What National Cat Day is
National Cat Day is a US observance held on October 29, encouraging people to adopt shelter cats, support rescue organizations, and spend extra time with the cats they already have. It carries no legal status: no federal or state law recognizes it, government offices and banks run a normal schedule, and no day off is attached to it. In 2026 it falls on a Thursday.
Like most observances on this calendar, it spreads mainly through social media and pet-brand marketing rather than through any civic or religious institution. Retailers and shelters use the date as a hook for adoption events and product promotions, which is a large part of how it has stayed visible since 2005.
Who started it, and why October 29
The origin traces to one named person: Colleen Paige, a pet and family lifestyle expert, who founded National Cat Day in 2005. Her stated goal was to draw public attention to the number of cats that need rescuing each year, and to give cat owners a reason to celebrate the animals already in their homes.
Paige did not stop at cats. She is also credited as the founder of National Dog Day (2004), National Puppy Day, National Mutt Day, National Wildlife Day, and National Beach Day, among other pet- and animal-themed US observances. That is a different pattern from National Boss's Day, where Patricia Bays Haroski registered one specific day in 1958 and the record stops there. Paige's founding claims are, by the same standard applied throughout this calendar, still just one person's account: there is no registration filing, trademark record, or proclamation available online to check independently, even though National Today, National Day Calendar, and Wikipedia all repeat the same name and year without contradiction.
One detail is notably absent: a stated reason for the October 29 date itself. For National Dog Day, Paige has said August 26 marks the day her family adopted a shelter dog when she was ten years old. No source carries an equivalent explanation for why Cat Day landed on October 29 rather than any other date.
Four cat days, four dates, four founders
"Cat day" is not one observance; it is a name loosely shared by at least four of them, and calendar sites frequently mix up which date and origin story belongs to which.
National Cat Day itself is the one covered on this page: October 29, US-only, founded by Colleen Paige in 2005. International Cat Day falls on August 8 and has an entirely separate, older institutional history: the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) created it in 2002, and in 2020 stewardship passed to International Cat Care, a UK-based nonprofit that has worked on feline welfare since 1958. Black Cat Appreciation Day, observed August 17 in the US, was founded in 2011 by Wayne H. Morris in memory of his sister and her black cat, Sinbad, who both died that year; Morris built it around dispelling superstitions that made black cats harder to place for adoption. National Black Cat Day, October 27 in the UK, was launched the same year, 2011, by the British charity Cats Protection, for a closely related reason: at launch, the charity's own data showed black and black-and-white cats took seven days longer on average to find a home than cats of other colors, a gap Cats Protection reported had narrowed to two days by 2019.
Two of those four (the American Black Cat Appreciation Day and the British National Black Cat Day) share almost the same name, launched in the same year, for a similar adoption-equity reason, on dates two days apart. That is enough overlap that a reader searching for one can easily land on coverage of the other. The safest way to keep them straight is by founder and country: Paige for the US's general National Cat Day, IFAW/International Cat Care for the global August observance, Morris for the US black-cat day, and Cats Protection for the UK black-cat day.
The shelter numbers behind the adoption push
Coverage of National Cat Day commonly cites shelter statistics to make the case for adoption, and the numbers in circulation do not agree with each other. Some blog posts state 6.3 million animals surrendered annually with 920,000 euthanized; others, covering the same day, cite 7.6 million surrendered and 2.7 million cats euthanized. Neither figure is attributed to a specific report in the articles that use it.
The ASPCA's own current shelter statistics, current as of 2025, put the real numbers well below either of those recycled figures: 5.8 million dogs and cats entered US shelters and rescues that year, 3 million of them cats, and approximately 597,000 animals were euthanized in shelters, 277,000 of them cats. Those figures reflect a shelter system that has improved substantially since the older, larger numbers still being repeated on some observance pages were first published. Readers who want a current, sourced number for how many cats need adoption should use the ASPCA's own statistics page rather than a figure repeated from an uncredited older post, a caution that applies just as well to National Coffee Day and any other observance page that leans on a statistic to make its case.