What should you put in a puppy go home packet?
A puppy go home packet should contain the puppy’s profile and photo, its pedigree, its weight record, its vaccination and worming record, its microchip number and how to transfer it, the sire and dam’s health test results, a socialization record, your feeding plan, and your own contact details. Everything on that list is a record of something you did or something you know — which is why a breeder can assemble the whole packet without writing a contract or giving veterinary advice.
The nine things a go home packet should contain
The list below is the consensus of what breed clubs, kennel clubs and experienced breeders describe as the expected paperwork, arranged in the order a new family will read it. British, Irish and Australian breeders assemble the same set of documents and call it a puppy pack. If it is easier to look at one than to read a list, a finished sample packet is every item below, printed. A packet is not judged by its length — it is judged by whether the family can find the microchip number at the vet’s desk eight weeks later.
Note what is not on the list: the sale contract and the health guarantee. Those are real documents and most breeders use them, but they are legal agreements between you and the buyer rather than records of the puppy, and they are normally signed and exchanged separately rather than bundled into the keepsake folder. This tool does not produce them.
- A cover with the puppy on it. Your kennel name and logo, the puppy’s photo and its name. It is the cheapest thing on this list and it is the reason the folder gets kept rather than filed.
- The puppy’s profile. Name, sex, colour and markings, date of birth, and the sire and dam. This is the page the family photographs and sends to their relatives.
- The pedigree. Three or four generations, typed as you have them recorded. Label it as recorded by the breeder — a pedigree written out by hand is not a registration certificate and should never be presented as one.
- Health testing on the sire and dam. Hips, elbows, eyes, heart, DNA panel — the test, the result as it was issued, the date and who issued it. For show and hobby breeders this is often the page they most want to hand over, because it is the work nobody else can see.
- The weight record. What the puppy weighed from birth to go-home day. A chart is more useful than a column of figures, because the family’s vet can see the shape of the growth at a glance.
- The health record. Every vaccination and worming: the date, the product, the lot or serial number, and who administered it. Record what was done. Do not print a schedule of what is due next — that is the vet’s call and it is the single easiest way for a breeder to end up giving advice they did not mean to give.
- The microchip page. The chip number, the manufacturer or database, and your own note on how the registration is transferred into the new owner’s name. A wallet-sized card with the number on it is worth more than another A4 sheet.
- The socialization record. What the puppy has met and done, with dates: surfaces, sounds, people, car rides, crate nights, first bath, nail trims. Almost nobody prints this, and it is the page that most clearly separates a considered litter from an accidental one.
- Feeding, and a letter from you. What the puppy is eating right now, how much, how many times a day, and how to change it without upsetting its stomach — in your words, because you are the one who knows. Then whatever else you want them to read, and your phone number.
The packet and the bag are two different things
Searching for a puppy go home packet mostly turns up tote bags: a blanket carrying the littermates’ scent, a few days of the food the puppy is already on, a toy, poop bags, a collar. That bag is a lovely thing and it is not what this page is about.
The distinction is worth keeping straight because the two are assembled at different times. The bag is shopping. The packet is everything you have been recording since the whelping box, and it can only be assembled from records you kept — which is why breeders who leave it to go-home week end up reconstructing the vaccination and worming record from memory.
Why one packet per puppy is more work than it sounds
Most of a go home packet is identical across the litter. The pedigree chart, the parents’ health tests, the feeding plan, the vet, the worming dates and your letter are the same in all eight copies. What differs is small: the photo, the name, the collar colour, the chip number and the weights.
Done in a word processor, that asymmetry works against you. You fill in a template once per puppy, so the shared nine-tenths gets retyped eight times, and a correction to the feeding plan on go-home morning means opening eight files. A fillable PDF template has the same shape: it is faster per form and there is still one form per puppy.
PuppyGoHomePacket inverts it. The litter-wide material is entered once, the per-puppy material is entered per puppy, and the packets are generated — so a late correction is one edit and one re-export, and the eight packets cannot drift out of agreement with each other.
Related
Make this packet without retyping it eight times
PuppyGoHomePacket is a puppy go home packet maker for breeders: you enter the litter once — sire, dam, pedigree, weights, vaccinations, feeding plan — and it generates a finished packet for every puppy, a ZIP of the litter, and your own litter record. The editor is free and there is no account: build the whole thing and preview every page with your own dogs in it before deciding anything.
Last updated 2026-09-13.