How common are fleas and ticks in cats?

It depends on the time of year and what part of the country you live in. Welcome to North Carolina. We do see fleas and ticks for a significant part of the year. In fact, ticks are potentially a year-round problem in North Carolina. Even if it gets extremely cold, we can still see ticks. Over the last 40 years of practice, I have seen a lot of tick problems that begin in February, right in the dead of winter. They'll typically continue throughout the year. For fleas in this part of the country, we typically don't get fleas outside during the months of late December, January, and February. Sometime in March, maybe early April, the fleas will start to emerge outside. We do have that small window where we typically don't have flea issues or the potential of pets picking up fleas when they go outside in the months of January, February, and March. But otherwise, they are a big problem in this part of the country.