Small Dog Breeds

Common questions

What counts as a small dog?

There is no official line. Registries group breeds by the job they were bred for, not by size, so the Toy group is the closest thing to a definition and it leaves out plenty of genuinely small dogs: the Bichon Frise, the Miniature Schnauzer and the Boston Terrier are all registered elsewhere. This table draws its own line at a typical adult top weight of 30 lb, which gives 46 breeds, and the weight control then caps that at 15 lb or 25 lb. The cap reads against the top of the range, so a breed listed at 12 to 18 lb survives a 25 lb cap and not a 15 lb one. Twenty-six of the 46 have a top weight of 15 lb or under.

Which small dog breeds shed the least?

Twenty-five of the 46 rows are marked low, and they fall into two shapes. One is the long single coat that keeps growing rather than cycling and dropping: the Maltese, the Yorkshire Terrier, the Havanese, the Coton de Tulear, the Shih Tzu, the Silky Terrier and both sizes of Poodle. The other is the harsh wire coat of the working terriers: the Norfolk, the Norwich, the Cairn, the Scottish, the West Highland White, the Border and the Miniature Schnauzer, plus the curly Bichon Frise. At the other end, the double-coated spitz types drop the most: the Pomeranian, the Shiba Inu, the Schipperke, the American Eskimo Dog and the Pembroke Welsh Corgi. Set the shedding control to Low and the table shows you all of them at once. Low shedding here is a statement about hair, and nothing more: this page carries no health claim of any kind.

Which small breeds are usually described as calm indoors?

Four rows carry a low energy mark: the French Bulldog, the Japanese Chin, the Pekingese and the Shih Tzu. Add a 15 lb cap on top of that and two are left, the Japanese Chin and the Pekingese, because the French Bulldog runs to 28 lb and the Shih Tzu to 16. Set energy to Low and Moderate together and the list opens up to most of the table, since the majority of small breeds are described somewhere in the middle. The five rows not marked as adapting to a flat are the working terriers and the scent hound: the Beagle, the Border Terrier, the Russell Terrier, the Welsh Terrier and the Rat Terrier.

Why can a dog be outside the range for its breed?

Because a breed standard describes a breed and an individual is not a description. The ranges here are what published descriptions give for a typical adult, and real dogs land inside them, at the edges of them, and outside them. Weight moves with age and with the individual animal, height is measured at the withers rather than the top of the head, and a mixed-breed dog is not bound by any of it. Read a range as the middle of a distribution, not as a limit.

Does this page recommend a breed?

No, and that is deliberate. It filters and it sorts, and it stops there: there is no score, no match percentage and no verdict. Which dog belongs in a particular home turns on how much room there is, who else lives there, how much time there is in a day and a dozen other things a web page cannot see, so a page that ranked breeds for you would be inventing the part that matters. The same rule keeps health, feeding and training claims off the page entirely. What the table can do is answer the comparison question quickly: which small breeds are actually under 15 lb, which are actually low-shedding, and how they line up side by side.

Is anything uploaded?

No. The breed table ships with the page, so the filtering and sorting happen in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere. Your filters and sort order are remembered in your own browser's local storage so the page opens the way you left it, and clearing your browser data clears them.