Bringing your dog or cat to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is rabies-controlled and sorts origins into risk groups. The continental US is Group II, the rabies-controlled tier, alongside Canada, most of Europe, Japan, and others. Group II is the good outcome: dogs and cats from Group II are exempt from quarantine on arrival, provided you comply fully with the permit conditions, and there is no rabies antibody titer required, unlike the higher-risk Group IIIA and IIIB origins that face a titer and a minimum 30-day quarantine.

So Hong Kong is not a long-lead, biology-driven move like Australia or Japan. The lead time is set by paperwork and permit processing, not a fixed waiting clock. That makes it one of the more manageable rabies-controlled destinations, but the flip side is that the strictness lives entirely in getting the documents and the permit exactly right.

This is the rule that catches people. You must hold the AFCD Special Permit before you book travel, because airlines will not accept your pet without it. The permit is issued by Hong Kong's Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD), takes roughly 5 working days once your documents are in order, is valid for 6 months, and covers a single dog. Apply well ahead, and do not commit to a flight date until the permit is in hand.

1. ISO microchip first. Hong Kong's standard is an ISO 11784 or 11785 microchip. If your pet's chip is not readable by a universal scanner, a conforming chip may be implanted on arrival at your cost, so sort this before anything else.
2. Rabies vaccination, given 30 days to 1 year before departure and recorded against the microchip.
3. Apply to AFCD for the Special Permit (Form AF240 and Form UN110) before booking flights. AFCD issues a reference number and, once all documents are satisfactory, completes the permit.
4. Health certificate. A USDA-accredited vet completes the Hong Kong health certificate within 14 days of departure, endorsed by USDA APHIS. For the continental-US form, this can be done digitally through the APHIS VEHCS system.
5. Residence proof. You will need to declare your pet has lived in the US for at least 4 months before export.
6. Fly as manifest cargo. Pets are imported as manifest cargo, not as cabin or excess baggage, so book the pet's transport accordingly with an airline experienced in live-animal cargo to Hong Kong.

If something in your paperwork slips and your pet is held, no insurance product covers that boarding bill. Not pet health insurance, not travel insurance with a pet add-on, not a shipper's protection plan. Nationwide is the one US pet insurer that reimburses vet care at any licensed vet worldwide, and even it excludes boarding, which is what quarantine is. The cheapest insurance here is getting the documents right.

US pet insurance is written around a pet that lives in the US. Most policies carry a policy territory, typically the US and sometimes Canada or Puerto Rico, and even the ones that reimburse vet care worldwide generally require your primary residence to stay in the US. So a policy may well pay a vet bill on a trip abroad and still lapse the day the move becomes permanent. Read your own policy's territory and residency wording before you assume it travels with you, and for a permanent move plan on taking out local pet insurance in your new country.

As a rough sanity check on any quote, and this is our read of current market pricing rather than an official figure: a standard international pet move tends to run about $1,500 to $6,000. Full-service door-to-door typically costs 30 to 50 percent more than a transport-only booking where you handle the vet work and paperwork yourself.

The costs people forget are the small ones. USDA APHIS charges a user fee to endorse an export health certificate, currently $101 where no test verification is needed, $160 for a certificate covering one or two tests, and $206 for three to six tests, with rabies vaccination not counted in that tally. These rates rose on 10 January 2025, the first APHIS fee adjustment since 2012. Add an airline-compliant crate (roughly $50 to $400), the travel vet visits themselves, boarding on a layover, and summer heat surcharges.

Pet shipping attracts scammers, so verify any company before you send money. IPATA, the International Pet and Animal Transportation Association, is a trade association: its members ship under their own company names, IPATA itself does not ship pets, and there is no legitimate shipper with "ipata" in its name. Scammers clone real shippers' sites, logos and testimonials, so check the company in the member directory at ipata.org rather than trusting a logo on a website. Treat these as red flags: a quote dramatically below every other quote, a domain registered less than six months ago, email coming from a gmail address rather than the company domain, and any request to pay by Western Union or MoneyGram.

The risk to plan around is documentation. A Group II pet that fully complies skips quarantine, but any variation, an incomplete health certificate, missing vaccination records, a permit condition not met, can trigger quarantine of up to 6 months at the owner's full expense. Pets under 5 months old are also held until they reach 5 months. In other words, the quarantine you are avoiding is only avoided by getting every document right, so this is a move where precision pays. Budget several thousand dollars all in, with air cargo the largest line, plus the permit, vet work, and health certificate.

The return leg is easy. Because Hong Kong is not high-risk for rabies, a dog flying home to the US is on the simplest CDC path: typically a CDC Dog Import Form receipt, a microchip, a minimum age of 6 months, and a healthy appearance, with no titer and no quarantine. Cats have no federal requirement. See our guide to bringing a dog into the US, and traveling with a pet for how Hong Kong compares with other destinations.

Common questions

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