What Is the Smartest Breed of Cat? Why No Ranking Exists
Dogs have a famous intelligence order, a vote by 199 obedience judges. Cats have none: no study has ranked cat breeds on a cognition test. The largest breed survey, 5,726 cats, measured ten behaviour traits and not one of them was cognition.
What you need to know
- No study has ranked cat breeds by intelligence, so no breed can be called the smartest breed of cat. Dogs have Stanley Coren's 1994 order, a survey of 199 obedience judges. For cats, we found nothing like it.
- The largest breed comparison, a 2019 survey of 5,726 cats in 19 breeds and breed groups, measured ten behaviour traits such as activity, shyness and aggression. None was a cognition test, and its authors call breed descriptions like "intelligent" unscientific.
- What cat-cognition studies measured is single-cat skills. In four experiments, cats told their own names from other words (Saito and colleagues, Scientific Reports, 2019), and most of the cats tested were mongrels, not a breed sample.
- Species-level data point the same way as dogs: one cat's cortex held about 250 million neurons against about 500 million in dogs (Jardim-Messeder and colleagues, 2017), but the cat figure comes from one animal.
No cat breed can be called the smartest, because no study has ranked cat breeds on a cognition test. Dogs have Stanley Coren's 1994 order, built from the votes of 199 obedience judges. Cats have nothing like it. What exists is research on single cats: in 2019, Saito and colleagues showed that cats tell their own names from other words. Online lists of the smartest breed of cat are opinion.
The new finding is what the biggest breed study left out. In 2019 Finnish researchers surveyed the owners of 5,726 cats in 19 breeds and breed groups about ten behaviour traits. Not one of the ten was a test of thinking. Below: what the lists say, what the cognition studies measured, and what we can and cannot say about cats and dogs.
Which smartest breed of cat do online lists name?
Lists of the smartest cat breeds, or smartest breeds of cats, most often name the Abyssinian, Siamese, Bengal and Maine Coon. We saw them in a web search on 4 November 2026, along with the Burmese, Cornish Rex, Japanese Bobtail and Turkish Van. We found no cognition study behind any of those rankings.
Breed lists tend to repeat each other. The largest cat breed survey says breed descriptions, such as calling Russian Blues intelligent, are usually based on owner and breeder notions and lack scientific basis. That is the authors' own wording, in a paper we read in full.
Why do dogs have an intelligence ranking and cats do not?
Because someone asked judges to rank dogs, and nobody has done the same for cats. Coren contacted dog obedience judges registered with the American and Canadian kennel clubs, and 199 gave usable answers. They ranked breeds on working and obedience ability. Our article on the smartest dog breeds and what Coren's order measures explains that list and its limits.
We found no comparable survey of cat judges, and no test given to many cats of many breeds. Without that, any cat breed ranking has nothing to stand on. Even for dogs, a 2022 Science study found that breed explains just 9% of the behavioural variation between dogs, so a ranking for cats would be shaky even if it existed.
What do cat intelligence studies actually measure?
They measure narrow skills in small groups of cats. Four studies show the pattern.
- Names: Saito, Shinozuka, Ito and Hasegawa (Scientific Reports, 2019) played recordings of four different nouns until a cat stopped reacting, then played its own name. In Experiment 1, nine of the 11 cats that had stopped reacting responded more strongly to their own name. Café cats did not tell their own names from other cats' names
- Voice and face: Takagi and colleagues (Animal Cognition, 2019) played an owner's or a stranger's voice, then showed a face on a screen. Café cats looked longer when voice and face did not match. House cats showed no such tendency
- Friends' names: Takagi and colleagues (Scientific Reports, 2022) found that household cats looked longer at a screen when a friend cat's name did not match its face. Café cats did not
- Where the owner is: Takagi and colleagues (PLOS ONE, 2021) found that cats showed the most surprise when the owner's voice came from a new place, and not when a cat's call or a non-vocal sound did
Look at who was tested. In Saito's Experiment 1, 12 of the 16 cats were mongrels, with two Scottish Folds, an American Shorthair and a Himalayan. In Experiment 2, 24 of 34 were mongrels. The paper reports no breed comparison. These studies tell us what cats in general can do, not which breed does it best.
Do cat breeds differ in behaviour, if not in intelligence?
Yes, in traits owners can rate. Salonen and colleagues (Scientific Reports, 2019) surveyed owners of 5,726 cats and found behaviour differences in 19 breeds and breed groups across ten traits. They estimated heritability in three breeds, Ragdoll, Maine Coon and Turkish Van, at 0.4 to 0.53 for seven traits.
The ten traits were activity, contact with people, three kinds of aggression, two kinds of shyness, grooming, wool sucking and owner-rated behaviour problems. Cornish Rex, Korat and Bengal cats were the most active in the survey, and Russian Blues the shyest towards strangers. No trait was a cognition measure, so the study cannot name a smartest breed. It does show that breed can matter for behaviour, which is why a proper cognition test across breeds would be worth running.
Are cats smarter than dogs?
Nobody has shown it, and the brain data lean the other way. Jardim-Messeder and colleagues (Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, 2017) counted about 250 million neurons in the cerebral cortex of one cat. Two dogs averaged about 500 million, a golden retriever at 627 million and a smaller dog at 429 million.
Those are tiny samples, one cat and two dogs. The authors predict that dogs have more flexible cognition than cats, but they also note that little work compares the two directly. Our smartest animals study sets the cat beside 13 other species on brain size, body-adjusted brain size and cortex neurons, and our guides to cat IQ and dog IQ go into each species.
Is the lion the smartest cat species?
Nobody has tested it, so no smartest cat species can be named. In the same 2017 count, one lion had about 545 million neurons in its cerebral cortex, against 250 million in the one house cat. Neuron counts are not intelligence tests, and one animal per species cannot rank anything. Even in people, brain size alone is a weak guide, as our article on brain size and IQ shows.
The same holds inside the domestic cat. The studies above compare conditions, such as house cats and café cats, not individual animals, so there is no smartest domestic cat to point to either.
What would a fair test of cat breeds need?
It would need the same task for every cat, and enough cats in each breed to tell a breed effect from luck. The studies above used 16 to 34 cats at a time, far too few to split into breeds.
It would also need to control for upbringing. Three of the Takagi and Saito studies found that café cats and household cats behaved differently, so where a cat lives can matter as much as its breed. And the task must suit cats: they do not work for praise the way a dog in an obedience ring does. Until someone runs that study, treat every smartest cat breed ranking as a guess.
Cat research tells us what cats can do. It does not tell us which breed does it best.
Can a cat have an IQ?
No. An IQ is a position on a bell curve built from thousands of people, with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 on most modern tests. No such norm group exists for any cat. The IQ bell curve shows what the number means for people. For another animal where the same limit applies, see our article on the smartest bird in the world.
Where would your own score land?
Cats cannot take an IQ test, but you can. The IQ Metrics test reports a score on the standard scale with its percentile.
Find your IQ score now! →If you want a number for yourself, take the IQ test and read it against the bell curve. Cats have to be compared one skill at a time. People can be placed on a single scale.
Common questions
What is the smartest breed of cat?
No one can say. No study has ranked cat breeds on a cognition test, unlike dogs, which have Stanley Coren's 1994 order from 199 obedience judges. Lists that name the Abyssinian, Siamese, Bengal or Maine Coon rest on opinion, not on a measured comparison.
Is there a cat breed intelligence ranking?
No. The largest breed comparison we found, a 2019 survey of 5,726 cats in 19 breeds and breed groups, measured ten behaviour traits such as activity and shyness. None was a cognition test, and its authors say breed descriptions like intelligent usually lack scientific basis.
Can cats recognise their own names?
Yes, in the cats tested. In a 2019 study in Scientific Reports, cats that had stopped reacting to four different nouns reacted more strongly when they heard their own name. Café cats did not tell their own names from other cats' names. Most cats tested were mongrels.
Are cats smarter than dogs?
Nobody has shown it. A 2017 count found about 250 million cortical neurons in one cat and about 500 million in two dogs. The authors expect dogs to have more flexible cognition, but note little work compares the two directly.
Sources for this story
- Saito, Shinozuka, Ito and Hasegawa (2019), Domestic cats (Felis catus) discriminate their names from other words, Scientific Reports 9:5394 — Scientific Reports (Nature Portfolio)
- Takagi, Arahori, Chijiiwa, Saito, Kuroshima and Fujita (2019), Cats match voice and face: cross-modal representation of humans in cats, Animal Cognition 22:901-906 — Springer
- Takagi and colleagues (2022), Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives, Scientific Reports 12:6155 — Scientific Reports (Nature Portfolio)
- Takagi and colleagues (2021), Socio-spatial cognition in cats: mentally mapping owner's location from voice, PLOS ONE 16(11):e0257611 — PLOS
- Salonen, Vapalahti, Tiira, Maki-Tanila and Lohi (2019), Breed differences of heritable behaviour traits in cats, Scientific Reports 9:7949 — Scientific Reports (Nature Portfolio)
- Jardim-Messeder and colleagues (2017), Dogs have the most neurons, though not the largest brain, Frontiers in Neuroanatomy 11:118 — Frontiers
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