Why category filters hide 97% of off-leash parks

Search most map apps for somewhere your dog can run off-leash and you will get a handful of results. Search ours the same way and, until recently, you would have got a handful too — 505 places, out of a catalog of 92,218.

The number of places in that catalog that actually permit off-leash access is 21,472.

The gap is not missing parks. It is a filing problem, and it is worth explaining because it shapes what almost every dog owner sees when they go looking.

What we counted

Every figure here comes from romp.'s own catalog on 4 August 2026: places we have verified, that have not been soft-deleted, in the six recreation categories we treat as "somewhere to romp" — trails, dog parks, parks, beaches, off-leash areas and nature reserves. That is 92,218 places.

Two different fields describe leash rules.

Category is what a place is — a trail, a dog park, a beach. One of the available values is off_leash.

Leash policy is what a place allows, derived from the posted rules for that specific location. It is a separate field, and it is close to complete: only 141 of the 92,218 places have no policy recorded. That is 99.85% coverage.

The gap

How you ask	Places
Filed under the "off-leash" category	505
Whose leash policy permits off-leash	21,472

Browsing by category surfaces 2.4% of the places that actually allow it. The other 97.6% are filed as parks, trails, beaches and nature reserves — because that is what they are. A riverside trail that permits off-leash access is still a trail.

The effect is sharpest close to home. Within 40km of eight US cities:

City	Verified places	Category says "off-leash"	Policy says off-leash	Policy says leashed
Austin	116	2	97	18
Chicago	170	0	152	17
Denver	165	1	110	51
Memphis	59	0	23	36
Nashville	72	0	59	11
Portland	176	1	104	63
San Diego	103	2	91	10
Seattle	211	0	156	45

Across those eight metros there are 1,072 verified places. Six carry the off-leash category. 792 have a policy that permits off-leash.

In five of the eight cities, a category filter returns nothing at all — while the policy field points at between 23 and 156 places in the same radius.

This is about finding, not abundance

It would be easy to read the table above and conclude that off-leash access is the norm. Across the whole catalog it is not: 21,472 places permit it and 70,333 require a leash. Roughly three in four places on our shelf are leash-required.

Memphis is the honest counterexample in our own sample. It has 23 places that permit off-leash and 36 that require a leash — the only city of the eight where leashed comes out ahead.

Dense metros skew toward off-leash because they have the dog parks and the designated areas. The wider catalog includes tens of thousands of rural trails and municipal parks where a leash is the rule. Both things are true, and the second one is why the leash policy is worth reading before you go rather than assuming.

Why the filing goes wrong

"Off-leash" describes a permission, not a place type. Treating it as a category forces an either/or that the physical world does not have: a beach is a beach whether or not dogs can run on it.

Once it becomes a category, only places whose primary identity is "off-leash area" get filed there — a few hundred purpose-built runs nationwide. Every trail, park and beach with an off-leash policy lands in its own category and drops out of the filter entirely.

What we do with it

We treat leash rules as a filter across the whole shelf rather than a category within it. Ask for off-leash near Seattle and the honest answer is 156 places, not zero.

Method and limits

• Counted 4 August 2026 against romp.'s verified catalog. Places we have not verified are not included, so these are floors, not totals for the world.
• City figures use a 40km bounding box around the city centre — straight-line, not driving distance, and a box rather than a circle, so the corners reach slightly further.
• Leash policy reflects the posted rules we hold for a location. Real parks are more specific than a single field: rules can be seasonal, apply to part of a park, or depend on hours. Read the place page before you go, and follow what is posted on the day.
• The two figures are not alternatives. All 505 places filed under the off-leash category also carry an off-leash policy — the category is a strict subset of the policy, which is why filtering by it can only ever return fewer places, never different ones.