The Best Dog Car Seats

Buy the Sleepypod Mobile Pet Bed if your dog is 15 lb or under and you want the safest thing money can buy. It carries a 5 Star Center for Pet Safety certificate, retested in August 2024, and it is the product CPS itself pointed at when its study of actual booster seats found nothing worth recommending.

Buy the Sleepypod Atom if your dog is genuinely under 12 lb. Same certifying body, same protocol, same test month, considerably less money, and it doubles as the in-cabin carrier for flights.

Buy the PawsInCar 3-in-1 if your dog is between 16 and 25 lb, because it is the only certified product in this entire category whose certificate reaches that far — with one caveat about its paperwork that we set out in full below.

And if your dog is over about 25 lb, buy none of them. Nothing in this category has been certified above that weight by anybody, and the honest answer is a certified harness or a certified crate. We would rather send you to another page than sell you a cushion.

The study this whole category has to answer for

In 2015 the Center for Pet Safety, funded by Subaru of America, ran a pilot study on pet travel seats — the raised, tethered boxes sold as dog car seats and booster seats. It picked four with high sales volumes or crash-test claims: the PupSaver, the Snoozer Lookout I (Medium), the PetSmart Top Paw Booster Seat and the Kurgo Skybox Booster Seat. It used weighted 25 lb and 30 lb test dogs and followed each manufacturer’s own instructions for securing the dog to the seat and the seat to the bench.

Here is what CPS recorded, product by product:

• PupSaver — the seat rotated on impact and rolled onto its side, and one anchor strap buckle failed.
• Snoozer Lookout I — the anchor strap failed completely on impact. The 25 lb test dog was left fully unrestrained and rebounded off the bench.
• PetSmart Top Paw — the wire connection hardware deformed severely. The seat stayed attached to the bench; the 30 lb test dog did not.
• Kurgo Skybox — the seat’s connections failed and the booster itself became an unrestrained projectile, with significant deformation of the metal frame.

None of the four earned the CPS Top Performer designation. CPS did not recommend any of them, and instead pointed buyers at the carriers that had earned Top Performer status in its parallel carrier study — at the time, the Sleepypod Mobile Pet Bed with PPRS Handilock and the PetEgo Jet Set Forma Frame Carrier with ISOFIX-Latch connection.

The reason sits in the definition CPS uses. A pet travel seat, in its words, is “a portable seat for a companion animal that is typically used in a car to hold or elevate the pet, however it does not offer full containment.” Elevation and containment are different jobs. A raised cushion with a short tether can hold a dog in place at 30 mph of ordinary driving. It cannot hold a dog in a 30 mph stop.

That is not a reason to write the category off — it is a reason to shop it differently. Two of the products CPS tested are still sold, in the same form, today. And in the eleven years since, a small number of enclosed carriers have been certified as car seats at published weights. That list, not the marketing, is what this page ranks on.

What we scored

1. Is there a certificate, and what weight is printed on it? This is the whole first filter. A CPS certificate is issued for a specific product at a specific test weight, and the weight is the part buyers skip. A seat certified at 15 lb tells you nothing whatever about a 22 lb dog. We give the weight on every card because it is the number that actually limits you.
2. Containment or elevation? An enclosed carrier restrains the dog with structure. A booster restrains it with a strap and a lip of foam. Both are legitimate products; only one of them can be certified, and the page says which is which every time.
3. What does the tether attach to? A tether to a collar is a neck-injury mechanism in a hard stop. Every product here that ships a tether says to run it to a harness — Snoozer says it in as many words — and any listing that does not say so is one to walk away from.
4. What does the maker say happens after a crash? This turned out to be the most revealing question we asked. Kurgo tells you plainly to replace the booster after an accident, the way you would a child seat or a bike helmet. Sleepypod runs a replacement program for any carrier or harness damaged in an accident, regardless of brand. Most of the category says nothing at all.
5. Does it fit the seat you actually have? Bench, bucket and captain’s chairs are three different shapes and the category mostly pretends they are one. We give published inside and outside dimensions wherever a maker will state them, because a seat that will not sit flat is a seat that slides.

The weight ceiling is the whole shopping decision

Here is every enclosed pet carrier currently certified by the Center for Pet Safety, with the weight on the certificate. This is not a list of what is good; it is the complete list of what has been independently tested at all.

Three things fall out of that table. The first is that 25 lb is the ceiling of the entire category. Not the ceiling of what is good — the ceiling of what anybody has tested. The second is that the certified products are all enclosed carriers, not boosters, which is the same finding the 2015 seat study arrived at from the other direction. The third is that several of these are marketed as cat carriers, and the certificate does not care: a crash test is a mass and a geometry, and an 18 lb dog in an 18 lb-certified carrier is the tested configuration.

Not everything on that list is easy to buy through one retailer — the Diggs Passenger and the Away carrier are sold largely direct — so the certified products we rank below are the ones you can actually get. We would rather name the full list and rank the buyable part of it than quietly pretend the list is shorter than it is.

The dog over 25 lb: what this page cannot do for you

If your dog is 30, 50 or 80 lb, no dog car seat exists that has been independently crash-tested at that weight, and a booster rated to “30 lb” is quoting what the cushion holds when the car is going in a straight line. The two products that have been certified for larger dogs are a different shape entirely: a harness that uses the car’s own seat belt, and a crate strapped into the cargo area. We cover both — the three certified harnesses and the certified crate list — and which of the two suits your car is its own decision.