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Pet Slots

Pet slots refer to how many Neopets you may have on an account. There are a certain number granted to every account, with additional slots issued to Neopians with an active Premium subscription, and more slots that can be purchased with Neocash at the NC Mall. Available slots can be filled by Creating a Neopet, or Adopting or Trading Neopets via the Pound. You can free up a slot by Abandoning a Neopet in the Pound.

Here is the current breakdown of pet slots available for all Neopians, which is also listed on an Official FAQ:

Your Pet Slot Status

You can always do the math based on the Neopet count on your given account against the information above, but other areas on the site will also indicate that you may have available pet slots.

If you see the following image at the below locations, then you have at least one available pet slot:

Add a Neopet!

Neopets.com Home Page

If you have any free (as in unpaid) slots available, you can see this by checking on the home page. To the right of your pet(s) (you may need to click the arrows to scroll farther right), if you see the above image, you have a pet slot available.

Clicking on the button beneath the image will bring up a popup directing you either the Create-A-Pet page, or directly to the adoption section of the Pound. Click the Return button or the X to close the popup and remain on the home page.

Premium Portal

On the Premium Portal, which is only visible to users with an active Premium membership, the add-a-pet icon will appear in the Your Pets section if you have an available pet slot either for free or from your Premium allotment. You may need to arrow to the right to see it depending on your current number of Neopets on that account.

Clicking on the image itself will bring up a popup directing you either the Create-A-Pet page, or directly to the adoption section of the Pound. Click the Return button or the X to close the popup and remain on the home page.

To learn what happens to your pet in your Premium slots if your membership expires, read our Cancelling Premium guide.

The Pound

The Pound doesn't proactively show anything indicating if you have available pet slots or not, but you can determine your pet slot status by interacting with different functions there.

If you try to adopt a pet and do not have a free or Premium slot available, you'll get a popup to purchase an NC pet slot so long as you have not already purchased the maximum limit of NC Mall pet slots.

If you have already purchased some pet slots, you might not see all of the paid options here.

If you try to transfer a pet to someone who does not have an open slot, the transfer will result in an error and no transfer will be initiated. The other person will receive no notification that any transfer was attempted—likewise if someone tries to transfer you a pet and you do not have an open pet slot, you will receive no notification since the transfer failed to be initiated.

Error: The new owner already has plenty of other Neopets to look after.

Purchasing Pet Slots

The limit of paid pet slots available for purchase at the NC Mall is an independent count from the standard and any Premium pet slots. That means you can purchase these pet slots separately even if you are not yet at the limit of pet slots allowed for free and/or from a Premium membership. These purchased slots are permanent with no expiration.

The NC pet slots are in too many places at the Mall, so if you are not yet at the purchasable limit, any you are eligible to still buy will appear on the Mall homepage under each the New Items, Popular Items, and TNT Favourites sections. If you navigate to the New or Popular tabs, or any of the other NC Mall Shops, they will appear as the first item(s) available to purchase—after any uncollected freebies—but before the product you actually want to see, like in the completely unrelated Food shop. You can also use the pet slot search term to find them.

When viewed on the old Mall layout, each pet slot item available for purchase will show you how many you have already purchased out of the current paid pet slot limit.

If you attempt to purchase more slots than allowed based the current limit and your current paid pet slot count, you will not be able to execute the purchase and will be reminded by Nyla of the limit and how many you may purchase.

Nice try, Dave.

When purchased, pet slots do not appear as inventory items, but rather are immediately converted into extra slot(s) on your account. As such, they must be purchased on the account where you want additional slot(s), and they cannot be traded or gifted. TNT has stated this item status was intentional and will remain as such, but we're still waiting on the empty promise of NC item puchase-gifting which was not a capability included in the summer 2025 Mall revamp.

Hey TNT! You mentioned pet-slots will auto-activate, but is there any possibility this could be changed? I am no longer able to buy NC (and I'm sure more people are in the same spot), and I would absolutely love to have more pet slots - I thought we'd be able to trade other NC items for them, which auto-activation doesn't really allow. Could you pretty please with a chocolate cake on top change this before the launch? :c Please remove my username if this goes live! ~~Anonymous
The decision to make Pet Slots auto-activate didn’t come lightly. It’s not something we can feasibly change now and we stand by our decision that auto-activating them is a better user-experience and safer option. We wanted to keep it straightforward as well so that users don’t end up with more Pet Slots than they can actually activate on their account which could cause issues. We do plan to introduce an auto-gift option in the NC Mall which will allow users to send Pet Slots to each other (if they are able to accept them and don’t have their slots maxed out). While this feature won’t be launched in sync with Pet Slots, it is something we are planning to include just to make gifting NC items across the board easier on Neopets. ~~Gutterfoot

From Neopian Times, Issue #949, published November 26, 2021

History

Sales

There have been occasional sales on NC pet slots since their launch in late 2021. You can find the full details of any current or previous pet slot sales on our NC Mall guide, scrolling to Pet Slots.

Expansion

At this point, it's almost hard to remember the days when you could only have 4 pets on an account. Here is a breakdown of how the pet slot limit has expanded over the years:

This is always a good day!

While we know TNT has more plans for continued pet slot expansion, it appears it will remain at a metered pace, and will always have a cap in place.

Hi. I would LOVE to see more pet slots. New colors and color/species combinations have been released since the last pet slot increase, and I have no room for them. Pet slots could be available for purchase in the Hidden Tower or NC Mall, or they could be free. Ideally, I'd like to see 2 more per account, since there are so many new colors I'd like! I'd REALLY love unlimited pet slots. That would give users endless goals to work for, keeping them interested in the site, and a lot of those poor pets in the pound would get homes. However, if unlimited pet slots are a coding nightmare or not ideal from your viewpoint, then I understand. However, I'd love to see a few more.
We would love to introduce more pet slots too, but in a far more controlled way. The way the code is written, it would be difficult to allow unlimited pet slots, so that’s not something we’re looking at.

From Neopian Times, Issue #875, published August 16, 2019

This page was written by Quail and last updated on September 7, 2025.