Not on who ranks highest, or who has the most reviews. On the things that decide whether a place will work for your animal — and most of them are published nowhere else.
Most pet care platforms list individuals — a person with a flat, a free weekend and a profile photo. That suits some animals and some owners, and it is not what this is.
Boarding Scout lists businesses. Premises built for the purpose, with staff, insurance, protocols and someone accountable when things go wrong. A facility that has been operating for a decade rather than a person who might stop next month.
How we check: wherever a licence register exists, we start from it — the state or city record of facilities permitted to board animals for a fee. It is the most reliable way to tell a business from an individual, and it surfaces the ones that never bought an advert: small operations, veterinary practices that board, places that have simply never needed to market themselves.
Not every state keeps one. Around nine license centrally; the rest leave it to counties and towns. Where no register exists, we say so on the listing rather than implying a check we could not make.
Registers routinely hold several times more facilities than appear in a search — most of the difference is small, long-established places that never needed to advertise.
Every pet needs something different, and the deciding factors are rarely on a facility's website. You can filter on all of these:
Set what your animal needs, see only the places that meet it. No phoning ten facilities to eliminate eight.
Facilities tend to get described as either social or quiet, so a nervous animal seems to rule out most of them. In practice many places do both — group time is offered, and staff will keep an animal out of it on request. It rarely appears on a website because it is a normal accommodation rather than a headline service.
For a nervous rescue, a recovering senior, a cat who would rather be left alone, or a dog who finds crowds tiring, that roughly doubles the places worth considering. We record it so you can see it up front instead of finding out by phone.
Distance in a city is measured in transfers, not miles. A facility five miles away on a direct train is closer than one three miles away that needs a bus connection.
We sort by how long the journey actually takes — which matters most for daycare, where you'll make the trip two hundred times a year rather than twice.
A listing is information, not a recommendation — we don't inspect facilities and we're not part of your booking. Facilities also change their policies without telling us. Always confirm the details that matter directly with the facility, particularly vaccination requirements and anything specific to your animal.
4,269 licensed facilities. Filter by what your animal actually needs.