Pet Shipping from Canada to China

A complete file buys you an ordinary arrival. You declare your pet, fill in the registration form GACC’s rules ask for on site, hand over the documents, collect the animal and leave. Under those rules a missing microchip or titre report buys 30 days in a facility chosen by customs, and the time your pet spends held before that period formally begins is counted inside it rather than added on top. A missing health or vaccination certificate is worse: GACC has the pet returned or disposed of.

What customs wants to see is the animal health certificate from the country you flew out of, the rabies vaccination certificate and a valid antibody test report. For the antibody test report, Shanghai Customs asks for the original and a photocopy, and typically keeps the copy and hands the original back. Whatever else you have prepared, those three decide the afternoon.

Dogs are then registered locally once you have arrived. Beijing requires it within 30 days and checks the registration certificate each year for a fee. Other cities write their own rules, so we tell you which set applies where you are going.

Before scheduling vet steps or flights, we confirm what applies to your pet against the General Administration of Customs rules and the CFIA export process, so nothing in your plan rests on an outdated summary.

Sequence is what this comes down to. The chip goes in first, so that every document written afterwards points at the same number. Then the rabies record: GACC wants the vaccination still valid on the day your pet arrives, and sets the titre blood draw on or after the day of the second rabies vaccination, so a pet that needs a new titre has two doses first. The sample goes to a laboratory on GACC’s accepted list, which on 15 August 2025 included CFIA’s Ottawa Laboratory Fallowfield. Courier time to that laboratory sits on top of its own turnaround, so we build both into the schedule.

The certificate is the part that catches Canadian owners out. China is not one of the countries the CFIA has negotiated a specific certificate for, so the paperwork runs on the Canadian International Health Certificate, completed by a veterinarian licensed in Canada and endorsed by an official CFIA veterinarian. CFIA says that certificate can be used where a country prescribes no format of its own and its requirements can be met, and GACC lists what it must show for China, including the vaccine’s type, product name and maker and the titre’s blood draw date, laboratory and result. That endorsement is by appointment only, walk-ins are refused, the fee is calculated by a CFIA officer and paid online at least three days ahead, and it is non-refundable. It also cannot happen once your pet has left the country.

China does not make you wait months. It makes you sequence correctly. For a pet whose second rabies vaccination is done and still valid, our own estimate is 4 to 8 weeks. That covers the blood draw, the wait on the laboratory, and then the certificate and the CFIA appointment, which has to be booked and paid for in advance. If your pet has only ever had one rabies vaccination, the second one has to happen before the blood draw, so start earlier.

One rule reshapes more Canadian itineraries than any other. China counts one dog or one cat per person, so a family flying two animals out of Toronto needs two adults named on the booking. Settling that while seats are still open is a different job from settling it the week you fly.

Planning the budget? See our breakdown of what pet shipping from Canada costs, fee by fee. Moving to Hong Kong instead? It is treated as a separate place with its own rules, so start with our Hong Kong page.

To put a figure on it, try our pet shipping cost calculator. The rabies titre is the long pole on this route, and our guide to the rabies titre test explains how a Canadian sample reaches a laboratory. Japan and South Korea are two other titre routes we cover.