Are Shih Tzus Good Apartment Dogs?

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10 min read · Updated 10 August 2026

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 were designing a dog for a fifth-floor one-bedroom from scratch, you would land somewhere very close to a Shih Tzu.

So the honest version of this article is short, and I’ll give it to you now: yes, they are excellent apartment dogs, probably top three. But two things trip up almost every first-time Shih Tzu owner, and neither of them is what people expect. The first is the flat face, which quietly rewrites your summer. The second is housetraining, which this breed is genuinely bad at, and which most owners handle in a way that guarantees eighteen months of accidents.

What You Should Know About Owning a Shih Tzu

Adults sit around 9 to 10.5 inches at the shoulder and 9 to 16 pounds. That is small enough to carry down four flights during a fire alarm and heavy enough not to disappear under a couch cushion. They typically live into their mid-teens, which is a long commitment for a dog you buy at eight weeks.

They are brachycephalic, meaning the muzzle is compressed. This is not a cosmetic detail. A shortened airway means less efficient cooling, because dogs shed heat by panting. On a hot afternoon a Shih Tzu can overheat while a beagle of the same weight is merely bored. It also means snoring, occasional reverse sneezing, and a real vulnerability to being left in a warm car or a stuffy apartment with the windows shut.

The coat grows continuously, like human hair, and does not shed in seasonal drifts. People read that as low maintenance. It is the opposite: hair that never sheds is hair that mats, and a matted Shih Tzu is a painful dog with sores under a pretty exterior.

Temperament is the easy part. They are affectionate without being needy in the way a Chihuahua can be, tolerant of handling, generally friendly to strangers, and not remotely interested in patrolling the perimeter of your home. They want to be in the room with you. That is the whole job description.

Are Shih Tzus Good Family Dogs?

They’re one of the better small breeds around children, with a caveat that has nothing to do with temperament and everything to do with physics. A 12-pound dog with prominent eyes and a delicate spine is easy to injure. Shih Tzu eyes sit relatively exposed, and corneal scratches from a toddler’s fingernail or an enthusiastic hug are a real vet visit, not a hypothetical.

What they do have is patience. Most Shih Tzus will absorb a lot of clumsy affection without snapping, which is more than you can say for several breeds marketed as family dogs. Teach children to sit on the floor and let the dog come to them, and this arrangement works well for years.

With other dogs in an apartment building they are usually unbothered. They don’t posture in elevators, they don’t lunge at the retriever on the third floor, and they rarely start anything. If your building has a lot of dog traffic, that’s worth a great deal.

Do Shih Tzus Bark a Lot?

Moderately, and it depends almost entirely on what you reinforced in the first year. They are alert dogs in the sense that they notice the elevator, but they are not compulsive barkers the way a Yorkie or a Pomeranian can be. There is no herding drive underneath, no terrier reactivity, nothing that needs an outlet.

The failure pattern is specific: the dog barks at hallway noise, the owner comes over and picks them up to soothe them, and within three weeks the dog has learned that barking at the hallway produces being held. Now you have a barking problem that looks like anxiety and is actually a training accident.

Handle it the boring way. Noise in the hallway, dog looks up, you say nothing and carry on. Dog settles, then you notice them. If the barking is already established, our guide on how to stop a dog barking in an apartment walks through unpicking it without shouting, and if the neighbours are already unhappy, soundproofing the worst wall buys you the weeks you need to fix the behaviour properly.

Can a Shih Tzu Be Left Alone?

Better than most toy breeds, and worse than a Basenji. Four to six hours is realistic for an adult who has been built up to it gradually. Eight hours daily, every weekday, is asking a companion breed to do the one thing it was never bred for.

They are prone to velcro behaviour, following you from room to room, and that habit turns into distress at the door if you never interrupt it. Start early: close the bathroom door behind you, feed them in a separate room, leave for ninety seconds and come back without ceremony. Departures and arrivals should be the least interesting moments of the day.

If your schedule genuinely involves long days, read what leaving a dog home alone while you work actually requires before you buy, not after. A midday walker is not a luxury for this breed, it’s the thing that makes the arrangement fair.

Are Shih Tzus Good Indoor Dogs?

This is the breed’s home ground. They are content on a couch, they don’t pace, they don’t dig at the carpet, and they will happily spend an entire rainy Sunday within six feet of you. A one-bedroom is not a compromise for a Shih Tzu, it’s roughly the size of space the breed was developed in.

Two indoor details matter more than square footage. Flooring: hardwood and tile are hard on a small dog with short legs, and a couple of runners between the couch and the door reduce the skidding that wears out joints. Temperature: a Shih Tzu in a west-facing apartment in July with no air conditioning is in genuine trouble, and a fan is not the same thing as cooling. If you can’t control the temperature of your flat in summer, choose a different breed. I mean that literally.

Shih Tzu Exercise Needs

Two short walks a day, twenty to thirty minutes total, plus some indoor play. That’s it. They are not an athletic breed and they don’t pretend to be.

What matters is when. Walk early morning and after sunset from roughly June through September. A midday walk on hot asphalt is how flat-faced dogs end up at the emergency vet, and the danger point arrives at a lower temperature than most owners assume. If your dog is panting hard, splaying out on the pavement, or the tongue looks wide and flat, you are already late. Turn around.

Indoors, they enjoy short bursts of chase and gentle tug, and they like food puzzles more than their reputation suggests. Fifteen minutes of nose work in the living room does more for a Shih Tzu’s mood than an extra loop of the block.

Shih Tzu Grooming Needs

Here is the part that decides whether you enjoy owning this dog.

A full-length Shih Tzu coat needs thorough brushing and combing every single day, plus a bath and blow-dry roughly weekly, plus a professional groom every four to six weeks. Skip three days and you get mats behind the ears and in the armpits. Mats tighten, pull the skin, and eventually the only humane fix is shaving the dog down under sedation.

The alternative is the puppy cut, an inch or so all over, every six to eight weeks. Most owners treat this as giving up on the show coat. It isn’t. It’s the sane default for a dog living in a city apartment, and it converts a daily obligation into a weekly brush plus a standing groomer appointment. Budget for that appointment as a fixed monthly cost, the way you’d budget a phone bill.

Two extras that don’t go away: the face needs wiping most days, because tear staining and food get trapped in the muzzle hair and the fold underneath can go sour; and the ears are hairy and closed, which traps moisture, so they want checking weekly.

Are Shih Tzus Easy to Train?

Obedience, yes, within reason. They’re bright and food motivated, and they’ll learn sit, down, place and a decent recall inside the flat without difficulty. They are not driven to work with you the way a poodle is, so long training sessions bore them. Three minutes, several times a day, beats one twenty-minute session.

Housetraining is a different story, and this is where the breed earns its reputation. Small dogs have small bladders and a lower tolerance for stepping outside in the rain. Shih Tzus in particular are slow to generalise the rule, and the standard apartment situation makes it worse: the dog has to hold it through a hallway, an elevator and a lobby before reaching grass. Plenty of owners are still cleaning up accidents at ten months.

The fix is scheduling, not scolding. Out every two hours for a young puppy, immediately after every nap and every meal, same door, same patch of ground, paid immediately with a treat while still outside. Our apartment puppy potty training guide lays out the timing in detail, and for a fourth-floor flat with a slow elevator, an indoor potty option as a permanent backup is not cheating. It is the difference between a clean floor and eighteen months of frustration.

Is a Shih Tzu a Good Apartment Dog?

Yes. Unreservedly, with one hard condition.

Almost nothing about this breed fights against apartment life. Low exercise requirement, quiet by default, no shedding on the sofa, small enough for any lease that permits dogs at all, socially easy in shared spaces, and genuinely happy doing very little. Compared with the breeds people romanticise for city living, the Shih Tzu is the one that actually delivers.

The condition is heat. If you cannot keep your flat cool in summer and you cannot commit to walking at dawn and dusk for four months of the year, this is the wrong dog and no amount of good intentions fixes it. Everything else about Shih Tzu ownership is a matter of habit and budget. The flat face is a matter of physiology.

Tips for Raising a Shih Tzu in an Apartment

1. Decide on the coat before you buy the puppy

Full coat or puppy cut is a lifestyle decision, not a grooming preference. Full coat is twenty minutes a day, every day, for fifteen years. Puppy cut is a weekly brush and a groomer bill every six to eight weeks. Pick one deliberately, price it out, and tell your groomer what you’ve chosen at the first appointment.

2. Move summer walks to dawn and after dark

From late spring, your walking schedule belongs to the sun, not your calendar. Check the pavement with the back of your hand: if you can’t hold it there comfortably for five seconds, it’s too hot for a brachycephalic dog. Keep a folding bowl and water in the bag from May onward.

3. Set up a permanent indoor toilet spot from week one

Not as a substitute for outdoor walks, as insurance. A specific tray in a specific corner, never moved, introduced on day one alongside outdoor training. Elevators break, storms happen, and you will occasionally be forty minutes later home than planned. A dog who already knows where the backup is will use it instead of the rug.

4. Interrupt the velcro habit early

The following-you-everywhere behaviour is charming at twelve weeks and becomes a problem at twelve months. Build small separations into ordinary days from the start, close doors behind you, feed meals apart from you, and keep departures wordless. This is the single most effective thing you can do to avoid separation problems in a companion breed.

5. Learn what heat distress looks like before you need to

Loud laboured panting, a wide flat tongue, brick-red or bluish gums, unsteadiness, refusing to walk on. In a flat-faced dog this escalates quickly. Get them somewhere cool, wet the paws and belly with room-temperature water rather than ice, and call the vet. Knowing the signs is more useful than any product you can buy.

Final Thoughts

Most breeds have to be adapted to apartment life. The Shih Tzu doesn’t. It was built for exactly this: a small warm room, people nearby, not much to do. The breed’s problems in a city flat are the ones its own anatomy creates rather than ones the flat imposes.

Which is why the decision is unusually clean. If you can handle a groomer on standing order and you can protect a flat-faced dog through summer, you are getting a dog that will genuinely thrive in the space you have. If either of those is a stretch, be honest now rather than at the vet’s in August.

Related Content

• The dog-friendly apartment checklist
• Apartment puppy potty training, step by step
• Choosing a crate for a small apartment
• Calming a dog with anxiety
• Indoor potty options for apartments