Year-round pest management is now essential because rodent activity is shifting from winter-only patterns to consistent pressure throughout spring and summer breeding seasons, while drought conditions and supply chain vulnerabilities amplify the risk regardless of the time of year.
- Peak rodent activity is shifting toward spring and summer when rodents breed, not replacing winter pressure but adding to it
- Drought conditions limit outdoor food and water sources, making buildings more attractive to rodents year-round
- Regional variations are significant: Wyoming saw a 57% increase in rodent service activity, while Minnesota jumped 42%, requiring targeted local responses
- Rodents often arrive through inbound shipments and pallet voids from high-activity areas, bypassing facility pest management programs
- Effective strategies include year-round monitoring, vendor pest management standards, six-sided pallet inspections, and supply chain-wide accountability
For decades, winter has been the season to watch. As temperatures drop, rodents tend to move indoors in search of shelter, food, and water, and prevention plans are built around that pattern.
That pattern is no longer the whole picture. Rentokil's 2025 State of the Rodent Report shows that peak rodent activity is now shifting toward spring and summer, when rodents breed. Not in place of winter pressure, but alongside it. A pest management plan built only around a single seasonal spike is no longer sufficient.
Businesses now face consistent, year-round rodent pressure, and operations that don't plan for it will feel the gap.
A second driver: Drought
Shifting weather patterns are compounding the pressure. Recent NOAA data shows that much of the U.S. experienced some form of drought in 2025. Dry conditions can limit the food and water rodents rely on outdoors. When those sources become scarce, buildings can become more attractive to rodents regardless of the time of year.
What the regional data shows
These shifting patterns are producing significant differences in rodent activity by market, with some areas seeing sharp increases while others held relatively steady.
According to Rentokil’s 2025 State of the Rodent Report, the West saw a 3.6% decrease in rodent activity overall, but states like Wyoming (+57.07%), Washington (+11.79%), and Oregon (+7.58%) drove the largest increases in service activity. In the Midwest, regional activity was down 10.5%, yet Wisconsin, Illinois, and Ohio, home to some of the country's largest food and logistics hubs, still ranked among the top 10 states nationally for overall rodent activity, and Minnesota saw service activity climb 42.44%.
Warmer-than-average temperatures and longer frost-free periods appear to be helping rodent populations persist and breed in these regions, even as their overall numbers moved the other way, the report cites. In the Southwest, population growth and construction are also factors, as development disturbs established habitats and pushes rodents toward buildings. In Idaho and across the Pacific Northwest, the increase in population at logistic centers has contributed to Roof Rat and Norway Rat population growth.
These regional differences call for a more targeted response. Local activity data, weather conditions, and site-specific inspection findings should determine where operators focus their efforts, not an inflexible, uniform seasonal playbook applied across the board.
Why this is a supply chain question, not just a facility ne
A facility can track its own regional data, run a strong internal program, and still end up with a rodent problem it didn't create. That's because the rodents don't always start there. New distribution centers receiving products from out of state are largely contributing to the rat population as well as residential POD containers from new residents to the state. They can arrive riding on an incoming shipment and originating from an area where activity is running high.
Rodents can also travel long distances without touching the ground inside a building. Pallet voids make convenient nesting sites, which can move through several facilities before anyone opens them. Corrugated packaging offers the same opportunity on a smaller scale: gnawed corners, shredded fill material, and nesting debris can travel with a shipment and go unnoticed until the box is unpacked.
This is a gap most pest management programs are not built to close. A facility's program is typically scoped to its own four walls: bait stations, exclusion, monitoring, staff training. The parties best positioned to catch rodent activity before it travels, the ones handling product before it reaches receiving, often carry no pest management obligations at all.
Where to focus next
Addressing an influx of rodents doesn’t require rebuilding a pest management program from scratch, but directing the same program further upstream and across more of the calendar:
- Monitor year-round, not only in winter. A plan built around a single season can miss the spring and summer breeding pressure the data now shows.
- Track regional and environmental conditions, including drought. Local weather can drive rodent activity toward a facility, independent of the time of year.
- Hold vendors to the same standard already expected of the facility. Pest management performance should be written into supplier qualification criteria, alongside more expected requirements, like food safety certifications.
- Inspect inbound shipments, not only the facility itself. Six-sided pallet checks at receiving can catch what a manifest cannot: gnaw marks, droppings, rub marks, and nesting material in deck-board voids.
Protecting the bottom line
Supply chain leaders already treat other risk categories this way. If a delivery truck loses its refrigeration, if packaging fails, or if a supplier makes a mistake, that becomes the receiving facility's problem the moment the truck pulls up to the dock.
Rodent risk deserves the same approach: not a once-a-year checklist for a single building, but an ongoing effort that covers every location and every partner in the supply chain, all year round.
