Vaccination Planner - Questions, Not Dates or Products

This page used to generate a dated vaccination timeline from a birth date. It does not any more, and the first thing you deserve is a straight explanation of why, rather than discovering the tool has quietly gone.

A vaccination plan is a clinical decision about one animal made by somebody who has examined it and who knows what is circulating locally. A web form knows a date. Turning a date into calendar entries produces something that looks authoritative, gets printed, gets stuck on a fridge, and then competes in an owner’s head with what their vet says. When those two disagree, the fridge sometimes wins. That is the failure mode, and it is not hypothetical.

So this page no longer prints dates or names products. What it does instead is explain how the decision is actually made, using the published guideline frameworks, so that you can have a better conversation at the appointment. There is a printable list of questions at the end.

What the published guidelines actually are

Two documents sit behind most of what any vet in the English-speaking world will tell you, and neither of them is written for owners.

The World Small Animal Veterinary Association publishes global vaccination guidelines. Read on 4 August 2026, its page describes them as setting out “the latest scientific thinking on the vaccination of dogs and cats globally” and offering “practical advice to veterinarians on optimum vaccination practice”. The audience is stated plainly: veterinarians. The same page notes regional recommendations for Latin America and Asia and translations into six languages, which tells you something important before you read a word of the content. If the guidance needed regional versions, then a single global answer does not exist.

The American Animal Hospital Association publishes canine guidelines, most recently dated 2022 on the page we read on 4 August 2026. Its framing is explicitly about the individual: the guidelines “empower veterinarians to make the best possible personalized recommendations for their patients by determining which vaccines are essential for each individual dog”.

Both documents exist. Both are freely findable. Neither is a schedule you can apply from a birth date, and both say so in their own words.

Core and non-core, without the product names

The vocabulary you will hear in the consulting room is core and non-core, and it is worth understanding because it is the axis the whole decision turns on.

AAHA describes core as the set required for all dogs, and then adds the part people miss: “other vaccines are just as essential for some dogs based on their lifestyle and risk”. Its instruction to the clinician is a question rather than a list: “For every patient, ask: What should be added to the core vaccines for this dog?” And it defines the practical meaning of core for an actual animal as “the vaccines required for ALL dogs PLUS vaccines required based on the dog’s lifestyle and risk factors”.

Read that carefully and the generator idea collapses. Non-core is not optional extras. For a given animal it is part of the answer, and which part depends on where you live, where you walk, whether the animal swims, whether it boards, whether it meets livestock, whether it travels, whether it hunts, and what is currently circulating in your area. A birth date carries none of that.

We are not going to name the vaccines that fall in either category, in any country. That is a deliberate refusal. The names differ by market, the categories differ by region, and an owner arriving at a practice with a list from a website is starting the conversation in the wrong place.

The thing AAHA says that owners rarely hear

There is one line in the AAHA material that changes how people feel about having got behind, and it deserves quoting directly. On animals whose history is incomplete or lapsed, it says: “when vaccines are overdue or unknown, consider that the benefits of vaccinating outweigh the risks in most cases”, and summarises it as “When in doubt, vaccinate.”

That is written for clinicians, not for you, and it is not permission to do anything yourself. But it does answer the anxiety that keeps people away from the practice, which is the fear of being told off for a rescue dog with no paperwork or a kitten whose first weeks are unknown. The published position is that uncertainty is a reason to go, not a reason to stay away.

  what a schedule generator sees:
  +---------------------------+
  |   date of birth           |
  +---------------------------+

  what the decision actually needs:
  +---------------------------+
  |   date of birth           |
  |   country and region      |
  |   what is circulating here|
  |   what law requires here  |
  |   records from breeder    |
  |     or shelter, if any    |
  |   lifestyle: indoor, out, |
  |     boarding, swimming,   |
  |     livestock, travel     |
  |   current health          |
  |   previous reactions      |
  |   what this practice uses |
  +-------------+-------------+
                |
                v
      a person who has examined
      the animal decides.
      not a form. not this page.

Where the law gets involved

For most of what happens at a routine appointment, vaccination is a clinical judgement. For international travel it stops being one and becomes paperwork with legal deadlines, and that is a genuinely different situation.

The GOV.UK guidance on taking a pet dog, cat or ferret abroad, read on 4 August 2026, requires an animal health certificate from a vet for travel to an EU country, and states that “You must get your pet microchipped before, or at the same time as, their rabies vaccination.” It sets validity periods on the certificate: “10 days for entry into the EU”, “6 months for onward travel within the EU after you enter the EU”, and “6 months for re-entry to Great Britain”. The EU’s own guidance for travellers, read the same day, requires a pet to be microchipped in line with the traceability rules “or has a clearly readable tattoo if applied before 3 July 2011”, limits ordinary travel to “up to five pets”, and sets conditions for exceeding that involving “a competition, exhibition or sporting event”.

Both sources also state a minimum age and a minimum waiting period between vaccination and travel. We are not printing those figures. Not because they are secret, but because they are exactly the kind of number that changes, that differs by destination, and that people copy from a blog into a calendar and then miss a ferry over. Get them from the official page for your route and from the vet who is signing the certificate. Our travel rules by country and travelling with your pet pages set out the shape of the process without pretending to be the legal source.

Records, and why they are worth more than a plan

The single most useful thing an owner can do about vaccination is not to plan it. It is to keep the record of what was actually done.

A complete record answers the question every future vet, boarding kennel, groomer, insurer and border official will ask, and it answers it without anybody having to guess. An incomplete record turns every one of those interactions into a negotiation. If you have taken on an animal with no paperwork, that is common and it is not a disaster, but it is worth saying so at the first appointment rather than hoping it does not come up.

What is worth having, in one place: what was given, on what date, by which practice, plus the batch or product label if the vet gives you one, and anything the animal reacted to afterwards. The pet emergency folder is where we suggest keeping it, and the puppy and kitten tracker has a place to write it down.

What we could not source

We could not obtain the definitions of core and non-core from the WSAVA landing page itself. The page describes what the guidelines are and offers downloadable tables, but the substantive framework sits inside the full guidelines document rather than on the page we read. We have therefore taken the core and non-core framing from AAHA, which states it on the page, and attributed it there rather than to WSAVA.

We could not source anything on serological testing from either page we read. Titre testing comes up constantly in owner conversations and we are not going to describe it from memory.

We could not source anything about adverse reactions, their frequency, or what to do about them. That is a clinical subject and it is not on this page.

We deliberately did not source, and will not publish, any schedule, any interval, any age, or any vaccine name for any country. That is the standing rule on this site and this page is where it bites hardest.

Printable: what to take to the appointment

This replaces the generator. It produces no dates, because we cannot know them. It produces better questions, which is the part a web page can honestly help with.

Related pages

Our other vaccination page, the vaccination planner, takes the same approach and covers the household side. For the first weeks with a new animal, see the first thirty days with a puppy, the first thirty days with a kitten and the new puppy checklist. For travel, travel rules by country, travelling with your pet and airline pet policies. For the money, the vet costs guide and the pet insurance guide, since most insurers make cover conditional on keeping to whatever your vet recommends. And the pet care plan is where the household version of all this gets written down.