiles are not accepted at that shelter.

Miami-Dade County, Florida’s pet preparedness page answers the same question the other way. It states that “Pre-registration is not required to use the evacuation center”, that evacuation centers “will be announced as needed”, and that on arrival “pets will be examined by a licensed veterinarian to determine if the pet presents a safety risk”, with any pet deemed a risk not allowed to enter.

Two more Miami-Dade rules belong on a multi-animal household’s calendar, because neither is something you can solve at the door. The same page, read August 5, 2026, publishes a headcount cap and a staffing rule: “Limit four pets per household” and “At least one family member must remain in the evacuation center with the pet.” Note that the cap is stated twice on that page in two different units. The requirements list says “Limit four pets per household”; the FAQ headed “What type of pets are allowed at a pet-friendly evacuation center?” says pet-friendly evacuation centers “accept up to four pets per person including the following animals” before listing birds, ferrets, gerbils, guinea pigs, hamsters, mice, rats and small rabbits. Four per household and four per person are not the same number for a family of three, which is precisely the kind of ambiguity a spring phone call resolves and a storm week does not. If you keep five animals in Miami-Dade County, the pre-season row is not “pack the carriers”, it is “find out now where the fifth one goes.”

Two counties, one state, opposite answers on whether there is a form and a date. Do not average them. The dated row on your calendar is not “pre-register”; it is confirm what my county requires this season, and if there is a form, note the day it opens. Do it before your basin’s season starts, because a county page can change between seasons and a phone call in April is a very different experience from a phone call at the watch stage.

While you are on that page, note what your county says it will check at the door. Miami-Dade publishes that “Annual rabies vaccinations and a visible Miami-Dade County dog license are required” and that “Cats are also required to have annual rabies vaccinations.” Palm Beach County lists, among items to bring, an ID tag on the pet’s collar, microchip information, and a “County license and rabies tag on pet’s collar”, along with a waterproof bag holding vet records, notes about the pet’s behavior, and proof of ownership. Those are not the same requirement stated twice. Miami-Dade publishes an interval, annual, and names the license by county; Palm Beach County requires the tag and license to be on the collar and does not publish an interval on that page. Either way the dated row is yours to write: the day the rabies certificate expires and the day the county license expires are calendar entries, not vague intentions. Our page on what a pet shelter checks at intake covers the door itself in detail.

One more Palm Beach County detail worth reading as a currency lesson rather than a rule. When we read that page on August 5, 2026, it still carried a notice reading in part “Pre-registration is no longer available, however space will be available for your dogs and cats on a first come first serve basis starting at 12:00 pm Wednesday 10/09/2024”, a leftover from a 2024 activation sitting directly above the paragraph that says the form opens every May 1st. County pages are maintained under pressure and are not always tidied afterwards. That is a reason to call, not a reason to distrust the page.

The medication row is the only one that has to be back-calculated per prescription

Every other row on this calendar is a fixed date. This one is arithmetic, and it is different for each drug in your house.

The size of the supply is published. The ASPCA’s disaster preparedness page calls for “a two-week supply of any medicine your pet requires”, kept in a waterproof container, and adds that “food and medications need to be rotated out of your emergency kit” or they go bad or become useless. Palm Beach County’s suggested list for its own shelter is a different and smaller figure, “Medications (Minimun 5 days worth for each pet)”, which is a floor for a stay at that specific shelter rather than a household planning target. When two numbers like that disagree, plan to the larger one and carry the smaller one as the minimum you must be able to show.

What is not published anywhere we read is the date you personally have to reorder to have that buffer on the deadline day, because it depends on your fill length, your pharmacy’s early-refill rules, and shipping. That is what our pet medication refill calculator exists for: it takes the last refill date, the days a fill lasts and the buffer you want, and returns the reorder date. Run it once per prescription in early spring, and write each returned date onto the calendar as its own row.

The reason this row starts in late winter rather than on the deadline is structural. A buffer cannot be bought in one transaction if your pharmacy blocks early refills, which is the normal case. It is built by refilling slightly early across two or three ordinary cycles, which takes months of ordinary calendar time and no extra effort. Starting that in May does not work.

Kit rotation: this page assigns the dates, another page says what to swap

The interval is the ASPCA’s. Its disaster preparedness page says to keep “7-10 days’ worth of canned (pop-top) or dry food (be sure to rotate every two months)” and “At least seven days’ worth of bottled water for each person and pet (store in a cool, dry place and replace every two months)”.

Counted forward from each basin’s pre-season deadline, that produces the dates already in the calendars above: July 15, September 15 and November 15 for an Atlantic or eastern Pacific household, and August 1 and October 1 for a Central Pacific household. The Atlantic sequence has a useful property that is worth noticing rather than leaving to chance. The September 15 check lands inside the mid-August to mid-October window NHC names as the season’s most active, five days after the September 10 peak. If you keep only one of the three checks, keep that one.

What goes into each check, which items expire on which clock, and how to keep a best-by date attached to decanted food is covered in full on our pet emergency kit rotation checklist. That page owns the contents question. This one owns only the dates, and the two are meant to be used together: the rotation checklist tells you what to do, this calendar tells you which three days of the year to do it.

Records, registry and the photo

Ready.gov’s Prepare Your Pets for Disasters page, which showed “Last Updated: 03/20/2026” when we read it on August 5, 2026, puts three items in this row. It says to have your pet microchipped and to “Make sure to keep your address and phone number up-to-date and include contact information for an emergency contact outside of your immediate area.” It says to keep “copies of your pet’s registration information and other relevant documents in a waterproof container and available electronically.” And it names a photo specifically: “A picture of you and your pet together”, on the reasoning that if you become separated it helps document ownership and lets others help identify the animal.

All three are pre-season rows for the same reason: a stale one fails silently, at the moment you are relying on it. A microchip registered to a phone number you gave up two years ago scans perfectly and returns nothing. Our microchip registration audit and contact chain walks the actual audit, and waterproof pet document kits covers the container side. Put one dated row on the calendar for the audit and one for the photo, both before the deadline, and redo the photo yearly for a growing animal.

Carrier conditioning has no completion date, which is why it goes first

Ready.gov describes the method rather than a duration: leave the carrier out in places your pet frequently visits, leave it open, feed treats near it and inside it, and add a favorite blanket or small bed so it smells familiar. It also adds a line that belongs on a calendar in its own right: “Make note of where your pets hide, so you can easily find them in case you have to leave your house quickly.”

Notice what is absent. None of the sources listed at the foot of this page puts a number of days on that routine, and we did not find one elsewhere in the pages we read for this article. That is not a gap in the guidance, it is the nature of habituation, and it is exactly why this row sits at the front of the calendar rather than near the deadline. A row with a fixed cost can be scheduled against a deadline. A row with an open-ended cost has to start early and be reviewed, not scheduled. Our guide to getting a hiding, scared or aggressive cat into a carrier covers what to do when the conditioning has not taken and the storm arrives anyway.

The vehicle row is a pre-season fit check, not a loading lesson

One dated row, before the deadline: put the carriers you actually own into the vehicle you actually plan to drive, with the people who will be in it, and find out now whether it works. Doing that in April costs an hour. Doing it at the warning stage costs the departure.

That is the whole of what this calendar has to say about the vehicle, because the substance belongs elsewhere. Car loading and carriers for multiple pets covers restraint method, crash-test certification, anchoring, cargo-area heat and the loading order for a multi-animal household. Read it once in the spring, then let this calendar remind you to rehearse it.

Large animals run on a different clock, and this page does not set it

If you keep horses, cattle, goats or poultry, the pre-season rows still apply: trailer and vehicle readiness, permanent and temporary identification, paperwork, and a destination confirmed before you need it. What this page does not do is set a departure hour for large animals, because that is hazard-specific and it is already answered in detail on horse and livestock evacuation basics, which splits its timing guidance by hazard for the specific reason that fire guidance and hurricane guidance give close to opposite instructions about the same animal.

Two things follow for your calendar. First, note that the Palm Beach County shelter quoted above does not accept equines, livestock, small barnyard animals, exotic pets or reptiles, so a large-animal or exotics household in that county needs a destination secured pre-season rather than a shelter assumed. Second, keep the departure-hour question on the large-animal page rather than copying an hour figure onto a season calendar where it will lose its hazard scope. Households with birds should also read bird and parrot emergency preparedness, and flock keepers backyard chicken emergency evacuation, before the deadline rather than after.

Registries and forms with their own expiry dates

Some jurisdictions run a registry that expires on its own schedule, which makes it a recurring calendar row rather than a one-time task. Texas is the example we verified.

The Texas Division of Emergency Management’s State of Texas Emergency Assistance Registry page describes STEAR as “a free registry that provides local emergency planners and emergency responders with additional information on the needs in their community.” The page lists who should register, and it is a people-first list: people with disabilities, people who are medically fragile, and people with access and functional needs including limited mobility, communication barriers, and needs for medical, transportation or personal care assistance. Read the two field lists on that page carefully, because they are not the same list. Under “Required Information to Register” it names four fields: name, address, phone number, primary language. Pets appears in the separate list below it, headed “Additional questions asked to capture vital information for local emergency planners and responders”, alongside emergency contact information, caregiver information, transportation assistance for home evacuation, communication barriers, and disability, functional or medical needs. So the pet field exists, and it is one of the additional questions rather than one of the four required fields. We read that page on August 5, 2026, when its source carried the stamp “Last Published: Wed Aug 05 2026”.

Three things on that page belong on a calendar rather than in a memory. The registry is voluntary, and the page states plainly that “Registering yourself in the STEAR registry DOES NOT guarantee that you will receive a specific service during an emergency” and that “Available services will vary by community.” It also says communities use the information differently and points readers to their local emergency management office. And it carries an expiry: “Your information will be kept in the system for 1 year. You should re-register after that time period.”

An annual re-registration with no reminder attached is exactly the kind of task a calendar exists for. If you are in Texas and you qualify, that is a dated yearly row. If you are not in Texas, the transferable lesson is the question, not the program: ask your own state or county emergency management office whether it runs a registry, whether pets are a field on it, and whether it expires.

The close-out block: what happens after November 30

The season-end date is a bookkeeping date. It is not an all-clear, and the calendar should say so in writing so that next spring’s version of you does not treat December as empty.

Run the last rotation. The November 15 check in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific calendars is the last one inside the season. Do it.

Write down what failed. The carrier that did not fit, the document you could not find, the prescription that was three days short, the neighbour who was not home. This is the only time of year you will remember these accurately, and it is the input to next spring’s pre-season block. A calendar that is not amended after a season is a calendar that repeats a mistake annually.

Do not unbook the destination. Whatever arrangement you made, a relative’s house, a boarding facility, a pet-friendly hotel you called, confirm whether it stands for next season while the person you spoke to still remembers the conversation. Our guide to boarding your pet or evacuating together in a hurricane covers that decision itself.

If you were displaced, the reunification clocks are local and they are short. Palm Beach County, Florida publishes that animals found while the community is impacted by a hurricane “will be kept for 10 days before being available for pre-adoption”, with no adoption finalized “until 30 days after the storm-impacted pet was brought to the division”, and that local shelters and rescues may not transport storm-displaced animals out of county for a period of 30 days. Those figures are Palm Beach County’s, for Palm Beach County. Your county may hold for a shorter period. If an animal is missing after a storm, find out your own jurisdiction’s hold period on day one rather than assuming you have a month.

The off-season row

Every calendar built around a season has a hole in it, and the honest thing to do is put a row in the hole.

NHC’s climatology page says of the Atlantic that the official season is June 1 to November 30 “but tropical cyclone activity sometimes occurs before and after these dates, respectively”, and of the eastern Pacific that the official season is May 15 to November 30 “but tropical cyclones occasionally occur before and after these dates, respectively.” The forecast products account for this too. NHC’s product descriptions say a Special Tropical Weather Outlook “can also be used for disturbances outside of the normal hurricane season when Tropical Weather Outlooks are not routinely issued.”

Read that carefully, because it describes a specific hazard for a pet household. Outside the season window, there is no routine six-hourly product arriving on a schedule. What exists instead is a product issued when something warrants it. The practical consequence is not that off-season storms are more dangerous; it is that you are less likely to be watching. A household that has stopped checking in February is relying entirely on being told.

So the off-season row reads: keep the alerting on year-round, and keep the two-month rotation running through the winter. Ready.gov’s page names the mechanisms, including paying attention to wireless emergency alerts sent by state and local public safety officials and getting National Weather Service alerts on your phone for multiple locations. None of those need to be switched off on November 30, and switching them off is the single easiest way to make the off-season row bite.

For readers in Guam, the Northern Marianas and Micronesia this is not an edge case at all. Per the NWS page quoted above, it is the whole year.

Build your own copy

The four calendars above are the published skeleton. The rows that actually save your household are the ones only you can fill in, and there are five of them. Write them on the same sheet.

Row	What you write	Where the answer comes from
My basin and its dates	Season start, season end, routine-outlook start	The table at the top of this page
My county’s shelter rule	Is there a form, when does it open, what do they check at the door	Your county emergency management or animal services office, confirmed this season
My animals’ expiry dates	Rabies certificate expiry, county license expiry, any registry expiry	Your veterinarian’s records and your county
My reorder dates	One per prescription	The pet medication refill calculator, run once per drug
My rotation dates	Two or three fixed days	Counted forward from your basin’s pre-season deadline on the ASPCA’s two-month interval

Print it, or put every row into whatever calendar already pings your phone. A calendar that lives in a document you have to remember to open has the same failure mode as the kit in the back of the closet.

What this calendar deliberately does not do

It does not tell you when to leave. Departure timing is a function of the storm, your geography and your household, not of the season. It is answered on how early to leave with pets, which works the leave-by arithmetic and the locally published clearance times; on the T-minus storm countdown card for pets, which is the printable execution version; on hurricane pet preparedness for the watch and warning stages; and on horse and livestock evacuation basics for large animals.

It does not tell you what to buy or when the shelves empty. That is when to buy pet emergency supplies for hurricane season.

It does not tell you what to put in the kit or how to pack the car. Those are pet emergency kit rotation checklist and car loading and carriers for multiple pets.

And it does not publish a national set of dates, because NOAA does not publish one either: the season dates NOAA publishes are per basin, and this page has quoted four different answers to the same question. Every figure above is scoped to the basin, the agency page and the county it came from, with the date we read it. Check yours against the source before the season opens, and check it again next spring, because the only part of this calendar guaranteed to still be accurate in twelve months is the part you verified yourself.