Dog Breed Finder
Answer eight questions about your home and your week, and every breed gets ranked to fit — with the reasons, and the trade-offs, written out. Change any answer and the list updates as you go. Just here for fun? Play Pup Quiz, the daily breed-guessing game.
About you
Size, weight, lifespan, coat and country of origin follow published breed standards. The 1–5 ratings for temperament, energy, shedding and grooming are general tendencies of a breed, not a prediction about any individual dog — upbringing and training matter more than breed for most of what a dog is like to live with.
How this dog breed finder works
Most breed quizzes ask a few questions and hand back a single answer with no explanation. This one does the opposite: it ranks every breed in the database against what you said, shows you why each one placed where it did, and lets you take the constraints back off. If your answers only leave four breeds, it tells you that, and tells you exactly what to relax to see more.
What counts as a hard requirement
Only three things exclude a breed outright: needing a low-allergen coat, having toddlers at home, and being away from the house for most of the day. Those are welfare and safety constraints rather than preferences. Everything else — size, energy, shedding, grooming, barking, drooling — is scored instead of filtered, so a breed that misses on one point can still rank well if it fits everywhere else. That's deliberate: a Greyhound is famously good in a flat despite being a large dog, and a hard size filter would have hidden it from you.
How the ranking is calculated
Each answer sets a target on one or more traits. A breed is penalized in proportion to how far outside your target it sits, weighted by how much that trait actually affects daily life — being left alone and being safe with children count for more than drooling. The score you see is what's left after those penalties. Where breeds tie, the more familiar one is listed first.
Choosing a breed is the start, not the decision
Breed tells you the tendencies you're likely to be working with — how much exercise, how much coat, how much noise. It doesn't tell you about the individual dog in front of you, and a well-raised dog of a "difficult" breed is easier to live with than a neglected one of an "easy" breed. Meet the actual dog, talk to a breeder or shelter about that dog's temperament, and take the list here as a shortlist to go and check in person.
Which dog breeds are best for apartments?
Less about size than about energy and noise. Choose An apartment above and the finder steers toward breeds that are quiet and content in a smaller space — which includes some surprisingly large dogs. Greyhounds and Great Danes are famously good flat dogs because they sleep most of the day, while a small terrier with a loud voice and a working drive can be much harder on close neighbours.
Are any dog breeds actually hypoallergenic?
No dog is truly non-allergenic. The allergen is a protein in dander and saliva, not the hair itself, so every dog produces some. What the low-allergen breeds have in common is a coat that sheds very little, which keeps far less dander moving around the house. Many people react much less to them, but some still react. If there's a diagnosed allergy, spend time with the specific dog before committing.
I work full time. Can I still have a dog?
Yes, but it narrows the field honestly. Answer Six to nine hours and the finder removes the breeds that are genuinely prone to separation distress rather than pretending it's fine. Most adult dogs shouldn't routinely be alone eight hours or more without a midday break — a dog walker or daycare widens your options far more than picking a different breed does.
Which breeds are best with young children?
Answer Toddlers or babies and only breeds rated four or five for tolerance with children are shown. Size matters less than you'd think: several giant breeds are excellent with small children, while some tiny ones are easily frightened and more likely to snap. Supervision matters more than either — no breed rating replaces watching a toddler and a dog together.
Why isn't my crossbreed listed?
The common poodle crosses are included — turn on Include crossbreeds above. They're kept separate because they have no breed standard: two dogs from the same litter can differ a lot, so their ratings are best-guess averages rather than a standard you can rely on. That's also why the coat you're buying them for isn't guaranteed.
Where does the breed data come from?
The measurable fields — height, weight, lifespan, coat type, ears, tail, breed group and country of origin — follow published breed standards. The 1–5 behavioural ratings are editorial summaries of how a breed is generally described. They're consistent across the database so comparisons are fair, but they're generalizations, and the range within any breed is wide.
Photo credits
Every breed photo comes from Wikimedia Commons under a free licence — Creative Commons or public domain. Each one is credited to its photographer with a link to the licence and the original file. Images were resized and re-encoded for the web; nothing else was altered. Photos under a share-alike licence remain under that licence.