A pet emergency kit isn’t one bag. It’s a system: food, water, medicine, documents, a carrier, and sanitation supplies, staged in the right locations and checked often enough that nothing in it has quietly expired. Every authority we checked, Ready.gov, the ASPCA, AVMA, the CDC, and the Red Cross, organizes the kit around that same core structure, even where their exact quantities differ.
We don’t sell products or take sponsorships here: every checklist item below traces to a named authority, and where we go beyond what they publish, we say so. Where this hub links to gear, we’re reader-supported through disclosed Amazon links, and commissions never touch what’s recommended.
This page is the map. It teaches the structure once, so the deep-dive spokes linked throughout and at the bottom can go narrow on species, duration math, records, written authority, and the medication clock without re-explaining the basics each time.
Ready America, Pet Evac Pak, ER (Emergency Ready), and DryFur are trademarks of their respective owners; EmergencyPetPrep is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.
The FEMA/Ready.gov Kit Structure, Category by Category
Ready.gov’s own framing is the cleanest starting point: build two kits, not one. A larger kit stays home for sheltering in place. A lighter version stays packed and ready to grab for evacuation. To turn the checklist below into one tailored to your own animals and your biggest local hazard, run the pet emergency kit builder; it filters this list to your pets and routes each item to the right calculator or template.
Review both regularly, Ready.gov says, so food and medicine don’t go stale before you need them.
Inside either kit, the category structure is consistent across every authority we checked:
- Food: several days’ supply per pet, in an airtight, waterproof container (Ready.gov). The ASPCA is more specific: 7-10 days of canned pop-top or dry food, rotated every 2 months so it stays fresh. The CDC recommends a 2-week supply per animal, stored in waterproof containers, and lists a manual can opener as its own line beside it.
- Water: a bowl plus several days’ supply (Ready.gov, which attaches no container specification to the water line). ASPCA: at least 7 days per pet, stored cool and dry and replaced every 2 months. CDC: 2-week supply per animal.
- Medicine: an extra supply of any medication your pet takes, in a waterproof container (Ready.gov). ASPCA specifies a 2-week supply. CDC adds a 1-month supply of flea/tick/heartworm preventive as a separate line item.
- Documents: vaccination and rabies records, medical summary, prescriptions, proof of ownership, and a recent photo (CDC, AVMA). Physical copies should be waterproofed; a digital or USB backup is a smart second layer.
- Carrier or crate: one per pet. Ready.gov and the ASPCA publish the same line, near word for word, a traveling bag, crate or sturdy carrier, ideally one for each pet. AVMA states it without the hedge and gives the reason: have a collapsible cage or airline-approved carrier for each pet, because having enough carriers to accommodate each of your pets is what facilitates a quick evacuation.
- Sanitation: disposable litter trays (the ASPCA’s own note is that aluminum roasting pans are perfect for this), litter or paper toweling, liquid dish soap and disinfectant, and disposable garbage bags (ASPCA).
- First aid and comfort items: a basic first aid kit (Ready.gov, AVMA, Red Cross), plus a backup collar, ID tag, harness, and leash, and comfort items like a toy or familiar bedding to reduce stress during an already stressful move.
Vet-wins note: if any pet takes a regular medication, talk to your veterinarian about what extra supply and storage make sense for that specific prescription. This page teaches kit structure, not dosing or treatment decisions; that call belongs to your vet.
How many of everything? The carrier line above is per pet, not per household (Ready.gov, ASPCA, and AVMA all frame it that way), and food, water, medicine, and documents multiply per animal too, so a three-pet household is building three of most of this list. The pre-made kits later on this page are each sized for a fixed number of animals, so check the capacity line before assuming one box covers everyone. For the worked per-animal math, see our multi-pet emergency planning hub.
Kit vs. Go-Bag: What the Terms Actually Mean
Ready.gov doesn’t use the word “go-bag.” Its own language is simply “two kits”: one for sheltering in place, one lightweight version for evacuation. “Go-bag” is common shorthand you’ll see across pet-brand and veterinary-clinic content for that second, lighter kit. It’s useful terminology, but not an official FEMA term, so we’re not going to cite it as one.
On this hub, we use the words this way:
- Kit = the larger, shelter-in-place build. Bulkier food and water quantities, a full first aid kit, sanitation supplies, everything you’d want if you’re riding out a power outage or a shelter-in-place order at home.
- Go-bag = the lightweight, evacuation-sized version of the same categories. Smaller food/water portions sized for a few days, no bulk litter or sanitation bulk, built to be carried out the door in under a minute.
Both pull from the same six categories above. The go-bag is a scaled-down, grab-ready subset of the kit, not a different checklist.
How Much Food and Water: Reading the Duration Numbers Correctly
The authorities don’t agree on one number, and that’s useful information rather than a contradiction to paper over. Here’s the actual spread:
| Source |
Food per pet |
Water per pet |
Framing |
| Ready.gov |
Several days, airtight, waterproof container |
Bowl + several days |
Go-bag / evacuation framing |
| AVMA |
3-7 days’ worth |
At least 7 days’ supply |
Evacuation kit, stored near an exit |
| American Red Cross |
No day count on the pet page or its PDF checklist |
No day count on the pet page or its PDF checklist |
Evacuation framing |
| ASPCA |
7-10 days, rotate every ~2 months |
At least 7 days, rotate every ~2 months |
Can apply to either kit |
| CDC |
2-week supply |
2-week supply |
Shelter-in-place framing |
Sources: Ready.gov Prepare Your Pets for Disasters; AVMA Pets and Disasters; American Red Cross Pet Disaster Preparedness; ASPCA Disaster Preparedness; CDC Build a Pet Disaster Preparedness Kit.
Read this as two different jobs, not five different opinions. Ready.gov, AVMA, and the Red Cross are largely describing the lightweight go-bag: enough to get through the trip and the first stretch afterward. The CDC and ASPCA numbers lean toward the fuller, shelter-in-place kit, where storage space isn’t limited by what you can carry.
If you have the budget and the shelf space, build your at-home kit to the CDC’s 2-week figure and keep your go-bag several days.
Where to Stage Each Kit
A kit that’s in the wrong place when the order comes is the same as no kit. AVMA recommends storing the evacuation kit in an easy-to-carry waterproof container near an exit, not in a closet, not in the garage behind the holiday boxes.
For most households, three staging points cover the real scenarios:
- Home, near an exit. The full shelter-in-place kit plus the evacuation go-bag, both reachable without digging, per AVMA’s near-an-exit guidance.
- Vehicle. A lightweight duplicate of the go-bag essentials (food, water, a spare leash, a copy of key documents) for the scenario where you’re not home when an order comes, or need supplies mid-evacuation before reaching a shelter. None of the authorities in our research publish a car-specific standard; this is the same two-kit logic applied to a second location, and it holds up.
- Grab point inside the home (by the door you’d actually use). Even a fully staged kit does no good if it’s not where your feet go first during a fast exit. Put it there, not where it looks tidiest.
Maintenance and Rotation: Keeping the Kit Actually Usable
Ready.gov’s own instruction is to review your kits regularly, without naming an exact interval. The ASPCA is more specific on one part of it: rotate food and water every 2 months so it doesn’t go stale or expire unnoticed.
A commonly used practical habit, borrowed from the twice-yearly smoke-detector battery reminder, is a full kit review every 6 months: check expiration dates, confirm medications are current (not the ones your vet discontinued last spring), verify documents are up to date, and make sure any pet added to the household since the last check has their own carrier and supplies. That 6-month cadence is a secondary preparedness-source convention, not a direct FEMA or CDC quote, so treat it as a useful trigger, not an official rule.
One rotation check that isn’t optional: confirm your pet’s microchip registry contact information is current. Two of the authorities in our source list state this step directly. Ready.gov’s instruction is to have your pet microchipped and to “keep your address and phone number up-to-date” on it, including contact information for an emergency contact outside your immediate area, and AVMA’s is to “Ensure your pet has proper identification and that microchip and other ID information is up to date.” The ASPCA and the Red Cross both recommend microchipping, but neither publishes that follow-up step, which is our reason for giving it a line of its own here instead of treating the chip as the whole job. A chip that’s never registered, or registered with an old phone number, doesn’t reunite you with a lost pet during an evacuation. That’s a five-minute check with no cost, and it belongs on the same 6-month calendar reminder as the physical kit review.
Records, Authority, and Medical Consumables: The Branch Kits Skip
Every complete pre-made kit we reviewed for the products section below handles food, water, and basic first aid. None of them handles the paperwork, and none of them handles the part of the kit that has a clock running on it. That gap is worth calling out plainly, because it’s what actually gets tested at a shelter intake desk, a boarding counter, or an unfamiliar ER vet.
This branch splits three ways, and the three fail differently:
- Records prove who the animal is and what it needs. They fail by being illegible, incomplete, or still at home.
- Authority is the written permission that lets somebody else act for the animal when you aren’t standing there. It fails by never having been created.
- Medical consumables are the items that expire, run out, or can’t legally be stockpiled on short notice. They fail on a date.
Keep them separate when you build. A perfect folder of records still leaves an emergency vet unable to treat, and a signed authorization is no help if the medication itself ran out days ago.
Records: What Proves the Animal Is Yours and What It Needs
Per the CDC’s structure, the document set should include:
- Photocopied vet records
- Rabies certificate
- Vaccination and medical summary
- Current prescriptions
- Heartworm test results (dogs) or FeLV/FIV test results (cats)
- Copies of registration
- A written description of the pet
AVMA’s own instruction is to “Collect records to help care for your pet during a disaster, such as vaccination records, medical records, and proof of ownership, and know how to access them.” Its evacuation-kit checklist files the same set under Important documents and adds four lines owners routinely skip: identification papers including proof of ownership and the microchip number, medical records and medication instructions as separate items, an emergency contact list that names the veterinarian and the pharmacy, and maps of the local area and evacuation routes. On its pets-and-disasters page AVMA tells owners to “Include addresses and 24-hour contact numbers, if available” on that list, which is worth reading as written: the 24-hour number is the goal, not a guarantee that every contact has one. Keep the list with the kit itself rather than only in a phone that might be dead or lost.
The pharmacy line and the maps line are the two most easily dismissed and the two that stop working first. A pharmacy you can’t name is a pharmacy a strange veterinarian can’t call for your pet’s fill history, and a route you only know through an app is a route you lose with the battery.
Waterproof the physical copies and keep a digital or USB backup as a second layer. Our waterproof pet document kits guide covers containers and setup in full, paper versus digital records covers which layer to trust when, and the pet emergency binder covers organizing the set one animal at a time instead of pooling it into a single household folder. For versions sized smaller than a binder, the pet travel document organizer and the fill-in pet emergency wallet card carry the same fields in a pouch and a pocket. The crate and kennel ID card is the copy that rides with the animal rather than with you, which is the copy that matters once the two of you are in different rooms.
Records also cross a state line differently than you do. If an evacuation takes you into another state, the destination state sets the requirement rather than your own, and USDA APHIS does not publish a standard interstate health certificate you can print ahead. Our long-distance move guide carries the sourced version of that, including the instruction to call the destination state’s veterinary office directly.
Authority: Who Is Allowed to Act for Your Animal When You Aren’t There
This is the category no pre-made kit sells and most households have never assembled. AVMA names three separate pieces of paper for it, and they do different jobs:
- A signed veterinary medical treatment authorization. AVMA’s wording: “Consider including a signed veterinary medical treatment authorization with your evacuation kit. This will help your veterinarian provide care if your pet must be treated during your absence.”
- A designated caregiver. “Designate a friend or neighbor to care for your pets in the event a disaster occurs when you are not at home.”
- A signed release for that caregiver. “Provide your friend or neighbor a letter signed by you that will release them from responsibility if a pet is injured during an evacuation and that tells them the location of your evacuation kit.” Read the second half of that sentence. The release letter is also where the kit’s location gets written down, which makes it the one document that tells a helper where everything else is.
A fourth piece belongs here and isn’t about a person you know at all: telling responders the animal exists. AVMA’s preparedness tip is that “Before a disaster or emergency ever takes place, you can post notices on entrances to your home that detail the number of animals inside to assist responders during a disaster event”, and that “If you live in an apartment, make sure your animals are on record with management.” That’s the rescue alert sticker and the fridge pet alert card; our guide on making sure firefighters know pets are inside covers what a sticker can and can’t do once a crew is actually working the building.
What this page will not tell you: whether your particular form is enforceable. Which wording a veterinarian will accept, and who may consent to treatment for an animal that isn’t theirs, sits in state veterinary practice law and varies by state. We don’t publish our own reading of any state’s statute. Ask your own veterinarian, at a routine appointment, which form they’ll honor, and take the question to your state veterinary licensing board if you want the rule itself rather than a practice’s habit. The pet emergency binder covers the AVMA fields to fill in with your vet, the pet sitter emergency instructions sheet is the short-horizon handoff naming who can approve care this weekend, and the pet guardian directive covers the long-horizon version of the same question: who takes the animal if you don’t come back.
Authority gets tested at an intake desk, not at your kitchen table, so the spokes that matter are the ones written from the desk’s side. Our emergency boarding checklist covers what a facility asks for and why a written spending limit needs a second named approver rather than only you. Pet daycare emergency intake covers the same fields for a facility that already has your animal when the order comes. The dog walker emergency card and the holiday sitter plan cover the people holding your key on an ordinary week. The foster pet emergency checklist covers the case where the animal in your house legally belongs to a rescue, and the rescue’s rule, not yours, governs the veterinary decision. And the vet hospital stay bag covers the handoff where the animal stays and you leave.
Medical Consumables: The Part of the Kit With a Clock on It
Food and water expire slowly and visibly. Medication fails quietly, and it fails three different ways.
It expires in the bag. AVMA’s one-page evacuation-kit checklist, document code aph-0823, puts an asterisk on three of the lines in its Food and medicine section, the food, the medicine, and the water, and resolves that asterisk in a footnote printed at the foot of the same list: “*These items must be rotated and replaced to ensure they don’t expire”. On AVMA’s pets-and-disasters web page the footnote reads the same way, but there the asterisk sits on the food and the medicine only, not on the water line. Our kit rotation checklist covers the cadence and what to check at each interval.
It isn’t in the bag at all. Anything refrigerated can’t live in a go-bag by the door, and AVMA publishes a specific fix for the hole that creates: “If medications must be stored outside of the kit due to temperature requirements, such as refrigeration, write down the name of the medication and its location, and include that note in the kit.” A note in the bag is what keeps a fast exit from leaving the insulin in the fridge. Insulin cooler cases covers carrying it once it’s out, and pet medication and refrigeration in a power outage covers the case where the fridge itself is the failure. Heat-sensitive medication has the mirror problem: a bag staged in a car has a temperature ceiling too, which is why the storage line on the label is worth reading before you decide where the bag lives.
You can’t simply order more the week of the storm. For controlled substances this is federal, not a pharmacy’s discretion. Under 21 CFR 1306.22(a), “No prescription for a controlled substance listed in Schedule III or IV shall be filled or refilled more than six months after the date on which such prescription was issued”, and “No prescription for a controlled substance listed in Schedule III or IV authorized to be refilled may be refilled more than five times.” Under 21 CFR 1306.12(a), “The refilling of a prescription for a controlled substance listed in Schedule II is prohibited.” That is only half of the section, and the other half is the part that answers the buffer question. Under 21 CFR 1306.12(b)(1), an individual practitioner “may issue multiple prescriptions authorizing the patient to receive a total of up to a 90-day supply of a Schedule II controlled substance provided the following conditions are met”, and those conditions include written instructions on each prescription naming the earliest date a pharmacy may fill it, the practitioner’s own conclusion that issuing them this way creates no undue risk of diversion or abuse, and that the practice is permissible under the applicable state law. Paragraph (b)(2) is equally explicit that nothing in it mandates or encourages a practitioner to prescribe that way, so it is a question to put to your veterinarian, not an entitlement to claim at a counter. Those limits reach prescriptions written by a veterinarian, because 21 CFR 1300.01 defines an “individual practitioner” as “a physician, dentist, veterinarian, or other individual licensed, registered, or otherwise permitted” by the jurisdiction where they practice to dispense a controlled substance in the course of professional practice.
The practical consequence: if any animal in your household takes a controlled substance, how large a buffer you’re allowed to hold is settled at a routine appointment, not in a phone queue during a warning. Ask which schedule the drug falls in, ask what quantity your veterinarian is willing to write, and write the answer somewhere you’ll find it again. For a drug that isn’t a controlled substance the ceiling is whatever your vet will authorize, which is a shorter conversation but still one worth having before hurricane season rather than during it. Our seizure-prone dog kit works this problem in the most detail on the site, including how state emergency-refill rules treat controlled and noncontrolled drugs differently and the honest gap in whether those rules reach a veterinary prescription at all. The pet medication refill calculator keeps the reorder date from arriving unannounced.
Two consumables get forgotten because owners don’t file them as medication. Preventives are the first: AVMA’s checklist puts flea and tick prevention inside the first aid kit, and the CDC’s separate preventive line noted in the category list above runs on a monthly calendar that doesn’t pause because you’re displaced. The second is everything a dose needs in order to be given: syringes, needles, lancets, test strips, a pill splitter, a sharps container. No pre-made kit on this page includes any of it. Count those the way you count doses, per animal, for the same number of days. Our medical consumables count for an evacuation runs that count item by item and sets out which of them no kit list quantifies at all.