The Surgery Is the Cheapest Part: A TNR Night Costed Line by Line

An eight-cat trapping night costs $1,579.61, or $197.45 per cat. Of that, $400 — a quarter — is the money that leaves the bank account for surgery. The rest is twenty-nine hours of somebody's life, priced at what an hour of volunteer labour is worth, plus fuel and consumables.

Here is the whole calculation, with the unit prices sourced and the assumptions stated so you can argue with them.

The Cash Column

Four lines. One colony, eight cats booked into a high-volume feral clinic, one night of trapping, one drop-off, one pickup, one return.

The 88 miles is four round trips averaging 22 miles: one scouting-and-feeder visit, the trapping night itself, the clinic drop-off and the pickup-and-return. I have used the IRS business rate of 76 cents rather than a fuel-only figure, because tyres, depreciation and a suspension that gets used as a cat carrier are real costs the driver pays.

Equipment is the line everyone overestimates. A Tomahawk 606 cat trap retails at $82.25.³ Ten of them, plus covers and dividers, is roughly $1,000. Spread over eight years at sixty cats a year — 480 cats — that is $2.08 per cat. Traps are capital, they last, and if you cannot afford them a clinic will often lend you one against a refundable deposit.⁴ Equipment is not what is stopping you.

Twenty-Nine Hours, Priced at Replacement Value

Now the part that does not appear in any budget I have seen.

• Colony recon and feeder liaison — 3 h
• Booking, confirming, chasing the feeder about withholding food — 1.5 h
• Trap prep, bait, staging — 2 h
• The night: setting, sitting, covering, hauling — 5 h × 2 people = 10 h
• Overnight holding checks — 1.5 h
• Drop-off drive and clinic queue — 2 h
• Pickup — 1.5 h
• Recovery monitoring across 24–48 hours — 4 h
• Return, release, site check — 2 h
• Paperwork, follow-up, the feeder's phone calls — 1.5 h

29 hours. Independent Sector and the Do Good Institute put the 2026 value of a volunteer hour at $36.14, derived from average hourly earnings for production and non-supervisory workers.⁵ At that rate the night's labour is worth $1,048.06, or $131.01 per cat.

Add the cash and you get $197.45 per cat, of which labour is 66% and the surgery donation is 25%.

That ratio is the argument. Every fundraising appeal, every grant application, every "$50 fixes a cat" graphic is describing the quarter and ignoring the two-thirds.

The Clinic Is Eating a Third Cost, and It Is Bigger Than Yours

The $50 is not a price. It is a suggested donation at a clinic that specialises in volume and is subsidised by its own donors. The Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon, which did 8,681 feral and stray cats in its 2024–25 fiscal year, says so directly: the $50 "covers just the services the cat receives while in our care, and it does not cover any other staffing, overhead, or supplies." The same page puts the marketplace value of the surgery alone at $318 per spay and $251 per neuter, before vaccines.¹

Blend those at a 50/50 sex ratio and the surgery is worth about $284.50. Your group pays $50. Somebody else's donors are absorbing roughly $234.50 per cat.

Stack the three layers and the full economic cost of one TNR'd cat is about $432: $66 of your cash, $131 of your volunteers' time, $235 of the clinic's subsidy. The $50 you cite in your newsletter is about 12% of that.

You Quote Marginal Cost and Budget as If It Were Average

This is the specific accounting error, and it is worth naming precisely.

The ninth cat on a night that is already happening costs $50 for the surgery, about $6 in consumables, and perhaps forty-five minutes of extra handling — call it $83. That is the marginal cost, and it is genuinely low. It is why "just add one more" is usually right, and why groups feel that cats are cheap.

The average cost is $197.45, and it is the number that governs whether you can run the night at all.

Groups fundraise against the marginal number and staff against the average. The result is a calendar full of booked surgery slots and nobody free to fill them, which is the single most common way a small TNR group stalls: not a shortage of money, not a shortage of clinic capacity, a shortage of the twenty-nine hours.

Pay a Trapper Before You Buy More Vouchers

Here is the claim experienced people will want to fight about.

Seventeen of the twenty-nine hours are field and handling work: the night, the holding checks, the drop-off, the pickup, the return. That is the portion you could hire. At a realistic local wage of $22 an hour — not the recognition rate, an actual wage — those seventeen hours cost $374 per night, or $46.75 per cat.

The same $374 buys 7.5 more surgery vouchers at $50 each.

Almost every group I am aware of spends the marginal dollar on the vouchers. I think that is wrong for any group that is currently declining or returning clinic slots for lack of a trapper. Seven and a half extra surgeries are worth nothing if the appointments go unfilled, and unfilled appointments cost you the clinic relationship as well as the cats. A paid trapper converts existing donated surgery capacity into fixed cats at a conversion rate close to one; another voucher converts at whatever your current fill rate happens to be.

This is a judgement, not a finding. I know of no study comparing the two spends. But the arithmetic is one-directional: if your binding constraint is hours rather than dollars, buying more of the thing you are not short of is a strange allocation.

The corollary is less comfortable. It means your recurring-giving page should carry a line item called something like "trapping hours," and it means the group has to decide who gets paid and who does not — which is a governance problem, and a real cost of taking this seriously.

Fourteen Cents a Mile Is a Congressional Decision

One line in the table is a subsidy hiding as an expense.

Your volunteer drove 88 miles at a real operating cost the IRS assesses at 76 cents. The charitable mileage deduction they may claim is 14 cents a mile — fixed in statute at Internal Revenue Code § 170(i), set by the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, and unchanged since.²⁶ The business rate is restudied annually and was raised mid-year in July 2026 on fuel prices; the charitable rate cannot move without an act of Congress.²⁶

So on that one night the driver absorbed about 62 cents a mile, roughly $54, that is neither reimbursed nor deductible. Multiply by a season. If your group reimburses mileage at all, reimburse at the business rate, and understand that when you do not, you have quietly moved a line from your budget onto a volunteer's household finances.

Where This Costing Is Weakest

Four honest objections.

The volunteer rate is not a wage. Independent Sector's $36.14 is a national average of private non-farm earnings, published to help charities recognise contributions. It is not a market price for trapping and nobody would pay it. Use it as a replacement-value benchmark, not a payroll estimate; at $22 an hour the labour line falls to $638 for the night and the per-cat total to about $146. The ratio still puts labour ahead of surgery.

Hours are not fungible with cash. A retired volunteer's Saturday cannot be converted into money and money cannot always buy that Saturday back. Costing an hour does not mean you could have spent it otherwise.

Paying some volunteers can damage the rest. Introducing pay into a group that has run on goodwill for a decade changes what people feel they owe each other, sometimes badly. That is a real risk and it argues for paying a defined role — the trapper, on scheduled nights — rather than paying generally.

The volunteer model is cheap, and the alternative is worse. Whiskers Rescue costed a fully municipal "turnkey" TNR programme for a New Jersey city: staffed trapping, a rented holding space, a dedicated vehicle, 1,200 surgeries. Their total was $354,839 a year, about $296 per cat in cash alone, at 2023 prices and 2023 wages.⁷ That is more than my $197 all-in. Volunteers are not merely cheaper on paper — they trap at the hour the cats are hungry rather than at the hour a shift starts, and that is a genuine efficiency, not just unpaid time.

What to Change in the Next Budget

Three things.

Publish a loaded per-cat figure alongside the voucher price. Not instead of it — donors do respond to $50 — but next to it, labelled. A funder who reads "$50 buys the surgery; the fully costed figure is about $197 per cat and about $432 including the clinic's own subsidy" learns that you understand your own operation. That is a fundable signal.

Budget hours as a resource with a ceiling, the way you already budget surgery slots. If your coordinator's realistic capacity is six nights a season, that is your programme size, and no amount of voucher fundraising changes it.

And when you next have a spare few hundred dollars and a choice, ask which of the two constraints is actually binding this month. If the clinic is calling about unused slots, the answer is not more slots.