The catenary degree is an invariant that measures the distance between factorisations of elements within an atomic monoid. In this paper, we classify which finite subsets of $\mathbb{Z}_{\geq 0}$ occur as the set of catenary degrees of a numerical monoid (that is, a co-finite, additive submonoid of $\mathbb{Z}_{\geq 0}$). In particular, we show that, with one exception, every finite subset of $\mathbb{Z}_{\geq 0}$ that can possibly occur as the set of catenary degrees of some atomic monoid is actually achieved by a numerical monoid.

Let $\def \xmlpi #1{}\def \mathsfbi #1{\boldsymbol {\mathsf {#1}}}\let \le =\leqslant \let \leq =\leqslant \let \ge =\geqslant \let \geq =\geqslant \def \Pr {\mathit {Pr}}\def \Fr {\mathit {Fr}}\def \Rey {\mathit {Re}}M$ be a commutative cancellative monoid. For $m$ a nonunit in $M$, the catenary degree of $m$, denoted $c(m)$, and the tame degree of $m$, denoted $t(m)$, are combinatorial constants that describe the relationships between differing irreducible factorizations of $m$. These constants have been studied carefully in the literature for various kinds of monoids, including Krull monoids and numerical monoids. In this paper, we show for a given numerical monoid $S$ that the sequences $\{c(s)\}_{s\in S}$ and $\{t(s)\}_{s\in S}$ are both eventually periodic. We show similar behavior for several functions related to the catenary degree which have recently appeared in the literature. These results nicely complement the known result that the sequence $\{\Delta (s)\}_{s\in S}$ of delta sets of $S$ also satisfies a similar periodicity condition.

Questions concerning the lengths of factorizations into irreducible elements in numerical monoids have gained much attention in the recent literature. In this note, we show that a numerical monoid has an element with two different irreducible factorizations of the same length if and only if its embedding dimension is greater than two. We find formulas in embedding dimension three for the smallest element with two different irreducible factorizations of the same length and the largest element whose different irreducible factorizations all have distinct lengths. We show that these formulas do not naturally extend to higher embedding dimensions.