How Much Does It Cost to Bring a Pet to Canada?

Age decides whether you need anything at all. A puppy or kitten under three months old travelling with its owner does not need rabies documentation. From three months, a veterinary certificate is required, and it has to establish one of three things. Either the animal is currently vaccinated against rabies, or it comes from a country Canada recognizes as rabies free and has lived there for the six months beforehand, or a rabies titre test returned at least 0.5 IU per millilitre from a sample taken at least 30 days after a previous vaccination.

The first route is the cheapest and the fastest. The certificate should identify the animal clearly and state the vaccine used and the date it was given, so that a border officer can match the document to the animal in front of them. Assistance dogs travelling with the person they work for are not subject to these import restrictions.

Nothing dramatic, and nothing that separates you from your pet. Under CFIA’s document, pet dogs from any country are exempt from post-import quarantine. What an inspector can do is issue a vaccination order, which requires you to have the animal vaccinated within a stated period, at your expense.

The cost of that is the reason to get the certificate right the first time. An arrival that triggers a vaccination order is inspected at CAD $67.75 for the first animal and CAD $36.95 for each additional one, rather than $36.95 and $6.16. The veterinarian who carries out the vaccination bills separately. A missing date on a certificate is a cheap mistake to make and an avoidable one.

Freight is the real cost of bringing a pet to Canada and it is quoted per booking rather than taken from a rate card. The airline prices it once it knows the crate outside dimensions, the loaded weight and the date, so two pets of the same weight in different crates are quoted differently. Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal take the widest range of animal-carrying flights, and an arrival into a smaller airport usually means a connection through one of them.

Winter is the constraint that surprises people arriving in Canada rather than leaving it. Air Canada Cargo says that from 1 November to 31 March it does not accept warm-blooded animals as cargo on some of its narrowbody fleet, because their cargo holds are not heated.

Everything charged in your departure country sits outside this table, and it is usually the larger half of the bill. The examination, the vaccination, any titre test and the government endorsement of your export certificate are priced where you are leaving from, and they vary enormously between countries. Ground transport from the Canadian airport to your address is charged separately, as is boarding at either end if your flight date and your own moving date do not line up.

Crate size drives the flight cost, as on every route, because freight is charged on the space the crate occupies rather than on what your pet weighs. After that, the variable that matters is where you are flying from, since the Canadian side is close to fixed and the departure side is not. A second pet is cheap on this route by international standards: CAD $6.00 more at the border, and a second crate on the aircraft.

Figures verified September 2026. Border inspection fees and CFIA import conditions are revised periodically, so check the sources if you are reading this later.

• CBSA inspections and fees, codes 1036 and 1037
• CFIA Import Reference Document, domestic dogs and cats
• CFIA, bringing animals to Canada

Travelling the other way? Start at our Canadian cost calculator. Terms used here are defined in our pet relocation glossary.

Send us the departure country, the breed and roughly when you want to travel. Request a quote and we will reply with an itemized plan, a timeline and clear next steps.

For the full entry rules and paperwork timeline, see our guide to bringing your pet to Canada.