The complexities of Cattery Capacity

A boarding cattery's capacity looks like a simple fact. Your website might even say “we have 15 pens”, but in reality there are a lot of factors that determine whether you are full or not.

Capacity depends on:

• available units
• pet welfare
• owner preference
• staff vacations
• the day-boarding and overnight-boarding mix

Each of these turns the number on the website into a different, smaller and less predictable number — and they overlap. This post looks at each one in turn, and at what they mean for the question that actually matters: can I say yes to this booking?

Available units

You obviously have a physical space with a fixed number of pens or units that can be used. You also have a licence which says how many cats your premises may accommodate, in pens that meet the required standards for sleeping and exercise space. It's the number an inspector can verify by walking your building.

This does not determine how many cats you can accept in any given week. It counts physical accommodation on the best possible day: every pen serviceable, every booking perfectly shaped to fit. No real week looks like that.

Cats from different households must never share accommodation. A kennel might put two individuals together to free up space, or exercise compatible dogs in groups. But in a cattery, a pen holds one household — full stop. Which means your capacity is not really measured in cats at all. It's measured in households you can accommodate at once — and that number moves with every booking you take.

Pet welfare

Welfare shrinks capacity further, and a well-run cattery knows this and embraces it. Pens need turnaround time. Between one guest and the next there's cleaning and disinfection, and after illness a pen may need to rest longer.

A cattery running at maximum every night has no slack for this — so in practice, some margin is always unsellable.

Stays also don't always end when they're supposed to. Flights get delayed, house moves slip, and the cat in pen nine stays three extra nights. If every pen was promised the moment it looked free, one delayed return cascades into phone calls you don't want to make. Experienced catteries hold margin for this too — not because a rule requires it, but because they've made those calls before.

And some cats simply need more than their share: the diabetic needing injections, the elderly cat that must be watched at mealtimes, the semi-feral pair that take twenty minutes to service safely. Ten straightforward cats and ten complicated ones are the same headcount and nothing like the same load.

Owners often have a built-in overflow that they know they'll need. This is just experience at work.

Pet owner preferences

Here is where cattery capacity becomes genuinely different arithmetic. A family books in three cats. How many pens is that?

It could be one, if they're bonded and the family wants them together in a large pen. It could be three, if they tolerate each other at home but fight in unfamiliar territory — something owners often know and volunteer, and sometimes discover the hard way. It could be two: the bonded brothers together, the elderly female on her own.

You find out at booking time, not before. The same three cats are a different capacity load depending on a conversation.

And preferences change: the pair that shared happily last summer may need separating this year. A cattery diary has to survive the owner who calls to say “actually, keep them apart this time” — which can quietly turn a bookable week into an overbooked one without a single new booking arriving.

This is the arithmetic kennel thinking misses. Dog boarding mostly scales by the dog. Cat boarding scales by the household and its choices, and the same household is not the same size twice.

Staff and owner vacations

Physical capacity assumes hands to service it. Many catteries are owner-run or small-team, and the number of cats you can care for properly — fed, medicated, observed, pens cleaned, notes kept — depends on who's on that week.

The uncomfortable part: your busiest weeks and your staff's holiday requests point at the same school-holiday calendar. A sensible cattery plans reduced intake for the weeks it runs short-handed, and uses genuinely quiet weeks to take pens out of service deliberately — repainting, repairs, the deep cleans that can't happen around guests. On those weeks, capacity is below the licensed number on purpose, and the diary needs to know it.

So what is your capacity?

Your physical building and your licence give you a ceiling. Welfare and maintenance take a margin off it. Every booking's household shape decides how much of the rest it consumes. And staffing sets a lid that moves week by week.

Which is why “are you full?” is a genuinely hard question. The catteries that get this right aren't the ones with the most pens.

They're the ones whose booking process asks the right questions early — how many cats, one household or two, sharing or separate — while capturing vaccination documentation and asking custom questions at booking.

This is why we have separate cattery and kennel logic for our booking flows — and why we know you'll still need to be involved, but you'll appreciate all the information and help you can get.