What Attracts Rats to Your Home and How to Prevent It

People often assume rats are a sign of a dirty house. They are not. Very clean homes get rats, usually because of something in the garden, a gap in the wall, or a drain nobody has looked at. What rats want is simple, and once you can see your property the way a rat does, most of the fixes are obvious.

Food: the Biggest Draw

Rats eat almost anything, and they are very good at finding it. The food that attracts them to a home is rarely in the kitchen at first.

• Bird feeding. Seed dropped under feeders, or scattered on the lawn or a bird table, is the most common single attractant in a domestic garden.
• Compost. Open heaps, or bins with cooked food, bread, meat or dairy in them.
• Bins. Lids that do not close, bags on the ground, or food waste caddies left open.
• Animal feed. Pet food left down overnight, poultry feed, and bags of seed or pellets in a shed or garage.
• Fallen fruit and vegetable patches, especially in autumn.

What to change

Use a seed tray under feeders and clear up spills, or pause feeding for a while if rats are active. Keep compost to raw vegetable matter in a closed bin. Store every kind of feed in hard, sealed containers, metal where possible. Pick up pet bowls at night.

Water

Rats need to drink daily. Ponds, water butts without lids, leaking outside taps, dripping overflow pipes and pet water bowls all help. You do not need to remove a pond, but fixing leaks and covering water butts takes away easy options.

Shelter

A rat wants somewhere dry, quiet and close to food to make its nest. Around a home that usually means:

• Space under decking, sheds and summerhouses
• Log piles, stacked timber, rubble and garden rubbish
• Dense ivy, brambles and long grass, particularly against a wall or fence
• Cluttered garages and outbuildings that are rarely disturbed
• Lofts, wall cavities and under-floor voids once they are inside

What to change

Keep a clear strip along the base of the house walls and outbuildings. Store logs and materials off the ground and away from the house. Cut back ivy and climbers. Tidy garages so there is nothing undisturbed along the back wall. Where a shed or decking has an open void underneath, a skirt of fine metal mesh dug into the ground can close it off.

A Way In

Even a very tidy home can have a way in, and that turns a garden visitor into a house guest. Gaps around pipes, damaged air bricks, worn door thresholds and defective drains are the usual culprits. Our post on how rats get into a home explains each one and how to check.

Sealing those gaps is best done once any current activity has stopped, using metal-based materials rats cannot chew through. Rat and mice proofing is £180 for up to 1 hour, with any further time quoted before it is carried out.

Prevention Has Limits

Removing food and shelter makes a property less attractive, but it will not clear rats that are already established. They have learned where everything is and will carry on for some time. If you already have signs indoors or a burrow near the house, prevention is the part you do alongside treatment, not instead of it.

Our rat control service covers the survey and treatment, and the rat control cost guide explains the £260 price, which has no call-out fee. If you have spotted one in the garden and are unsure what it means, see what to do if you see a rat in your garden.

Look at your garden the way a rat would: where is the food, where is the water, and where would you sleep?