Bringing a Pet to Shanghai in 2026: Rules, Quarantine, Dog Licence

Bringing a dog or cat to Shanghai comes down to one decision made months early: whether you clear the paperwork that skips the 30-day quarantine. With an ISO microchip, two rabies vaccinations and a rabies antibody test above 0.5 IU/ml from an approved lab, your pet walks out of Pudong with you. Without it, they spend a month in a customs facility. Once home, dogs need a licence within 30 days, costing 300 to 500 RMB a year. I have helped enough friends through this to know where it goes wrong, and it is almost never at the airport. It goes wrong four months earlier, when someone books the flight before booking the blood test. So here is the order of operations, working backwards from the day you land. Does my pet have to do 30 days of quarantine in China? Not if you prepare. There are two ways out of it. Route one: come from a listed region. Pets arriving from a set of designated countries and territories, with a valid electronic chip and a clean on-site inspection, are exempt. That list includes New Zealand, Australia, Fiji, French Polynesia, Hawaii, Guam, Jamaica, Iceland, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Cyprus, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, Singapore, Hong…