In the rain, a cat moves two thirds as far
"It was raining, so it cannot have gone far." People say this during searches, and there is a measured number behind it — a Danish study that put GPS units on 97 companion cats. But if you mistake what the number measures, you will search the wrong way.
What was measured
The Danish GPS study (Animals 12(14), 1748) tracked 97 companion cats with outdoor access for about seven days, with owner-reported data on each cat.
Mean distance moved per day:
Dry days: 3.6 km (95% CI 2.8-4.5 km)
Days with heavy rain: 2.4 km (95% CI 1.6-3.5 km)
Roughly two thirds. The confidence intervals overlap, so this is not a guarantee of a two-thirds reduction — but within this study, cats clearly moved less when it rained.
What else the same study found
Median time away from home was 5 hours a day (IQR 2.5-8.8 h). Median daily distance moved was 2.4 km (IQR 1.3-3.7 km). Median 95% BBKDE home range was 5 hectares (IQR 2.9-8.5 ha).
Cats over seven years old spent less time away, were less active and had smaller ranges. Cats with access to natural areas were the opposite. Four intact males had larger ranges.
The mistake to avoid
These are distances a normally-living cat walks in a day. They are not the distance at which a lost cat is found from where it escaped.
That is a different study. In the 1,210 missing-cat paper, the median found-distance was about 50 m, and 39 m for indoor-only cats. A cat that walks 2.4 km a day is found 39 m away. That is not a contradiction. How far something roams and where it ends up are different quantities.
A lost cat hides in unfamiliar ground. It is more likely to stay put than to roam. Do not use the rain figure as a reason to shrink your search radius.
What it is good for
The order in which you search.
If cats move less in rain, then the cat is somewhere sheltered right now. A roof, out of the wind, dry ground.
Under decks and porches. Garages. Sheds. Under parked cars. Stairwells. Bin shelters. A cardboard box behind something.
That list overlaps with where the 1,210-cat paper found cats: other people's gardens, shrubs, under decks and terraces, garages, behind furniture, basements. The places cats are found are already the sheltered places. Rain only sharpens it.
Confined cats give a different answer
A 2025 study (Animals 15(5), 637) fitted accelerometers to seven research cats across 13 weeks of the year. A combined temperature-humidity-wind index and daylength affected behaviour, and more rain meant less grooming and scratching.
But in that study rain had no effect on active behaviour itself. The paper attributes this to its cats being research animals with limited space to roam, unlike the free-roaming cats in other work.
Confined cats and roaming cats have to be treated separately. A lost cat is closer to the latter.
What is not known
We could not find a study measuring how rain affects a lost cat specifically.
All the figures above come from cats living their normal lives. How a frightened cat behaves in rain has not been measured.
The same holds for temperature, humidity and wind. The search tool displays them as a record, but they do not change the search rings, because there is no basis for changing them.
In practice
When searching in or after rain:
1 Sheltered places first: under decks, garages, sheds, under cars, stairwells.
2 Open ground later. A cat is unlikely to be walking through rain.
3 Do not shrink the radius. Rain changes what you look at first, not how far you look.
And when the rain stops, cats start moving again. It is worth checking the same places once more after it clears.