Are Maltese Good Apartment Dogs?

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13 min read · Updated 30 July 2026

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 perfect apartment breed: under seven pounds, almost no shedding, content to spend the afternoon on a cushion next to you.

And then people bring one home and discover that small does not mean easy. The Maltese has three daily jobs attached to it — the coat, the face, the teeth — and none of them are optional. Skip the coat for two weeks and you have a matted dog in pain. Skip the teeth for two years and you have a dental bill that costs more than the dog did. That gap between “tiny and low-effort” and what the breed actually asks for is where most disappointed Maltese owners live.

What You Should Know About Owning a Maltese

The breed standard puts adults under seven pounds, and most sit somewhere between four and seven, standing roughly seven to nine inches at the shoulder. That is genuinely small. A Maltese fits in a bike basket, travels in a carrier under an airline seat, and can be picked up with one hand. It also means a dog that a distracted person can step on in a narrow galley kitchen, which matters more in four hundred square feet than it does in a house.

They tend to live a long time — into the teens is normal, and mid-teens is common. You are signing up for a longer relationship than you would with a big dog, which cuts both ways. Fifteen years of grooming appointments is a real budget line.

The coat is the defining feature and the thing people misunderstand. Maltese have a single coat with no undercoat, which is why they shed so little. But hair that doesn’t shed doesn’t fall out — it keeps growing, like yours, and if it isn’t brushed it tangles into mats against the skin. A neglected Maltese coat is not a cosmetic problem. Mats pull, trap moisture, and hide sores.

Temperament is where the breed earns its reputation. They are affectionate, playful well into old age, and genuinely interested in being wherever you are. They are also alert, opinionated, and perfectly willing to tell the whole floor that someone got out of the elevator. More on that below, because in an apartment it’s the single thing most likely to cause you trouble.

Health-wise, the things to have on your radar are the ones that follow toy breeds around: luxating patellas, crowded teeth and the dental disease that follows, a windpipe that doesn’t tolerate collar pressure, and low blood sugar in very young puppies. None of these are certainties. All of them are worth asking a breeder about directly.

Are Maltese Good Family Dogs?

With adults and older children, yes, easily. With toddlers, I’d think hard.

This isn’t about temperament. Most Maltese are patient and sweet-natured and will tolerate a lot of handling. It’s about mass. A five-pound dog with fine bones can be seriously hurt by an ordinary childhood accident — a dropped dog, a fall off a sofa during rough play, a kid who sits down without looking. Broken legs in toy breeds are not exotic injuries; they happen at home, on normal furniture, to dogs that were fine ten seconds earlier.

The other risk runs the other way. A small dog that gets grabbed, squeezed and startled repeatedly learns to defend itself, and a defensive Maltese is a snappy Maltese. That’s not the breed being bad with kids. That’s a dog with no other options.

If you have young children and you want this breed anyway, the rule that actually works is a floor rule: the dog is greeted on the floor, sitting down, and the dog is allowed to leave. No carrying the dog around the flat. In a small space that’s easy to enforce, which is one of the few times apartment living helps you.

With other dogs in the building they’re usually fine, though many Maltese have no idea they’re small and will square up to a Labrador in a lobby. Keep them on a short lead in shared spaces and don’t let them practise it.

Do Maltese Bark a Lot?

Yes. This is the honest answer and it’s the main thing standing between this breed and a perfect apartment score.

Maltese are alert dogs. Not aggressive, not anxious by default, just wired to notice and announce. In a detached house that means a few barks when the postman comes. In a fifth-floor flat, where the lift dings all day, the neighbour’s door closes at eleven, and there is somebody in the corridor roughly every twenty minutes, the same instinct produces a dog that barks dozens of times a day at things you have long stopped hearing.

The good news is that it responds well to training, because the barking is usually reactive rather than compulsive. The bad news is that most owners accidentally train it in the wrong direction during the first few months, by rushing over to shush the dog — which, from the dog’s point of view, means barking summons you.

Handle it early and handle it boringly. Hallway noise happens, dog looks up, you say nothing and keep doing whatever you were doing. Dog settles, then you acknowledge them. If it’s already established, our guide to stopping a dog barking in an apartment works through the unpicking, and if there’s already tension with a neighbour, treating the worst shared wall buys you the weeks you need to fix the behaviour instead of panicking about it.

One more specific trigger: the front door. Maltese frequently develop a full-volume response to keys in a lock, and in a building where five other doors are within earshot, that’s a bark that fires whether or not anyone is coming to yours.

Can a Maltese Be Left Alone?

Four to six hours for a settled adult who has been built up to it gradually. Eight hours a day, five days a week, is a bad match for this breed, and the failure mode is loud.

Maltese were bred to be with people, and they are prone to velcro behaviour — following you from the sofa to the kitchen to the bathroom. That’s charming, and it’s also the seed of separation anxiety. The habit of never being separated becomes distress the first time it’s enforced for eight hours.

Interrupt it from day one, gently. Close the bathroom door behind you. Feed the dog in a different room. Leave the flat for two minutes and come back without making anything of it. Departures and arrivals should be the flattest, least interesting moments of the day.

The reason this matters more here than for most breeds is the acoustics. A distressed Basenji is silent. A distressed Maltese barks and howls, and you will not find out about it — your neighbours will, and you’ll hear from the building manager. If you already suspect that’s happening, the calming and desensitisation work is where to start, and if your workday is genuinely long, read what leaving a dog home alone while you work actually involves before you buy rather than after.

Are Maltese Good Indoor Dogs?

About as good as it gets. This is a dog that was designed for the inside of a building.

They are quiet movers, they don’t need floor space to be happy, and they self-limit — a Maltese will play hard for ten minutes and then flop. A hallway and a couple of rooms is a perfectly adequate territory. They also don’t do the thing that many small energetic breeds do, where under-exercise turns into destruction; an under-exercised Maltese is more likely to be clingy than to eat your skirting board.

Two indoor caveats, both practical. First, they’re fragile in ways that a flat’s furniture layout makes worse. Sofas and beds are jumping-off points, and a dog with fine legs landing on hardwood from a metre up is the classic toy-breed injury. Steps or a ramp at your two main pieces of furniture are cheap insurance.

Second, the white coat and hard floors. Maltese hair does come out, just slowly, and it’s fine, pale and static-prone. On dark floors you will see it. It’s not shedding in the Labrador sense, but “hypoallergenic” gets oversold — the allergen is in dander and saliva, not just hair, and plenty of allergic people react to Maltese anyway. If that’s your reason for choosing the breed, spend an hour in a room with one before you commit.

Maltese Exercise Needs

Low, but not zero, and the second half of that sentence is the one people ignore.

Two short walks a day — fifteen to twenty-five minutes each — plus some play indoors covers an adult Maltese comfortably. They’re not endurance dogs, they overheat faster than you’d think for their size in summer, and their stride is short, so a “quick loop” for you is a decent outing for them.

What they actually need from those walks is not distance, it’s the outside world. This breed goes odd if it never leaves the flat: suspicious of strangers, reactive to other dogs, panicky about traffic noise. The single most common Maltese behaviour problem I’d point at isn’t barking, it’s a dog that has been carried everywhere since it was twelve weeks old and has therefore never learned that the pavement is normal.

Put them down. Let them walk. Let them sniff the same three trees for ten minutes if they want — sniffing tires a small dog more than trotting does. Rain and cold are legitimate obstacles for a four-kilo dog with a single coat, so a coat for winter is sensible, not silly, and in genuinely bad weather a proper indoor session plus an indoor potty setup is a fair substitute for a day or two.

Maltese Grooming Needs

This is the real cost of the breed, and it’s the section to read twice before you decide.

If you keep the coat long, it is a daily brush. Not “most days” — daily, right down to the skin with a pin brush and a comb, because mats form underneath a coat that looks fine on top. Behind the ears, under the front legs and around the harness line are where they start. A long-coated Maltese also needs regular bathing, and it needs to be dried properly, because a damp coat mats faster.

If you keep it in a short puppy cut — and for most people in flats, you should — the brushing drops to two or three times a week and life gets a lot easier. You’ll want a groomer every four to eight weeks either way. Price that in your city now. Over fifteen years it is not a small number, and it never stops.

Then the face. White dogs stain, and Maltese stain around the eyes because the tears sit in the hair. Daily wiping with a damp cloth and keeping the hair around the eyes trimmed or tied back handles it. Persistent heavy staining with redness is a vet conversation, not a cosmetic one — blocked tear ducts and irritated eyes exist.

And the teeth. Small mouths mean crowded teeth mean plaque, and dental disease in toy breeds is a bigger health story than most owners realise. Brush them. Daily if you can manage it, several times a week at minimum, starting when the dog is young enough to think it’s a game.

Are Maltese Easy to Train?

Easy to train, hard to housetrain. Those are two different questions and the breed scores very differently on each.

Obedience and tricks come readily. Maltese are bright, they’re food-motivated, and they want your attention, which is most of what you need. They learn sit, down, place, recall inside the flat and quiet-on-cue faster than their reputation suggests. Keep sessions to a few minutes and keep them cheerful — this is not a breed that responds to being told off, and a Maltese that gets shouted at tends to shut down rather than try harder.

Housetraining is the weak spot, and in an apartment the physics work against you. A dog this size has a bladder to match. A puppy that needs to go now cannot hold it for the time it takes to get shoes on, walk to the lift, wait for the lift, cross the lobby and reach grass. That’s not disobedience, it’s arithmetic.

Which is why I’d treat an indoor option as the primary system for the first several months rather than a fallback for bad weather — the full sequence is in our apartment puppy potty training guide. A crate helps enormously here too, both for the housetraining and for giving a small dog a den in a busy room; choosing one that fits a small flat is worth ten minutes of thought.

Is a Maltese a Good Apartment Dog?

Yes. Unreservedly, on the space question — and this is one of the few breeds where a small flat is arguably better than a house, because the dog is never far from you and that’s all it wants.

But the yes comes with a condition, and it isn’t square footage. It’s whether you will do the barking work in the first six months and the grooming work for the next fifteen years. Those are the two things that turn a great apartment dog into a problem: a Maltese that has learned to announce every noise in a building, and a Maltese whose coat has been left long by an owner who brushes it when they remember.

Do those two things and you have close to an ideal city dog. Ignore them and the flat isn’t the issue — you are.

Tips for Raising a Maltese in an Apartment

1. Decide the coat length before the dog arrives, and book the groomer as a standing appointment

Almost nobody chooses this deliberately. They intend to keep the beautiful long coat, they brush enthusiastically for a month, life gets busy, and eight weeks later a groomer tells them the only humane option is to shave it off. Pick the short cut on purpose if your week is full — it’s not a failure, it’s the sensible choice for most flats — and put the appointment in the calendar on repeat so it doesn’t depend on you remembering.

2. Set up the indoor potty before the puppy arrives, not after the third accident

If you’re above the second floor, or your building has a lift you sometimes wait two minutes for, a tiny puppy is not making it outside in time. Have the pad or turf tray in place, in a fixed spot, from day one, and reward there from the first hour. Retrofitting this after a fortnight of accidents on the rug is much harder, because by then the rug has been marked and the dog has an opinion.

3. Put steps or a ramp at the sofa and the bed

The most common way a Maltese gets hurt in a flat is jumping down from furniture onto a hard floor. In a small space the dog is on and off the sofa all day, because that’s where you are. Two cheap sets of pet steps eliminate most of that risk, and a dog that learns to use them at twelve weeks uses them for life.

4. Kill the door-and-hallway bark in the first month

Buildings generate an enormous amount of ambient human noise, and this breed is built to comment on it. Spend the first month deliberately not reacting to hallway sounds, rewarding the dog for settling, and if possible pairing corridor noise with something good. It is far easier to prevent than to reverse, and it’s the difference between neighbours who like your dog and neighbours who file complaints.

5. Harness only, never a collar for walking

Small breeds with delicate windpipes should not have a lead attached to their throat. Use a well-fitted harness from the start. It also gives you something to hold in a lift when a large dog gets in, which happens more often than you’d like.

Final Thoughts

The Maltese is one of a small handful of breeds that needs no adaptation to apartment life at all. It doesn’t want a garden. It doesn’t want a job. It wants to be in the room with you, and a flat delivers that better than a big house does.

What it does want is maintenance — the daily kind, the unglamorous kind, brushing and teeth and wiping a face. If you’re the sort of person who finds that soothing, this is one of the best dogs you can own in a city. If you were choosing this breed because a small dog looked like less work, choose again, because the work just moved indoors.

Related Content

• The dog-friendly apartment checklist
• Apartment puppy potty training, step by step
• Indoor potty options for apartments
• How to stop a dog barking in an apartment
• Choosing a crate for a small apartment