The Best Habitat for Happy Chameleons

Getting your enclosure setup correctly from the start isn’t just great for your chameleon’s health—it saves you a lot of time and stress tweaking or rebuilding their home as they grow. A well-planned habitat keeps them healthy, active, and stress-free. Whether you’re brand new to chameleons or just looking to create the perfect setup, this guide will walk you through everything you need to know to build and house your pet chameleon for a long, healthy life.

We’ve built and tested hundreds of enclosures ourselves, and here’s what we know works best:

Start with the Right Enclosure

Chameleons are arboreal animals, spending their lives in the trees, so vertical space is very important. They also need a balance of proper airflow and humidity, which is why screen enclosures or hybrid enclosures (especially in dry climates) are necessary.

• For adult Veiled and Panther Chameleons: we recommend at least 24”x24”x48”h

• For Jackson’s, Carpet Chameleons, and juveniles 18”x18”x36”h is perfectly fine

• Bigger is always better.

If your room is dry—like it is here at our studio in Salt Lake City—covering a few sides of the enclosure with plastic sheeting or acrylic panels can help keep humidity in without sacrificing ventilation. There is a balance to this. Getting an enclosure to a 90% night time relative humidity is not easy if your room is 40%.

Rule of thumb: go as big as your space allows. Chameleons use every inch.

Lighting & Heat: Set the Foundation

Lighting isn’t optional—it’s foundational. Without proper UVB and heat, your chameleon’s health will decline fast.

• UVB: Use a linear T5 HO UVB bulb like the Arcadia 6% or ReptiSun 5.0. It helps them process calcium and stay strong.

• Basking bulb: Create a warm zone where they can soak up heat during the day. Temps should sit around:

  • 85–90°F for Veiled and Panther

  • 75–80°F for Jackson’s and Carpet

  
  

Keep lighting on a 12-hour cycle and skip any heat at night. Chameleons need darkness to rest.

Live Plants Make a Huge Difference

While artificial plants can offer additional climbing surfaces and places to hide, there is a noticeable improvement in a chameleon's vibrancy and well-being when they are kept with live plants. At Chameo, we do not keep chameleons in an enclosure without live plants at any stage in their lives. This is something we arrived at through experience, and it has made a huge difference. Live plants help sustain humidity naturally, and they also help your chameleon feel secure and stimulate more natural behavior. The full relationship between chameleons and live plants in nature is a dynamic that I think is currently under-appreciated and understudied.

Some of our go-to plants:

• Pothos*

• Philodendron*

• Umbrella plants*

• Spider plants

Of these, pothos seem to be the easiest to care for in a chameleon enclosure, and we are using them almost exclusively here at Chameo.

*While pothos, philodendron and umbrella plants are known to be toxic to other animals, they are among the most popular plant for chameleon enclosures, and there is no known risk to chameleons if eaten.

Hydration is Everything

In the wild, chameleons drink from dew and rain dripping off leaves, and our care should replicate that.

Here’s how we keep ours hydrated:

• Mist 2–3 times daily (right before they wake up, and once or twice in the day/evening would be ideal). We do this with a spray bottle or battery powered hand sprayer, and we use ZooMed ReptiSafe to remove the chlorine and condition the water

• Use an automatic drip system for longer hydration windows (also using ReptiSafe)

• Use a fogger or humidifier to get our enclosures to the target humidity level for each species (See individual species profiles for a breakdown of humidity requirements.)

Always track it with a digital hygrometer—guesswork doesn’t work with humidity.

Give Them Room to Explore

Chameleons want to climb, perch, and move around. They also want to be able to hide out of sight when they are stressed. We fill their enclosure with:

• Branches at different angles (especially a basking branch where you have measured the temperature under their basking light.)

• Flexible vines

• Plenty of leaf cover

The goal is to build our enclosures like trees at the edge of a jungle—with layers of branches and leaves providing perches and hiding spots.

Keep the Floor Simple

For most setups, you don’t need substrate. In fact, loose substrates like bark or soil can cause impaction if swallowed and make cleanup harder.

• Go bare-bottom or use paper towels for easy cleanup.

• Or, for experienced keepers: try a bioactive setup.

Monitor, Adjust and Automate

While it takes a little bit of work during setup, monitoring and automating light, heat, humidity and even spraying removes almost all the guesswork out of keeping your chameleon, and ensures that that they are provided consistent schedules and parameters.

Helpful tools:

• Digital thermometers (for basking and ambient zones)

• Digital hygrometers (to track humidity)

• Timers (for lights and misting)

We'll add a full blog post for the automation we do at the Chameo studio and for our individual enclosures in the future.

Build It Right the First Time

A happy chameleon starts with a solid setup. The right enclosure doesn’t just look good—it prevents illness, encourages natural behaviors, and helps your chameleon live a longer, healthier life. Getting the right equipment and building things right before you even get your chameleon will save you time and upgrade costs, and will allow your chameleons to grow into his or her new jungle environment.

Still figuring things out? We’re happy to walk you through your build. Feel free to message us with any questions? We have a lot of experience keeping happy chameleons, and we would love to make sure you and your chameleon start out strong.

Talk To Us!