Cat Vomit Color Chart

How to use this chart

1. Photograph it before you clean up. Colour and texture are almost impossible to describe accurately an hour later, and a photo is the single most useful thing you can bring to an appointment. Put something next to it for scale.
2. Pick the closest match. Fourteen appearances, from an ordinary hairball to the four that mean go now. If two look close, pick the more serious one. The tool never talks you down from that choice.
3. Say how often this happens. This is the question every other chart skips and the first one your vet will ask. Once this year and four times this week are not the same event, even if the vomit is identical.
4. Say how long it has been going on. A cat that started this morning and a cat that has been doing this for three weeks need different things, and the second one needs bloodwork rather than a recheck.
5. Tick anything else that is true right now. Breathing, straining, appetite, energy, thirst. This is the step that separates a cat who needs watching from a cat who needs a car journey.
6. Read the verdict and act on the window. Routine, recheck today, today, or now. Then download the PDF and take it in, so your vet gets what you actually saw rather than a description of it.

Why this cat vomit color chart is different

Search this phrase and you get the same page eight times: a table of six colours, a sentence each, and a closing line telling you to see a vet if you are worried. Half of what ranks is a Pinterest pin of somebody else's chart, and one of those pins is a chart for humans. Here is what this one does instead.

• It asks how often and how long. No other chart does, and those two questions are what a vet asks first. Yellow bile once is nothing; yellow bile four mornings a week for a month is a cat that needs investigating. A static table has to answer both the same way, which is why every one of them hedges.
• It knows who your cat is. The same vomit in a ten-week kitten, an eleven-year-old, or a cat with known kidney disease is worth acting on sooner, because none of them has the fluid reserve a healthy adult does. Tick the box and the verdict moves up a step.
• It covers fourteen appearances, not six. Vomit that smells faecal, vomit with string in it, and visible worms all appear on almost none of the pages currently ranking, and all three are on this one. So is the accompanying sign that kills cats fastest: straining in the litter box with no urine. A blocked cat presents as a vomiting cat, and it is a few hours from fatal.
• It cannot talk you down. Every input can only make the verdict more urgent. There is no combination of answers that turns blood in the vomit into "probably fine", by construction rather than by editorial care.
• It does not try to sell you anything on an emergency. If the result is go now, there are no product recommendations on the page at all, only what to do on the way. That is not a feature most affiliate sites would build, and it is the one we would most want from a page we were reading at two in the morning.
• It gives you something to hand over. The PDF carries the appearance, the frequency, the duration and everything you ticked, timestamped. That is triage information. "She threw up something yellow" is not.
• It shows its work and it is free to embed. Every threshold below is cited, an automated test re-checks the whole chart against those sources on every build, and any clinic, rescue or foster network can put the tool on their own site at no cost.

What the colour is actually telling you

Vomit colour is not a diagnosis. It is a description of what was in the stomach and how long it had been there, and that narrows things down usefully, but only so far. Three things determine what you are looking at.

What went in. Brown, chunky, faintly sour is usually the food, because most cat kibble is brown. Green is usually grass or a houseplant. Neither is more sinister than what the cat ate, with one enormous exception: if the plant could have been a lily, that is an emergency and not a chart entry, because lilies cause kidney failure in cats from a few licks of pollen.

What the body added. An empty stomach produces the two most common vomits there are. Bile washes back from the small intestine and comes up yellow or yellow-green; stomach acid and saliva get whipped into white foam. Both mean the stomach had nothing in it, which is why they so often happen at five in the morning and why splitting the same daily food into more, smaller meals resolves a surprising number of them. Mucus is the same story one step further along: a stomach lining irritated enough to produce it.

How long it sat there. This is the one that matters. Fresh blood is red. Blood that has been sitting in stomach acid turns black and granular, which is where the coffee-ground description comes from, and it means bleeding that started some time ago and is probably still going. That single distinction is the most clinically useful thing on this chart, and it is the reason brown deserves a second look: digested food and digested blood are both brown, and the difference is texture and smell rather than shade.

Vomiting is not the same as regurgitation

Worth getting right, because it changes which part of the cat your vet looks at. Vomiting is active: there is heaving, visible abdominal effort, usually some warning, and what comes up has been in the stomach. Regurgitation is passive: no heaving, no warning, the food simply arrives back, often minutes after eating and often still tube-shaped from the oesophagus. Regurgitation points at the oesophagus rather than the stomach, and it is a different investigation. If you can tell your vet which one you watched, you have saved them a step.

How the verdict is reached

Four inputs each resolve to an urgency level on their own, and the answer is the highest one any of them reaches. Nothing can pull it back down: adding information to this tool can only ever make the verdict more urgent. A fifth input, who your cat is, moves the answer up by one step and never further, so being a kitten turns a watch into a same-day call but never manufactures an emergency. Nine signs override everything else and send you straight to an emergency vet whatever the vomit looked like.

The thresholds are not ours. The Cornell Feline Health Center puts the line at more than once a week: cats vomiting more often than that, or vomiting alongside lethargy, weakness, reduced appetite, blood, increased thirst or urination, or diarrhoea, should be seen promptly. VCA Animal Hospitals adds two more: vomiting that continues for more than one to two days warrants care even in a cat who otherwise seems well, and hairballs more than once a month warrant a call. Past three weeks, vomiting is chronic by definition and needs a workup rather than another recheck.

One judgment here is ours, and we would rather say so. VCA publishes a single flat list of signs that mean seek care immediately, and it runs from lethargy to a swallowed lily. Treating every item on it as drive-to-the-emergency-room would put a soft stool in the same bucket as a poisoning, and a tool that calls everything an emergency gets ignored on the day it matters. So the list is split: the items that are a plausible threat to life within hours go to go-now, the rest go to call-your-vet-today, and nothing on either source's list is ever allowed to resolve below that.

Three worked examples

The five-in-the-morning yellow puddle

Four-year-old indoor cat, fed twice a day, brings up a small puddle of yellow-green liquid before breakfast. It has happened maybe three times this year. She eats normally afterwards and is otherwise herself. The tool returns worth watching. This is bile on an empty stomach, the most common benign vomit there is, and the fix is usually mechanical rather than medical: the same daily food split across more meals, or a late one on a timer, so the stomach is never empty for twelve hours.

The same puddle, four mornings a week

Identical cat, identical yellow liquid, except it is now happening more than once a week and has been for a month. Nothing else has changed; she is eating and behaving normally. The tool returns call your vet today, and the reason is frequency alone. Cornell's threshold is exactly this case, and chronic vomiting in a cat who otherwise looks fine is how inflammatory bowel disease, food intolerance and early hyperthyroidism announce themselves. This is the scenario a static colour chart gets wrong, because the colour never changed.

A brown puddle that is not food

Eleven-year-old cat throws up twice in an afternoon. The second one is dark, gritty rather than mushy, and looks more like wet coffee grounds than like the kibble he eats. He is quieter than usual. The tool returns emergency, go now on the appearance alone, before the age or the lethargy is even counted. Granular black material is digested blood, which means bleeding high in the gut that started hours ago. He may well still look bright in the waiting room. Go anyway.

Common questions

What colour cat vomit is bad?

Four appearances are an emergency on their own, whatever else is true: frank red blood or clots, anything black and granular like coffee grounds, brown vomit that smells like faeces, and vomit containing string or fabric. Pink-tinged vomit and visible worms need a call the same day. Every other colour on this chart, including the yellow bile and white foam most people arrive here worrying about, is judged on how often it happens and what else is going on rather than on the colour by itself.

Why is my cat throwing up yellow liquid?

That is bile, and it means the stomach was empty when the vomiting started. It is most common first thing in the morning in cats fed once or twice a day, and the usual answer is a feeding change rather than medication: the same daily ration divided into more, smaller meals, or a late one on an automatic feeder so the overnight gap is shorter. If it keeps happening on a split feeding schedule, or more than once a week, it is irritation rather than timing and needs a vet.

When should I worry about my cat vomiting?

The Cornell Feline Health Center's line is more than once a week, or vomiting alongside lethargy, weakness, reduced appetite, blood, increased thirst or urination, or diarrhoea. VCA adds vomiting that continues beyond one to two days even in a cat who otherwise seems well. Before any of those, go straight in for blood, coffee grounds, a faecal smell, string, repeated retching with nothing coming up, a hard or painful belly, collapse, open-mouth breathing, or straining in the litter box without producing urine.

How many hairballs are too many?

More than one a month is VCA's threshold for a phone call. Cats are supposed to pass swallowed hair through the gut, not bring it back up, so frequent hairballs are usually telling you about one of three things: over-grooming from stress, fleas or skin disease; a gut that is not moving properly; or simply an enormous coat. Brushing helps with the last. For the first two the answer is the vet, and in between, hairball-control food and hairball treats work by adding fibre that moves hair through rather than by dissolving anything.

My cat threw up and then ate normally. Is that fine?

Usually, once. A cat who vomits, shakes it off and asks for dinner is describing a one-off, and the chart will tell you so. What matters is whether it repeats. Keep a note of the date, because the thing that separates "cats do that" from "this cat has a problem" is a pattern over weeks, and nobody remembers accurately without writing it down. The share link from this page preserves what you entered, which makes a rough log.

Should I withhold food after my cat vomits?

For a few hours, in an adult cat, yes, and then offer a small amount of something bland. Never for longer than that without asking your vet, and never at all in a kitten. Cats that go without food for even a couple of days are prone to hepatic lipidosis, a liver condition that is far worse than whatever caused the vomiting. Leave water down throughout, unless they cannot keep water down, which is its own emergency.

Can I embed this cat vomit color chart on my website?

Yes. Copy the snippet at the bottom of this page. The embedded version is a clean, ad-free widget built for veterinary practices, emergency clinics, rescues, TNR groups and foster networks. Attribution is included in the snippet; there is no fee, no signup and no tracking.

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What helps, and what a chart cannot fix

Nothing you buy stops a cat bringing up blood, and this page will not pretend otherwise. What products reach is the benign end of the chart, which is also the common end: the empty-stomach bile, the hairball, and the cat who eats too fast.

For empty-stomach bile and foam, the change that works is the boring one. The same daily food, arriving in four or five small meals instead of two, keeps the stomach from sitting empty overnight, and a timer does the five-a.m. one so you do not have to. Dr. Anand's picks are in the best automatic cat feeders roundup. Adding wet food helps twice over: it is gentler on an irritated stomach and it puts water into a cat who would not otherwise drink it.

For hairballs, the mechanism is fibre rather than lubrication, which is why the best hairball-control cat foods are chosen on fibre type and level rather than on the word "hairball" being on the bag. Hairball treats are the stopgap for the weeks before a food change has had time to work. For a cat who gulps water and brings it straight back, moving water gets most cats sipping steadily instead: see the best cat water fountains. And if the chart turned up worms, match the drug to the worm rather than buying the first box on the shelf, which is what the best cat dewormers roundup works through.

Methodology & sources

The appearances, thresholds and escalation rules on this page are not typed out as prose. They live in a data file, and an automated test checks them on every single build: every appearance carries a valid urgency tier, adding any sign to any appearance can never lower the verdict, a worse-looking vomit can never produce a calmer answer, the who-is-this-cat lift moves exactly one step and can never manufacture an emergency, an emergency verdict never carries product recommendations, and every figure quoted in the body copy above is re-derived from the data rather than trusted. If an edit ever contradicted a citation, the build fails instead of publishing.

The honest limits. Vomit appearance is a triage screen, not a diagnosis. It tells you how fast, not what. A cat can be seriously ill having brought up something that looks completely ordinary, and the two commonest causes of chronic vomiting in cats, inflammatory bowel disease and intestinal lymphoma, look identical on the floor and are told apart by biopsy. Colour perception on a screen is imperfect and indoor lighting shifts it further, so a swatch match is a starting point rather than a measurement. And the split between go-now and call-today, described above, is our interpretation of a source list that does not itself draw that line.

• Cornell Feline Health Center: Vomiting. The source of truth for the frequency threshold on this page: cats that vomit more frequently than once per week, or that show lethargy, weakness, decreased appetite, blood in the vomitus, increased thirst, increased or decreased urination, or simultaneous diarrhoea, should be evaluated promptly.
• VCA Animal Hospitals: Vomiting in Cats. The seek-care-immediately sign list, the more-than-one-to-two-days duration rule, and the hairballs-more-than-once-a-month threshold.
• In Practice (BVA): Approach to managing chronic vomiting. Vomiting is considered chronic once it has continued for more than three to four weeks, which is where this tool stops calling for a recheck and starts calling for a workup.
• Cornell Feline Health Center: Common Cat Hazards. Lilies cause life-threatening kidney failure in cats from very small ingestions, which is why suspected plant ingestion is a red flag here rather than a shade of green.
• ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center, (888) 426-4435, staffed around the clock.

These thresholds are long-standing consensus veterinary guidance and are not expected to move; sources and product picks are re-checked annually. About Dr. Anand · Last reviewed September 28, 2026.

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  Cat vomit color chart by
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