Cat Trackers Can Keep Your Feline Friends Safe

Hundreds of thousands of cats go missing each year. Here’s how to make sure you can find yours

Claire Leibowitz,

AARP

Comments

Published March 10, 2026

a cartoon-style illustration shows a cat roaming around a trash can with a fish skeleton in its mouth

Hugo Jason Herrera

Keeping a cat indoors is the only surefire way to know where it is at all times. But if you’ve got an outdoor feline, there’s now a digital way to keep tabs on it when it’s roaming: a cat tracker.

One evening in May, Devon Clifford, 38, of Hurst, Illinois, had a sinking feeling when one of her cats, 5-year-old Kygo, missed his nightly house check. But Clifford opened an app on her phone and, with the help of a device on Kygo’s collar, learned exactly where he was. She drove 30 minutes to retrieve him; the tracker led her to a pair of glowing eyes in a field. “It was the best feeling ever,” she says. “I didn’t know if I was ever going to see him again.”

Hundreds of thousands of cats go missing each year in the U.S., according to Leslie Poole, executive director of Pet FBI, a nonprofit organization founded in Ohio that allows users to report or search for lost and found pets by scrolling through its website. Anyone can enter details like the pet’s name, picture and last known location, and the website will help connect them to potential matches in its international database.

But companies like Fi, Jiobit and Tractive sell devices like the one Clifford used. They’re about the size of a computer flash drive and clip onto a cat’s collar or harness, providing real-time updates on the feline’s location. They sync to your phone and work over cellular signals, with batteries that last for days or even weeks, depending on the features you use. You might, for example, set the device to track your pet’s every move, minute by minute, which depletes the battery faster, while a basic feature might only show where the cat was located when you last opened the app.

A tracking device typically costs about $50 and requires a subscription to an online service that can range from $100 to $190 per year.

Other features that may come with your tracker

In addition to providing live location data, some pet trackers offer these features:

Physical activity and sleep monitoring. This collected data can be reviewed by a veterinarian when you bring your pet in for a checkup; it shows more of your cat’s behavior than typical tracking and can help answer the vet’s questions. You can also view the health data yourself.
Alerts that are triggered when your cat wanders outside a specific geographic area. You can set up an area that you deem safe for your cat, and the device will send you an alert if it goes outside those boundaries.
Reports on daily location. Learn where your cat goes when not at home. “Tons of cat owners discover: Surprise! My cat has another family they visit every day and spend considerable time with,” says Andrew Bleiman, executive vice president, North America, at Tractive.

Why not just get your cat microchipped or use AirTags?

Using a tracker is not the same as having your cat chipped. Chips don’t provide location information; they contain the owner’s contact details — which means that to get a lost cat back, you’re still dependent on somebody finding and taking it to a veterinarian or animal shelter, which can scan the chip to get in contact with you. And the chips sometimes don’t work properly.

“When we talked to animal control and to vets, they told us that 50 percent of the time when there’s a microchip, they still cannot get in touch with the owner,” says Jonathan Bensamoun, founder of Fi. This could be due to a registration error in the chip — meaning it won’t link to your information — or the use of an outdated phone number or address, or the chip moving under your cat’s skin, unbeknownst to you. As for AirTags, they tend to lack precision unless they’re within close range, and Apple does not recommend them for use on pets. Apple announced they are “designed exclusively for tracking objects, and not people or pets” in a January press release.