Study: Ticks Survive Up to 25 Days on Home Floors
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- Ohio State University researchers found that lone star and Gulf Coast ticks can survive 1 to 3 weeks on five common home flooring types—tile, wood, vinyl, and short-pile and shag-like carpet
- Gulf Coast ticks survived significantly longer than lone star ticks overall, averaging about 18 days versus roughly 11 days; they lasted an average of 25 days on vinyl but just 10 days on long-pile carpet
- Lone star ticks flipped the script, living longest on long-pile carpet at nearly 15 days while lasting only about 7 days on tile
- Afsoon Sabet, a Ph.D. student in entomology at Ohio State, tested 90 ticks per species across three experimental rounds, completing more than 4,600 individual daily observations
- Desiccation—loss of body moisture—appeared to kill the ticks on flooring, while control ticks kept in ideal lab humidity survived more than a year
- CDC data cited in the report shows total U.S. tick-borne disease cases rose 40% from 2019 to 2022, and both species can transmit spotted fevers, ehrlichiosis, and alpha-gal syndrome
Why it matters: For pet owners in the eastern U.S., this is the first hard data showing hitchhiking ticks can persist indoors for weeks, not hours. The carpet finding flips the assumption that hard floors kill ticks faster, and it lands as CDC-cited tick-borne illness cases climb 40% in three years.
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