Start with your breed
The six most popular dogs in America, ranked by AKC registrations for 2025. Each guide breaks down purchase price, routine care, the health problems that actually show up, and what the whole thing adds up to.
#1 in America French Bulldog Non-Sporting group See what it costs → 
#2 in America Labrador Retriever Sporting group See what it costs → 
#3 in America Golden Retriever Sporting group See what it costs → 
#4 in America German Shepherd Herding group See what it costs → 
#5 in America Dachshund Hound group See what it costs → 
#6 in America Poodle Non-Sporting group See what it costs → 
$26,213 between the cheapest and the most expensive
Chihuahua at $27,184. Poodle at $53,397. Same calculation, same sourced prices.
Size drives most of it: food, medication doses and every procedure priced by body weight.
6.5 years separate the longest and shortest lived
Cane Corso at a measured median of 8.1 years, Shiba Inu at 14.6. From a study of 584,734 dogs.
Lifespan multiplies through every other number, which is why we spent longer on it than anything else.
Is insurance worth it?
We run the numbers both ways for every breed and publish whichever way they fall, including when the answer is no.
Where we land
Insurance is protection against an uncommon large bill, not a way to pay for routine care. Whether it is worth buying depends on your ability to absorb one bad year, the policy terms and the exclusions that apply to your dog. We publish current premium benchmarks and documented treatment costs, and we do not claim a breed-level expected return, because that would need a model we withdrew for being indefensible. We say so on every page, including the ones with an advertiser on them.
Every breed on one axis
Cost to own across a measured lifespan. Each dot is a breed, colored by group. Hover or tap for the name.
Purchase, food, grooming, boarding and routine veterinary care across each breed's measured median lifespan. Health costs are reported separately on each breed page.
The cheapest and the most expensive
Same calculation on every breed, so these compare directly. All 100 are on the breeds page, searchable and filterable.
Every breed uses measured lifespan data and published disorder rates. 66 of 100 breeds carry at least one figure measured in that breed specifically, and 31 of those come from clinical records or a large US study. The remaining 34 carry rates measured across all dogs, labeled as such on every row.
Where the numbers come from
Lifespan from a study of 584,734 dogs. Disorder rates from veterinary clinical records. Prices from a cost study covering all 50 states.
Where a figure does not exist, we leave it blank rather than inventing one. A script re-checks every number against its source and fails the build if anything disagrees.
How we get the numbers
How often
Diagnosis rates from peer-reviewed studies of hundreds of thousands of dogs in primary-care practice.
When
The age range a condition usually first appears, because timing decides what you can still do about it.
How much
US veterinary prices from a commissioned study covering all 50 states.
Why American dog health data barely exists
Only 5.5% of American dogs are insured, the country's largest veterinary dataset is privately owned and rarely published, and no national system was ever built to count any of it. That gap shapes every dog health figure you will read anywhere, including ours.
Figures we modeled are labeled as modeled. Figures we could not source contribute nothing at all rather than a guess. Read the method.