Puppy Bowl 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Hoboken Girl Puppy Bowl is and who runs it

Puppy Bowl 2025 is the public-facing name of the Hoboken Girl Puppy Photo Bowl, a pet photo contest published by The Hoboken Girl, the Hoboken, New Jersey lifestyle outlet operated by The Local Girl LLC. The 2025 cycle was the program's 5th annual edition, and the publisher's network also includes The Montclair Girl and The Jersey Shore Girl, which share the same hyperlocal audience model.

Unlike most New Jersey public votes covered on this site, which run on third-party contest platforms, this ballot runs on hobokengirl.com, the publisher's own domain. The confirmed ballot address is the finalists page, where the nine puppies appeared with their photos and the vote sat directly beneath them. That single-page setup matters for supporters: everything needed to participate lives at one address, with no platform dashboard to learn.

The vertical is pets, and the audience is deliberately local. The publisher addresses Hoboken and the wider Jersey City metro, and the nomination round was open to locals who could submit their pet's cutest photo by form or email. That framing separates this ballot from national pet photo contests, because every finalist comes from the publication's own readership and every vote comes from people who can actually follow the outlet year round.

The dated record for the Puppy Bowl, nominations through voting

The 2025 cycle ran in two dated phases. Nominations opened Friday, January 24th and closed at 11:59PM on Friday, January 31st, with locals submitting their pet's cutest photo by form or email. Voting then ran from Monday, February 3rd to Thursday, February 6th at 11:59PM, a four-day window announced on the finalists page itself.

Confirmed Puppy Bowl editions run in 2024, 2025 and 2026; the 2025 page called that cycle the 5th annual Hoboken Girl Puppy Photo Bowl, a label indicating earlier rounds published by the same outlet. The two-phase shape, nomination week followed by a short public vote, is the structure those confirmed cycles share.

The publisher has yet to print a schedule for the next round: no nomination or voting dates for a future Puppy Bowl appear alongside the 2025 results; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Whether the February slot and the late-January nomination week repeat in the same months is likewise unstated by the publisher.

One more dated anchor is worth noting for planners: the 2025 result was announced in a follow-up post on hobokengirl.com, so the outlet closes each cycle publicly rather than leaving the outcome silent on the ballot page.

How a supporter votes in the Hoboken Girl Puppy Bowl

Voting in the Puppy Bowl is a straightforward public poll on the finalists page at hobokengirl.com. A supporter opens that page during the voting window, looks over the top nine puppies, and votes for a favorite directly on it. The printed rule is unusually permissive: votes could be cast as often as a supporter desired within the time frame. That makes the Puppy Bowl one of the few New Jersey ballots with no per-supporter ceiling at all, a fact that shapes every serious push.

Entry works differently from voting. The nine finalists were not self-selected on voting day; they came out of a nomination week in which locals submitted photos by form or email. Once nominations closed, the publisher chose the top nine and opened the vote among them, so a pet's path to the ballot starts weeks before the window opens.

Because the ballot sits on hobokengirl.com rather than a contest platform, the finalists page names no login flow, no nominee profile system and no separate voting dashboard. The finalist photos, the vote control and the window dates all sit on one URL, which is also where any rule change for a later cycle would appear first.

Where the Puppy Bowl sits among New Jersey public votes

New Jersey readers have no shortage of public ballots, but the Puppy Bowl occupies a narrow corner of them. The closest sibling in kind is the 94.5 PST Pet Costume Contest, another pet-vertical vote in the state, though that one belongs to a radio station rather than a lifestyle publisher. Everything else on the state's ballot board answers a different question.

The Asbury Park Press High School Athlete of the Week is a sports vote with a weekly rhythm, and the Asbury Park Press Readers' Choice is a multi-category best-of ballot. The Best of Bergen Community's Choice Awards, the Best of Jersey Shore Contest and Bergen & Morris Top Dentists are all business-facing recognition programs.

What makes the Puppy Bowl different is the combination of subject and scale. It is a single-subject, single-winner vote about nine named puppies, run by a publisher whose readers follow it for local life rather than for rankings. Its window is measured in days, not weeks, and its rule allows unlimited voting, where several of the business ballots above cap or structure participation far more tightly.

Building support for a puppy in a short, unlimited window

A four-day window with unlimited voting rewards concentrated effort over long campaigns. The supporters who move a Puppy Bowl finalist are the ones who share the hobokengirl.com finalists link on day one and ask each friend to vote more than once before the close, because the printed rule permits exactly that. A pet owner who waits until the final evening has almost no room to recover ground.

The organizer publishes no rule beyond the unlimited-vote allowance, so there is no stated restriction on how supporters reach each other. That silence is not permission for anything in particular; it simply means the ballot's own text is the only written constraint. Our get more votes guide walks through outreach that fits a window this short, and readers weighing purchased support for an award-style ballot can compare options on our award votes page. No outside help, ours included, can promise a win in a ballot where anyone may vote repeatedly.