"How long does this breed live, on average?" Older answers mostly came from owner surveys and small samples. The VetCompass programme at the UK's Royal Veterinary College (RVC) changed that by pooling anonymized clinical records from first-opinion veterinary practices across the country. In 2022, Teng and colleagues published a study in Scientific Reports that used more than 30,000 canine death records from this database to build proper demographic life tables for UK companion dogs — remaining life expectancy at every age, overall and by breed.
Across all dogs, life expectancy at birth came out around 11.2 years, with females (11.4) living slightly longer than males (11.1).
The spread between breeds is striking. Among the breeds analyzed, the top and bottom of the life-expectancy-at-birth table included:
One caveat: the French Bulldog figure was likely pulled down by the UK population skewing very young at the time of the study. Even so, the pattern of flat-faced breeds living markedly shorter lives is consistent.
Two factors dominate: body size and skull shape. Within dogs, larger means faster aging and shorter life. And brachycephalic (flat-faced) breeds like French Bulldogs, English Bulldogs and Pugs carry a heavy burden of airway, skin and spinal disease that compresses average lifespan. These statistics are worth weighing when choosing a breed; for the risks facing an individual dog, talk to your veterinarian.
In the US, the Dog Aging Project is one of the largest long-term canine aging studies ever attempted, enrolling tens of thousands of companion dogs of every breed to track how genes, environment and lifestyle shape aging — with the goal of understanding why some dogs age slowly, and feeding those insights back into human aging research. Our picture of breed longevity will only get sharper.
Curious how old your dog is in human years, and how far it is from the senior stage? Pick a breed in our Dog Age Calculator and it will set the right size class and draw a life-stage timeline automatically.
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