The ownership calculation, in full
Every figure on this site comes out of these two lines. Nothing else feeds the headline total.
Setup = puppy price midpoint + puppy vaccine series + spay or neuter + microchip + starter supplies + one training course
Routine, each year = food + grooming + boarding + annual exam + parasite preventatives + dental cleaning
Total = setup + (routine × median lifespan) + (senior bloodwork × senior years)
Health costs are not in it. They are documented separately on each breed page, in the units the study that measured them used.
Worked example: the Beagle
| Puppy price, midpoint of $800 to $2,000 | $1,400 |
| Puppy vaccine series | $235 |
| Spay or neuter | $471 |
| Microchip | $48 |
| Starter supplies | $420 |
| Training course | $200 |
| Setup | $2,774 |
| Food, from body weight and 2026 kibble prices | $433 |
| Grooming, short coat on a medium dog | $214 |
| Boarding, eight nights | $416 |
| Annual exam | $214 |
| Parasite preventatives | $708 |
| Dental cleaning | $379 |
| Routine, each year | $2,364 |
| Routine × 12.5 year measured median lifespan | $29,550 |
| Senior bloodwork, $181 × 5.5 senior years | $996 |
| Cost to own a Beagle | $33,320 |
Lifespan is the measured median, not a breed-standard range, so a part year at the end is carried at its true fraction. Senior years are the span past the age at which twice-yearly bloodwork is usually advised for that body size. Rounding happens once, at display. The published figure and the sum of the parts reconcile exactly, and an automated check fails the build if they ever stop doing so.
Are purebred dogs actually less healthy?
Why American dog health data barely exists is worth reading alongside this. This site covers 100 purebred breeds, so the question is fair to ask of it. The largest US study to compare the two says the answer is not the one most people expect.
Across 13,618 purebred and 13,923 mixed-breed US dogs, purebreds were not worse off overall. A slightly higher share of purebreds had no medical condition reported at all, 22.26% against 20.74%. Of 53 conditions measured, purebreds were worse on 14 and mixed-breeds worse on 13. Source.
The interesting part is not the totals. It is which conditions fall on each side.
The pattern is the finding
Every condition purebreds lead on is structural. Narrow nostrils, an eyelid rolled inward against the eye, a cornea left exposed, discs in a back that was bred long. These are consequences of how a dog is built, and a dog is built by breeding.
Every condition mixed-breeds lead on is circumstantial. Fleas, chocolate, dog bites, teeth pulled and teeth broken. These track how a dog has lived, not how it was made, and they say more about the road a rescue took to get to its home than about its genes.
So the honest answer is narrower than either side of the usual argument. Buying a purebred does not buy a sicker dog. It buys a specific and predictable set of structural risks in exchange for knowing what you are getting, and the more exaggerated the build, the larger that trade. Stenotic nares at nine times the rate is not bad luck. It is the nose people asked for.
Owner-reported and cross-sectional, so it measures what owners noticed rather than what a vet found, and it cannot prove cause. Data collected 2019 to 2020.
What each number is, and what it is not
Veterinary research reports several different quantities and they are not interchangeable. We store the metric type with every figure and show it on the page, rather than converting everything into one number that looks tidy.
- One-year period prevalence The share of dogs seen for a condition during a year of primary veterinary care. From VetCompass clinical records.
- Cross-sectional owner-reported prevalence The share of living surveyed dogs reported to have a condition. Undercounts what owners do not notice.
- Screening registry proportion The share of dogs submitted to OFA that evaluated abnormal. Submission is voluntary and skewed toward dogs expected to pass, and a radiographic finding is not the same as clinical disease.
- Median survival Median age at death in a measured population.
Why we no longer publish a single lifetime health cost
An earlier version of this site converted all of the above into a modeled lifetime risk and multiplied it by a treatment price to produce one expected health figure per breed. An external review in August 2026 found that this was not defensible, and we agreed. Converting a screening proportion or an owner survey into lifetime risk claims something the studies did not measure, and multiplying a radiographic finding by a surgical price assumes a link that has not been demonstrated.
We now publish two things separately. The cost of owning the dog, where every input is sourced and the components genuinely add together. And the documented health risks, each shown in the units the study used, with the treatment price stated where a matching cost source exists. A condition with no matching cost source is left unpriced rather than given a plausible-looking number.
What we exclude from totals
Organ-system groupings such as "skin disease" are shown for context but never added alongside the specific conditions they contain, because that would count the same disease twice. All-dog population rates are shown as context and never presented as breed figures. Age-of-onset ranges are display aids, are not sourced, and feed no calculation.
Geography
The strongest health datasets are British, because no US equivalent to VetCompass exists. Cost data is American. Every page says which is which. A French Bulldog's airway is shaped the same in Ohio as in Oxfordshire, but where breeding lines genuinely differ we say so.
Corrections
Every figure is re-verified against a committed copy of its source by a script that fails the build if anything disagrees. If you have a source that contradicts something here, send it.