Council cat containment rules in Australia

Before you price an enclosure it is worth knowing whether you actually need one. This is a register of 68 Australian councils across 6 states and territories, each row traced to the council's own local law or by-law rather than to another summary of it.

Council instruments checked 12 September 2026

Containment is not a curfew

Almost every article on this subject uses the two words interchangeably. The instruments do not. A curfew restricts a cat during stated hours, usually overnight. A containment duty requires the cat to be kept on the property, commonly with no hours mentioned at all, which in practice means always. Of the 48 councils here that impose a duty, 36 state hours and 12 state none. The table reproduces each council's own wording rather than our summary of it.

Where it stands, by state

Those two numbers are worth sitting with. In Queensland every council verified imposes some containment duty; in Western Australia, 1 of 14 does. That is not a difference in how seriously the two states take cats. It is a difference in what their enabling Acts permit, and it is explained under each state below.

The law each state is working under

ACT

Domestic Animals Act 2000 (ACT), Part 4 Division 4.1B (Cat containment), sections 84AN and 84AO Territory-wide statutory containment. Section 84AO(2) makes it a strict liability offence for a cat's keeper or carer to allow a cat to be off their premises anywhere in the ACT, unless the cat was registered before 1 July 2022 or a document shows it was born before 1 July 2022. Section 84AO(1) applies the same offence to every cat, regardless of age, inside an area declared by the Minister under section 84AN. Maximum penalty for each is 10 penalty units. Section 84AO(4) exempts a cat effectively controlled on a leash and harness. 'Premises' is defined in section 84AO(6) as a completely or partly enclosed space from which a cat cannot escape, including a building, a vehicle, a cat cage, or a backyard or courtyard. The ACT has no local councils. The obligation is territory-wide and set by the Act, not by a local law. Read from republication R51, effective 16 November 2025. A section 84AN declaration is a disallowable instrument, so the list of declared areas can change without the Act changing.

Read the Act, checked 2026-09-12

NSW

Companion Animals Act 1998 (NSW), Part 4 (Cats), sections 29 to 32 The Companion Animals Act 1998 does NOT give a NSW council power to impose a cat curfew or a cat containment requirement. Part 4 of the Act deals only with cat identification (s 29), places where cats are prohibited, being food preparation and consumption areas and declared wildlife protection areas (s 30), nuisance cat orders for persistent noise or repeated property damage (s 31 and s 31A), and seizure to protect people and animals (s 32). There is no roaming offence for cats equivalent to the dog control provisions, and no order-making power over cat confinement anywhere in the Act. Some NSW councils have adopted cat containment policies relying instead on Order 18 in the Table to section 124 of the Local Government Act 1993, which lets a council order an occupier of premises to do or refrain from doing something about the keeping of birds or animals. This is an order served on individual premises, not a general curfew, and its use for cat containment has not been tested in court. Queanbeyan-Palerang Regional Council is the clearest published example and is included as a row. The NSW Office of Local Government released a discussion paper reviewing the Companion Animals Act 1998 in February 2025, with submissions closing 4 May 2025. Council containment powers were a live issue in that review. As at the checked date no amendment conferring a containment power had been verified as in force. The legislation.nsw.gov.au and AustLII copies of the Act blocked automated retrieval at the checked date. The statement that the Act does not restrain roaming is taken verbatim from a NSW council's own adopted policy, which states: 'The Companion Animals Act 1993 does not prohibit cats from roaming as it does for dogs.' That policy mis-cites the year of the Act as 1993; the Act is the Companion Animals Act 1998. The substance of the statement was cross-checked against the section list of Part 4, which contains no confinement provision.

Read the Act, checked 2026-09-12

QLD

Animal Management (Cats and Dogs) Act 2008 (Qld) and Local Government Act 2009 (Qld) s 28. Queensland has NO statewide cat curfew and NO statewide containment requirement: the 2008 Act covers identification of cats and dogs, registration of dogs, regulated dogs and breeding, and its effective-control obligation is expressly limited to dogs. Containment is therefore entirely a matter of council local laws. Of 14 councils verified, NOT ONE has a dusk-to-dawn or any other time-limited cat curfew; the sunset and sunrise wording that appears in several of these laws is in koala conservation provisions applying to dogs only. Councils split into two tiers that look identical on paper: Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast impose genuine round-the-clock containment on the owner's own land, while the other twelve require a fence that prevents the cat leaving the property but permit the cat to be loose, unsupervised, in its own yard. The difference turns entirely on how each law defines wandering at large. No Queensland council publishes a dollar penalty: every one expresses maxima in penalty units, and these must not be converted.

SA

Dog and Cat Management Act 1995 (SA), s 90, under which councils may make by-laws, together with s 246 of the Local Government Act 1999. South Australia has no statewide cat curfew or containment requirement; it is council by council. Of the councils verified, several metropolitan ones have NO cats by-law at all and say so plainly on their own pages, while a cluster of Fleurieu Peninsula councils have adopted 24/7 confinement in recent years. Two features recur and are routinely got wrong by aggregators. First, BIRTH-DATE PHASING: most SA confinement by-laws exempt cats born before a cut-off, so an existing cat is frequently unaffected. Second, DELAYED ACTIVATION: at least one by-law has been passed but does not operate until the council separately resolves a start date, which had not happened when checked. Almost no SA council publishes a dollar penalty for a cat offence; expiation is usually expressed as a proportion of an unstated maximum.

VIC

Domestic Animals Act 1994 (Vic), section 25 (Cats found at large) and section 26 (Dogs and cats found in places specified by the Council) Section 25(1): 'If a cat is found at large outside the premises of the owner or not securely confined to the owner's premises, in a municipal district or a specified part of a municipal district in respect of which an order under this section has been made, during the hours specified in the order, the owner is guilty of an offence and liable to a penalty of not more than 1 penalty unit for a first offence and 3 penalty units for a second or subsequent offence.' Section 25(2): 'A Council may, by resolution, make an order under this section.' Section 25(3) requires the order to be published in the Government Gazette and in a newspaper circulating in the municipal district. Victoria is where most Australian cat containment obligations sit, but there is no statewide curfew. Each of the 79 councils decides for itself, by resolution, and each order sets its own hours. Because the order specifies the hours, a council can set anything from a dusk to dawn curfew to 24 hour confinement, and both are made under the same section. Section 26 is a separate power to ban or condition the presence of cats in specified public places; it is not a containment power over the owner's own property. Maximum penalty under section 25 is 1 penalty unit for a first offence and 3 penalty units for a second or subsequent offence. Councils issue infringement notices for well under the maximum, which is why the dollar figures in the rows below vary between councils. Read from the authorised version of the Act. Agriculture Victoria does not publish a consolidated list of which councils have made section 25 orders, so there is no single authoritative register and each council must be verified individually.

Read the Act, checked 2026-09-12

WA

Cat Act 2011 (WA), s 79. Western Australia has no statewide cat curfew and no statewide containment requirement, and s 79(3) contains no express curfew power. Of 14 councils verified, NOT ONE has a curfew: the word, and any sunset or sunrise formulation, appears in none of the instruments. Only ONE, the City of Gosnells, has an enforceable containment requirement, and it is limited to premises within 200m of a listed prohibited-area parcel. Most striking, TWO councils actively DELETED their containment clauses by gazetted amendment: Kalamunda in 2023 and Serpentine Jarrahdale in 2024, which is strong evidence that a general containment duty sits at or beyond the edge of the s 79(3) power as currently drafted. Where containment appears elsewhere it is always a condition attached to a permit or licence for keeping above the standard number of cats, never a district-wide obligation.

The register

Sorted by state, then council. "Hours" is the instrument's own wording, and is blank where it states none. "Applies to" matters more than it looks: a rule that binds only cats born after a cut-off leaves most existing cats untouched.

Penalty is blank on 64 of 68 rows because the council does not publish a dollar figure. Queensland states maxima in penalty units and South Australian by-laws usually set expiation as a proportion of an unstated maximum. Converting either into dollars would be inventing a legal fact, so we do not.

Four things the summaries get wrong

1. "Queensland councils confine cats between dusk and dawn." None of the Queensland councils verified has a curfew of any kind. The sunset and sunrise wording that appears in several of those laws sits in koala conservation provisions that apply to dogs.
2. Queensland's containment duties are not all the same. Two of the councils verified impose genuine round-the-clock containment on the owner's own land. The rest require a fence that stops the cat leaving the property but permit the cat to be loose, unsupervised, in its own yard. The difference turns entirely on how each law defines wandering at large, and it is the difference between needing an enclosure and needing a decent fence.
3. Two Western Australian councils removed their containment clauses. Both deleted them by gazetted amendment, in 2023 and 2024. That is strong evidence a general containment duty sits at or beyond the edge of the power their state Act confers, and it is the opposite of the direction most commentary assumes things are moving.
4. A by-law existing is not the same as a by-law operating. 1 council here has passed containment that does not commence until it separately resolves a start date, and no such resolution could be found. Its own cats page still says owners are "encouraged" to contain. Reported as a current requirement in several places. It is not one.

What we could not establish

One council is recorded as not established rather than as having no rule, because we could neither find an instrument nor rule one out. That is a different answer from "no", and marking it as "no" would be the easy and wrong thing to do.

• City of Swan (WA). UNVERIFIED, and recorded as such rather than as a negative.

How this 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.

That rule caught two false claims during the build. A widely indexed reference to a Western Australian council's 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.

If a row here is wrong or out of date, it is worth telling us, and it will be corrected rather than defended. Local laws in this area are moving quickly in both directions.

If you do need an enclosure

A containment duty is a duty to keep the cat on your property, not a duty to buy any particular product. The options and what they cost are in the enclosure comparison, and if you are considering fencing instead, note that some councils will not accept it as compliant containment: see cat-proof fencing. Whether the structure itself needs approval is a separate question, covered in building approval.

Common questions

Do I legally have to contain my cat?

It depends entirely on your council, and the answer is genuinely mixed: of the 68 councils in this register, 48 impose a containment duty and 19 impose none. There is no national rule and, in most states, no state rule either. Find your council in the table below, read the instrument named in its row, and confirm with the council before you rely on it.

Is a cat curfew the same as containment?

No, and conflating them is the most common error in this area. A curfew restricts a cat at stated hours, usually overnight. A containment duty requires the cat to be kept on the property, often at all times, with no hours mentioned at all. Of the 48 councils requiring containment here, 36 state hours in their instrument and 12 state none. We record each council's own wording rather than paraphrasing it.

Does it apply to the cat I already own?

Often not, and this catches people out. 8 councils in this register phase the obligation by the cat's birth or registration date, exempting animals born before a cut-off. One council has passed a by-law that does not operate at all until it separately resolves a start date, which had not happened when we checked. An existing cat is frequently unaffected by a rule the headlines describe as already in force.

What is the penalty?

Usually unpublished as a dollar figure. Only 4 of 68 councils here publish one. Queensland expresses maximum penalties in penalty units, and South Australian by-laws generally set expiation as a proportion of a maximum they do not state. We leave those blank rather than converting them, because computing a dollar penalty from a unit would be inventing a legal fact.