Apartment Dogs

Searching is half the job; the other half is getting permission into the lease. Here is how Humane World says to search, present your dog and read the paperwork.

The safest apartment window for a dog is a closed one, or one open only a few inches. A screen is not a barrier: the Animal Medical Center of New York says all pets, and especially those home alone, should have windows closed or, if left open, covered by a well secured screen, and DoveLewis,

In 2016, doodles and other poodle crosses made up 2.3% of the licensed dogs in New York City with a known breed. In the 2026 license data they make up 8.9%, and together they are now the most common group of dogs in the city, ahead of the Shih Tzu, the Lab and the Yorkie.

Ask people who have lived with a Bernese Mountain Dog what they’re like indoors and you get the same answer every time: calm. Berners are not pacers. They lie down in the middle of the room, preferably on a cool floor, preferably touching someone’s foot, and they stay there. On the strength of that alone,

Before temperament, exercise or grooming, ask the practical question first: will you legally be allowed to keep this dog where you live. Many landlords won’t allow a Cane Corso. Many home insurers list the breed as excluded from liability cover. Some cities and countries restrict it outright, and the rules change. You’d be building a

Most breed guides answer this one with a shrug about needing space. That misses what actually stops people keeping a Rottweiler in a flat, which is almost never the floor plan. It is the lease, the insurance policy, and the eight seconds in the lift with a stranger. A Rottweiler can live perfectly well in

If you want proof that a dog’s size tells you almost nothing about whether it suits a flat, the Jack Russell is it. Fifteen pounds, short coat, small enough to fit under an aeroplane seat: it will comfortably out-work a Rottweiler, out-bark a Yorkie and out-think most of the dogs on this list before lunch.

Cocker Spaniels get chosen for the face. It’s an extremely effective face, and it has sold an awful lot of dogs to people who were expecting something else entirely. Underneath the ears and the soft expression is a working gundog: a dog bred to spend a full day in wet undergrowth flushing birds, on a

Every other article on this site can start from a breed standard. This one can’t, and that’s the single most useful thing to understand before you buy a Labradoodle. A Labradoodle is a Labrador crossed with a Poodle. It isn’t a breed with a standard behind it, which means there’s no reliable way to predict

Poodles turn up on almost every “best apartment dogs” list ever written, usually with no explanation beyond the word hypoallergenic. That is lazy, and it skips the part that actually decides whether the arrangement works: a Poodle is a working retriever in a fancy haircut, and the breed comes in three sizes that behave like

The Cavalier King Charles Spaniel is the dog people describe when they say they want a small spaniel that doesn’t bounce off the walls. Gentle, sociable, portable, quiet, happy on a couch and happy on a two-hour walk. On temperament alone it is close to the perfect apartment dog, and I’d rank it above almost

The Maltese has been a lap dog for something like two thousand years. Not a farm dog that got smaller, not a terrier that lost its job: a companion animal from the start, bred by people who lived in cities and wanted a dog that fit in one. On paper it is close to the

Ask a breeder what the Shih Tzu was bred to do and you get an answer no other breed can give: nothing. No herding, no retrieving, no ratting, no guarding. This dog was developed inside Chinese and Tibetan palace rooms to sit near people, and it has been doing exactly that for centuries. If you

On paper the Yorkshire Terrier is the apartment dog. Seven pounds, barely sheds, needs a fraction of the exercise a big dog does, and fits comfortably in a studio. Every list puts it near the top and the reasoning is not wrong. What the lists leave out is that the Yorkie is a terrier, and

Nobody asks whether a Chihuahua physically fits in an apartment. A four-pound dog fits anywhere. The question people are actually asking, whether or not they phrase it that way, is whether the breed’s reputation is deserved: the barking, the snapping at strangers, the dog that terrorises the building from inside a handbag. The reputation is

Bathing a dog in an apartment is a different job than bathing one at a house with a yard and a hose. You have one bathroom, a tub that was built for a person, no drain outside, and a downstairs neighbor who does not want to hear a sixty-pound dog scrambling on porcelain at nine