Puppy weight chart by breed and size

These are the breeds with a size group. Some groups come from the Waltham study itself (Table 1 of the article); we set the others from the American Kennel Club’s adult weight, and the last column says which is which. The adult weight is the one the AKC gives for the breed; where the AKC gives only a maximum or a description, we quote it.

Some breeds sit in a group whose range does not cover their AKC weight. The study placed each breed by the average adult weight of that breed in the clinic records, and real dogs often weigh more than the breed standard. Where we set the group, we started from the middle of the AKC range, and for a few breeds close to the border between two groups we chose the larger one, for the same reason. Breeds that come in several sizes, such as the Dachshund or the Poodle, are not listed: choose the chart by the weight you expect your dog to reach, as for a mixed breed.

The charts come from Salt and colleagues at the WALTHAM Petcare Science Institute (PLOS ONE, 2017). They used the records of healthy purebred dogs from Banfield clinics in the USA, 1994 to 2013, dogs that kept a normal body condition, weighed before neutering. The weighings are open data under CC BY 4.0.

The article publishes its centiles only as figures, so we fitted the open data again by the method the article describes and checked the result against its figures: the medians agree within 3%. This is our fit of the open Waltham data, not the official WALTHAM chart. The full method, with every check, is in our report on the data.