Breed LifespanDog breed lifespan numbers, sourced

Method and sources

Every number on this site is quoted, in the words the study used, from one of the four published papers below. If a quote can't be matched, word for word, against our saved copy of the paper — or a number on the page turns out not to be inside that quote — the build stops and nothing ships.

The four studies

The four papers measure different things, in different countries, with different methods, and we do not merge them into one number:

The breed chart

The breed chart lists 155 breeds and their median lifespan, taken from the UK dataset study's breed-level supplementary table — a spreadsheet published alongside the article, not part of the article text itself. A build check independently recomputes the whole chart from that table and refuses to publish if a single cell differs from what we show.

36 of those breeds also turn up in a second study we could match by name — 23 in the Kennel Club survey, 11 in the Portugal registry study, 5 in the VetCompass life tables. The chart prints every second figure next to the first, with its own measure spelled out, and never averages them or picks a winner.

A life expectancy at birth and a median age at death are not the same quantity, and for some breeds they sit far apart. So a breed only gets a page of its own when each second figure lands within 20% of the first, the gap being measured against whichever of the two is larger. Breeds that miss that line stay in the chart, flagged as measured differently with a large gap, because a stand-alone page would read as one settled answer. Right now 21 breeds clear it; the build refuses any breed page that does not. Each cross-checked row is verified against the exact wording of that second paper's table before we publish, the same way a quote is.

What this site does not cover

This site shows lifespan numbers and the sources they came from, and nothing else. It does not cover disease, treatment, feeding or breeding advice. If you are worried about a specific dog's health, that is a question for a veterinarian, not a chart.

How our fetcher behaves

Whatever pulled the papers below names itself openly, with a link back to this page, and reads a site's robots.txt before it reads anything else on that site. It leaves at least three seconds between hits on the same host and walks away for good at the very first refusal — no second try under a different name; a host that says no just doesn't end up in the data.

Papers quoted