Stay calm, close off the room the bat is in, and open any windows or exterior doors in that room. Most bats will find their way out on their own within minutes, especially if you turn off the lights indoors. If the bat won’t leave or has landed on a surface, you can safely capture it with a container. Here’s exactly how to handle both situations, plus when the situation calls for medical attention.
If the Bat Is Flying Around
Your first move is containment. Close the door to the room the bat is in and stuff a towel under the gap if needed. Get children and pets out, especially cats, which will try to attack the bat. Then open every window and exterior door in that room as wide as possible and remove the screens.
If it’s nighttime, turn off all indoor lights in the room. Bats navigate using echolocation and are drawn toward open air, so a dark room with an open window is essentially an exit sign. Stand quietly against a wall or step out and close the door behind you. Most bats will find the opening within 10 to 20 minutes. If it’s daytime, you can try dimming the room and opening a single window so the bat has one clear path out.
Do not swing at the bat with a broom, tennis racket, or towel. Swatting is unlikely to make contact and more likely to injure the bat or cause it to fly erratically toward you. You also risk killing or losing a bat that may need to be tested for rabies.
If the Bat Has Landed on a Surface
A bat resting on a wall, curtain, or floor is actually easier to deal with than one circling the ceiling. Put on thick leather gloves or heavy work gloves. Take a rigid container, like a large plastic tub, coffee can, or shoebox, and slowly approach the bat. Place the container over it, then slide a piece of stiff cardboard or a folder underneath to seal the opening. Keep the cardboard pressed firmly against the container as you carry it outside.
Set the container on an elevated surface like a porch railing or the top of a wall, tilt it on its side, and walk away. Bats cannot take off from the ground the way birds can. They need a small drop to become airborne, so placing them at least three or four feet up gives them the best chance of flying away safely.
If anyone in the house may need rabies evaluation (more on that below), do not release the bat. Keep it contained in the sealed container and call your local health department. They can arrange to have it tested.
When a Bat in the House Means a Rabies Risk
The vast majority of bats, about 94% of those submitted for testing, do not have rabies. But bat bites can be tiny enough to go unnoticed, which is why public health agencies treat certain situations as potential exposures even when no one remembers being bitten.
You should contact your local health department or a healthcare provider if:
- A bat was in the room with a sleeping person. You cannot confirm there was no contact while asleep.
- A bat was found near an unattended child. Young children may not recognize or report a bite.
- Anyone was intoxicated or otherwise unable to confirm they weren’t bitten.
- Someone touched the bat with bare hands.
If none of these apply and you watched the bat the entire time it was in the room, the risk is essentially zero. But if there’s any doubt, health officials will want to test the bat. That’s why capturing it rather than letting it fly away matters in those scenarios.
What Rabies Treatment Looks Like
If the bat tests positive or can’t be captured for testing, treatment involves a series of four vaccine doses given over two weeks, on days 0, 3, 7, and 14. On the first visit you also receive a one-time injection of immune globulin, a product that provides immediate protection while your body builds its own antibodies from the vaccine. The shots are given in the arm for adults and the thigh for young children. They’re no longer the painful abdominal injections of decades past.
Rabies is almost always fatal once symptoms appear, but treatment given before symptoms start is extremely effective. The key is not to delay. If you wake up to find a bat in your bedroom and it flies out before you can capture it, call your doctor that day.
Why the Bat Got In
Most bats that end up in living spaces are either lost juveniles learning to fly or adults that entered through a small gap connecting your attic or walls to the rest of the house. Bats can squeeze through openings as small as half an inch, roughly the width of a pencil. Common entry points include gaps around chimneys, unscreened attic vents, loose flashing along the roofline, and spaces where pipes or wiring enter the building.
A single bat appearing once is usually an accident. If it happens more than once, you likely have a colony roosting somewhere in the structure, often in the attic, behind shutters, or inside wall cavities.
Preventing Bats From Coming Back
Start by inspecting the inside of your attic for any openings that connect to living spaces. Seal those interior gaps with caulk, steel wool, screening, or weather stripping. Put draft guards under attic doors. This keeps bats that are roosting in the attic from accidentally entering bedrooms and hallways.
To keep bats out of the structure entirely, you’ll need to seal exterior entry points. Use caulk, metal flashing, screening, or heavy-duty mesh. A few important details: use water-based caulk applied early in the day so it dries before bats emerge at dusk. Never use expanding foam in active entry points, because bats can become trapped and entangled in the material as it hardens.
If bats are actively using certain openings, seal them with one-way exclusion devices rather than blocking them outright. These are tubes or netting that let bats crawl out but prevent them from getting back in. A simple version is a 2-inch diameter PVC pipe, about 10 inches long, secured over the opening with a loose plastic sleeve taped around the outer end. The sleeve collapses after a bat pushes through, blocking reentry. Lightweight plastic netting with very fine mesh (one-sixth inch or smaller) works the same way: secure the top and sides over the opening, let the bottom hang free about 18 to 24 inches below the gap, and bats will drop out the bottom but won’t be able to crawl back up behind the netting.
Leave exclusion devices in place for at least a week so every bat in the colony has a chance to leave. Only then should you permanently seal those exterior openings.
Timing Matters for Colony Exclusion
If you’re dealing with a colony, do not seal them out during bat maternity season. In most of the U.S., this runs roughly from mid-April through mid-August. During those months, flightless pups are inside the roost. Blocking the adults out traps the young inside your walls, where they die and create serious odor and sanitation problems. In some states, including Florida, excluding bats during maternity season is illegal. Plan exclusion work for late fall or early spring, when all bats in the colony can fly.