About this site

Cat Enclosure Guide Australia compares cat enclosures, catios and netting for Australian buyers, and publishes a register of which councils actually require containment. It exists because every other result for these searches is a company selling its own product.

Programs, councils and specifications checked 12 September 2026

How it makes money, precisely

It does not, yet. There is no tracking link anywhere on this site. 1 of the sellers covered here runs an affiliate program and we have not applied to it. When that changes, the notice at the top of the affected pages changes automatically, because it is generated from the same configuration this table reads.

The awkward shape of that table

The one seller that could pay us has the smallest brand search of anyone on this site. The pages carrying the most traffic by a wide margin, the retailer pages, earn nothing at all and never will. That is not an accident of the plan, it is the plan: in a category where every other search result is a vendor selling its own enclosure, being the only source that states plainly which sellers pay us is the entire reason to read this rather than them.

It also means a recommendation here costs us nothing to make honestly. Where a brand we earn nothing from is the better fit, the page says so in the same voice it would use for the one that could pay.

We checked that position rather than assuming it. On a sibling site in this portfolio, two sellers recorded as having no program turned out to run live ones linked from their own footers, which reversed that site's economics. So every seller here was re-checked, including whether one brand's wholesale distributor ran a program that covered it. It does not. Five sellers are recorded as having no program on positive evidence, not on an absence of findings.

How the council register is built

Each row was verified against a primary source: the council's own published page for the section 25 order, local law or containment policy, or the text of the state or territory Act. Aggregator sites, news articles and pet-product blogs were used only to find leads and are never cited as the source of a row. Where a council's own page and a news report disagreed, the council page won and the disagreement was recorded in notes. Hours are recorded in the council's own wording rather than normalised, because a 24 hour confinement obligation and a dusk to dawn curfew are different obligations and are routinely conflated. Penalties are recorded only where the council or the Act publishes a dollar figure; where only penalty units are published, the unit figure is quoted verbatim in notes and penalty_aud is null. A council with no containment requirement is recorded as a row with containment_required false, because that is a useful finding. An order that has been resolved but has not yet commenced is recorded as containment_required false with the commencement date in notes, because a pending order is not a current requirement. Recheck: the whole register every 6 months, and any row whose notes mention a pending commencement date within one month of that date.

Two rules govern it. No row is ever populated from another aggregator or from memory. And where something cannot be established, it is recorded as not established rather than as a "no", because those are different answers and only one of them is honest.

That discipline earned its keep twice. A widely indexed claim that a council had gazetted a new cat law turned out, on opening the gazette, to be a shopping trolleys local law. A containment sentence attributed to another council's cats page does not appear anywhere on it. Both would have been repeated by anyone working from summaries.

What the data does and does not contain

• Prices are Australian dollars as listed, with the date each was checked.
• Floor area is ours, not the seller's. Nobody publishes one. We computed it for 58 of 68 products from published dimensions, and some of those are external measurements that overstate usable floor.
• Unpublished means unpublished. A field we could not source renders as not published rather than being estimated. 0 of 68 products publish a wind rating and 9 of 68 state a cat capacity, and those gaps are recorded as values because in this category the absences are frequently the most useful thing on the page.
• Some retailers block us. Several large chains refuse automated access, so where we could not read a price we say so and tell you to check in store, rather than publishing a figure we could not verify.
• Two sellers are one catalogue. Our own product table records only each seller's exclusive models, so the duplication is not visible in the table itself. It is reported here because a buyer comparing the two believes they are comparing the market when they are comparing one supplier with itself.

What we will not do

We do not claim to have tested anything. We do not publish stock photography as though it were our own. We do not invent credentials, and there is no panel of experts here. On the legal-adjacent pages we do not state a threshold we could not verify, which is why the building approval page publishes no floor area, height or setback figure at all: an unverified setback number would be worse than none.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, it is worth telling us, and it will be fixed rather than argued with. Several figures on this site exist because a first attempt was wrong and got caught: a product filter that silently dropped a real enclosure from every table, three products recorded under the wrong brand, and a price comparison that had quietly merged an open-topped run in with roofed enclosures. Those corrections are recorded in the data files rather than tidied away.

Common questions

Does this site earn money from its recommendations?

Not today. 1 of the 8 sellers we cover runs an affiliate program, we have not applied to it, and there are no tracking links anywhere on this site. The other 7 have no program at all and can never pay us whatever we write about them.

How is the council register verified?

Every row was read from that council's own published local law or by-law, or the state instrument, and the source is linked in the row. Nothing came from another aggregator and nothing from memory. That rule caught two false claims during the build: a widely indexed reference to a council's new cat law turned out to be a shopping trolleys local law, and a containment sentence attributed to a council page does not appear on it.

Why is floor area described as your figure rather than the seller figure?

Because not one seller publishes a floor area. We computed it for 58 of 68 products from their own published dimensions, and each record notes which pair of measurements it came from. Some are external dimensions that include roof overhang and nesting boxes, so they slightly overstate usable floor. It is the only number on this site that is ours rather than a seller's, and it is labelled that way everywhere it appears.

Have you tested these enclosures?

No, and we will not imply otherwise. There is no testing policy to announce, no panel of experts, and no fabricated credentials. What we do is read every listing and every instrument, record what they say and what they do not, and show the working. If we ever do test something, it will be labelled as measured with the method and the date, and kept in its own column so it can never be confused with a manufacturer claim.