Animal Shelter Directory USA
Transparency

Data sources & methodology

How every listing is built, and what we will and will not claim about a shelter or rescue.

Where the listings come from

There is no national register of animal shelters in the United States. Municipal shelters are run by thousands of cities and counties, and private shelters and rescues are licensed, if at all, state by state. The directory currently holds 10,229 animal shelters and rescues, built from open data:

  • Overture Maps Places. The backbone of the directory. Overture Maps Foundation publishes an open dataset of places, built from Meta and Microsoft data, among others. It supplies the name, address, phone number, website, category and operating status of each location. Overture Places data is available under the Community Data License Agreement, Permissive, Version 2.0 (CDLA-Permissive-2.0).
  • OpenStreetMap. Used for enrichment: opening hours, which animals a shelter takes in, websites and links that volunteer mappers have recorded, plus shelters that are mapped in OpenStreetMap but missing from Overture. OpenStreetMap data is © OpenStreetMap contributors and available under the Open Database License (ODbL).
  • IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File. The public IRS list of tax-exempt organizations. We match listings to 501(c)(3) organizations in the animal protection and welfare categories to show nonprofit status, the EIN and the year the IRS recognized the organization. 3,310 listings are matched.
  • GeoNames and the US Census Bureau. Cities and towns come from GeoNames; county boundaries and ZIP code areas come from the US Census Bureau. We use them to place each listing in the right state, county, city and ZIP code.

Overture also files veterinarians, boarding kennels, groomers, pet stores and homeless shelters close to animal shelters. We leave those out by name and category, and we only keep a place when its category is animal shelter or rescue, or its official name says shelter, rescue, humane society, SPCA or animal control. Locations that the source marks as closed, or that have a low source confidence, are not published.

How we classify listings

We assign a type only when the source or the official name supports it. A listing is a humane society or SPCA when its name says so, and animal control when the source category or the name identifies a city or county animal service. Animal focus (dogs, cats, horses, birds, rabbits, farm animals) comes from the name or from the animals recorded in OpenStreetMap; a general shelter that takes dogs and cats is not listed as a “dog rescue”. A listing is marked no-kill only when its name or a confirmed record says so, because the term has consequences for the animals and the people who bring them in. When we don't know, the page says “Not available”. See all types for the rule behind each category.

Rescues without a public address

Many rescues are foster-based: animals live in volunteers' homes, and adoptions happen by appointment or at events. Their IRS records often show a home address. We therefore use IRS data only to confirm nonprofit status for organizations that already appear in public map data, and we never publish a street address taken from tax records.

Cities and counties

Most listings carry a mailing address, and we use the city named in it. When a record has no town in its address, we list it under the nearest town from GeoNames and say so on the city page, so a listing filed under a city may be just outside its limits. The map pin always shows the recorded location.

Duplicates

The same shelter can be recorded more than once, for example as “Humane Society of the Example Valley” in one source and “Example Valley Humane Society” in another, or as both the adoption center and the clinic at one address. We compare names, addresses and phone numbers, and merge records automatically only when they are certainly the same place. Uncertain matches go to a review queue and stay separate until a person checks them.

Corrections and verification

Every listing has a correction form. Shelter staff, volunteers and visitors can suggest changes, and we review each one before publishing. A listing shows “Verified” only after its details have been confirmed. Always confirm hours, adoption fees and intake policies directly with the shelter.

What we do not publish

  • Lists of adoptable animals. They change daily; follow the link to the shelter's own site or adoption page.
  • Adoption fees, unless they come from a source we can name.
  • Ratings or reviews we cannot attribute to a real visitor.
  • Home addresses of foster-based rescues.