How Many Toes Do Cats Have? The Answer, and the Exceptions

Eighteen. Five on each front paw, four on each back paw.

That is the whole answer, and it takes one line, which is why almost nobody searching for it stops there. What people actually want to know is why the front paws get an extra one, and what is going on with the cats that have considerably more.

The toe that never touches the ground

Count a front paw and you will find four toes on the ground and a fifth sitting higher up the leg, set back from the others. That is the dewclaw, the cat's vestigial first digit, the equivalent of your thumb.

It does not reach the floor. Which matters more than it sounds, because a claw that never contacts a surface never wears down against one. The other claws file themselves as a cat walks and scratches; the dewclaw does not. Left alone, it keeps growing, and it grows in a curve, back towards the pad.

So the dewclaw needs its own look, on its own schedule, every time you check your cat's feet. Cats do not have rear dewclaws as standard.

Polydactyly: what is actually happening

A polydactyl cat is one born with more than the baseline. It ranges from a single extra dewclaw to several extra full toes, and it can appear on one paw or all four.

The mechanism is genuinely elegant. Limb development is directed by a gene called Sonic Hedgehog, switched on in the right place at the right moment by a distant regulatory sequence called the ZRS. The ZRS does not even sit inside the Sonic Hedgehog gene: it sits inside an intron of a neighbouring gene, LMBR1, and reaches across to control it. A point mutation in the ZRS switches Sonic Hedgehog on in the wrong part of the developing limb bud, and the limb builds extra digits.

Three of those mutations are documented by name in cats:

The trait is inherited as a dominant, so one copy is enough. But in Maine Coons it shows incomplete penetrance and variable expression, which is the technical way of saying that carrying the mutation does not guarantee showing it, and showing it does not tell you how much. That is precisely why one polydactyl litter produces kittens with six toes, seven toes, and a perfectly standard five, all from the same parents.

The record changed in May 2026, and most pages have not noticed

The Guinness World Record for most toes on a cat now stands at 29, held by a cat called Erebus in Kaukauna, Wisconsin, whose owners are Kendra Vandenbloomer and Hunter Nett. The record was set on 13 May 2026.

It replaced a record of 28 that had stood since 2002. If you read almost any other page answering this question today, you will still be told the record is 28.

The Hemingway cats, and a name most sites get wrong

The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, Florida keeps nearly 60 cats today. About half of them physically show extra toes, though the museum states all of them carry the gene.

They descend from a white six-toed cat given to Hemingway by a ship's captain. The museum's own page names her Snow White. A good number of secondary sites call her Snowball instead. When the museum that has kept the colony for decades and a blog disagree about the founding cat's name, we go with the museum.

The ship's captain detail is not incidental, by the way. Polydactyl cats were prized aboard ships, and the concentration of the trait in port cities on both sides of the Atlantic is the fingerprint of cats travelling by sea.

Five registries, five different answers, and it splits by country

This is where the subject stops being a curiosity and starts having consequences, because whether a polydactyl cat can be registered or shown depends entirely on which body you ask.

Read down that column and the pattern is hard to miss. The one registry that embraces the trait is the one whose home country produced the Hemingway cats. Where a breed's history includes polydactyly, the local registry tends to have made room for it; where it does not, the trait reads as a fault.

Living with a cat that has extra toes

Every source agrees on one practical point, and it is the same one as the dewclaw, multiplied.

Extra toes usually mean extra claws that never touch the ground, so they never wear down. An unclipped claw on a non-weight-bearing toe curls round into the pad, and that hurts long before anyone notices. Check the extra toes every time, not just the ones you can see from above.

Beyond that, polydactyly is generally benign. Cats with extra toes walk, jump, hunt and land like any other cat.

One thing polydactyly is not, and the confusion matters

There is a separate condition called radial hypoplasia, also known as radial agenesis and sometimes as the twisty cat mutation. It is not extra toes. It is the radius, one of the two bones of the forearm, failing to develop properly, so the foreleg comes out short and twisted, in severe cases so badly that the paw appears to attach near the elbow.

The two get conflated, including by people who should know better, and they are genetically unrelated. A 2023 whole-genome study of an affected Siamese family placed the cause in the CMYA5 and JMY genes, on a chromosomal region with nothing to do with the ZRS. It is also inherited recessively, the opposite pattern to polydactyly.

Older breeder literature, written before DNA testing existed, reported an apparent link between certain polydactyl paw shapes and radial hypoplasia in offspring. The genetics do not support a shared gene, and even that older material states that Maine Coons do not carry it.

If anything about your cat's legs or feet looks wrong to you, that is a conversation for your vet, and out of hours, an emergency clinic. Nothing on this page is a reason to wait.

What to take away

• Eighteen toes is standard: five in front, four behind.
• The fifth front toe is the dewclaw. It never touches the ground, so its claw never wears down. Check it.
• Polydactyly comes from a point mutation in a distant switch called the ZRS, which turns Sonic Hedgehog on in the wrong place. Three variants are named in cats.
• It is dominant, but with incomplete penetrance, which is why one litter can hold six toes, seven toes and five.
• The record is 29, set on 13 May 2026, not the 28 you will read elsewhere.
• TICA welcomes polydactyl Maine Coons. The GCCF and CCA-AFC refuse them. Which registry you ask decides the answer.
• Radial hypoplasia is a different condition with different genes. Do not conflate them.

While you are counting your cat's parts: a cat's whiskers grow in five places, not one, the spines on its tongue are hollow scoops, and its lives number exactly one, a story older than Rome.