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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.
We pulled both years from the city’s own dog licensing records and counted breeds, boroughs, zip codes and names. Some of what came out matched what you see on any Upper East Side sidewalk. Some of it did not. The French Bulldog boom, for one, barely shows up.
How we counted, and what the numbers can and can’t tell you, is at the bottom of this post.
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The ten most common dogs in NYC, 2026 vs 2016
Shares are out of licensed dogs whose breed is known: 88,318 in the 2026 file and 97,732 in the 2016 file. Where a breed has a “mix” or “crossbreed” label in the data, we counted it with the breed.
| Rank in 2026 | Breed or group | Share in 2026 | Share in 2016 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Doodles and poodle crosses | 8.9% | 2.3% |
| 2 | Shih Tzu | 7.1% | 7.9% |
| 3 | Labrador Retriever | 6.0% | 6.5% |
| 4 | Chihuahua | 5.7% | 6.6% |
| 5 | Yorkshire Terrier | 5.7% | 8.1% |
| 6 | Poodle (purebred) | 5.0% | 4.2% |
| 7 | Pit bull type | 4.7% | 7.5% |
| 8 | Maltese | 3.3% | 4.7% |
| 9 | Dachshund | 2.8% | 2.5% |
| 10 | German Shepherd | 2.3% | 3.2% |
In 2016 the Yorkie was number one. It lost almost a third of its share and dropped to fifth. The doodle group went the other way, from eleventh to first.
What counts as a doodle here
The group is every poodle cross the city’s breed list names: Goldendoodle (including the separate “Goldendoodle Miniature” entry), Labradoodle, Maltipoo, Cockapoo, Bernedoodle, Shih Poo, and the catch-all “Poodle Crossbreed”. Purebred Poodles are not in it. They sit on their own line in the table.
The Goldendoodle did most of the work. There were 378 licensed Goldendoodles in the 2016 file. The 2026 file has 1,973, plus 396 listed as miniature. Labradoodles went from 726 to 1,056, which is growth, but the Goldendoodle passed it somewhere along the way.
One fair objection: the breed menu owners pick from changed between the two years. Cockapoo had 1 entry in 2016 and 805 in 2026, which looks more like a new menu option than a real change. So we checked the one label that existed in both years unchanged, “Poodle Crossbreed”. It went from 0.8% of dogs to 2.7%. The trend holds without the new labels.
Borough by borough
| Borough | Doodle share 2016 | Doodle share 2026 | Most common in 2016 | Most common in 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manhattan | 3.4% | 10.6% | Labrador (6.9%) | Doodles (10.6%) |
| Queens | 1.8% | 8.6% | Yorkie (8.6%) | Shih Tzu (8.6%), doodles right behind |
| Staten Island | 1.4% | 8.3% | Labrador (8.9%) | Shih Tzu (8.5%) |
| Brooklyn | 1.8% | 7.9% | Pit bull type (8.8%) | Doodles (7.9%) |
| The Bronx | 1.4% | 7.1% | Pit bull type (12.8%) | Shih Tzu (11.7%) |
The Bronx is the outlier. Doodles grew there as fast as anywhere, five times over, but small dogs still run the borough: Shih Tzus and Yorkies together are more than a fifth of its licensed dogs.
Pit bull types lost ground in every borough. In the Bronx they went from 12.8% to 7.9%, in Brooklyn from 8.8% to 5.7%. Read the caveats below before you make much of that one.
The doodle zip codes
We ranked every zip code with at least 300 licensed dogs of known breed. In 2016 there were 123 of them, and doodles were the most common group in none. In 2026 there are 114, and doodles lead in 44.
| Zip code | Area | Doodle share 2026 | Licensed dogs (known breed) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10075 | Upper East Side, Manhattan | 15.5% | 684 |
| 10012 | SoHo / Greenwich Village, Manhattan | 14.6% | 651 |
| 11357 | Whitestone, Queens | 13.9% | 433 |
| 10028 | Upper East Side, Manhattan | 13.7% | 1,185 |
| 10128 | Upper East Side / Carnegie Hill, Manhattan | 13.6% | 1,491 |
| 10021 | Upper East Side, Manhattan | 13.0% | 1,008 |
| 10013 | Tribeca / SoHo, Manhattan | 12.8% | 546 |
| 10023 | Upper West Side, Manhattan | 12.8% | 1,849 |
| 10010 | Gramercy / Flatiron, Manhattan | 12.5% | 854 |
| 10024 | Upper West Side, Manhattan | 12.5% | 1,549 |
In 10075, roughly one licensed dog in six or seven is a doodle. Ten years ago the highest share of any zip in the city was 5.2%, in 10012.
Whitestone is the only zip outside Manhattan in the top ten, and it’s a good reminder that this isn’t only a Manhattan story. Doodles are the most common group in zips across Queens and Brooklyn too.
Meanwhile, pit bull types were the most common dog in 35 zip codes in 2016 and in 5 in 2026. The Yorkie led 31 zips in 2016 and 13 now.
Who else gained, and who lost
Australian Shepherds, counting the miniature and “Miniature American Shepherd” entries, more than doubled, from 0.95% to 2.2%. That’s a lot of herding dog for apartments that rarely have a yard. We wrote about whether Aussies work in an apartment, and the short version is that it depends on how much time you spend outside with them.
Cavalier King Charles Spaniels went from 1.4% to 2.1%. Dachshunds edged up.
On the losing side: Yorkies, Maltese, Beagles (2.9% to 1.9%) and Pugs. The Pug label on its own fell from 1.5% to 0.7%, less than half of what it was.
Then the French Bulldog. It’s the most registered breed in the country by some counts, and it’s everywhere in city marketing. In the NYC license data it went from 2.1% to 2.2%. That comparison merges the two labels the form uses for the breed (“French Bulldog” and “Bull Dog, French”), because in 2016 almost half of Frenchies were filed under the second one. Merged, the Frenchie barely moved in a decade.
Luna is the new Bella
Names changed too. These are the most common names on licenses, leaving out blanks and “unknown”:
| Rank | 2016 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bella (1,254) | Luna (1,177) |
| 2 | Max (1,194) | Bella (991) |
| 3 | Charlie (919) | Coco (784) |
| 4 | Coco (864) | Max (754) |
| 5 | Rocky (811) | Milo (728) |
| 6 | Lola (806) | Charlie (721) |
| 7 | Lucy (720) | Teddy (605) |
| 8 | Buddy (688) | Lola (542) |
| 9 | Lucky (675) | Rocky (521) |
| 10 | Daisy (637) | Daisy (513) |
Luna was twelfth in 2016. Milo climbed from nineteenth to fifth and Leo from twenty-seventh to twelfth. Princess went the other way, eleventh to twenty-seventh.
Teddy moving up to seventh fits the breed table a little too well. A lot of teddy-bear-looking dogs got licensed in the last ten years.
What this means if you live here
More doodles means more demand for the same groomers. A doodle coat needs a professional cut every six to eight weeks, and most owners in small apartments can’t bathe and dry a 50-pound dog at home. If you’re in one of the zips above and your groomer’s calendar feels tighter than it used to, the numbers suggest you’re not imagining it. Our guide to grooming at home without a yard covers what you can handle between appointments.
If you’re thinking of adding a doodle to a one-bedroom, size matters more than the label. A standard Goldendoodle and a mini are not the same apartment dog. We looked at both in Are Goldendoodles Good Apartment Dogs? and the same question for Labradoodles.
How we did this, and the limits
Source. The NYC Dog Licensing Dataset, published by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene on NYC Open Data (last updated July 2026). We compared the 2016 extract (112,591 records) with the 2026 extract (96,459 records). Each record is a dog license that was active during that year.
Only licensed dogs. New York requires every dog to be licensed, but plenty of owners never do it. This is a picture of licensed dogs, not of every dog in the city. If one kind of owner licenses more often than another, that skews the shares, and we have no way to correct for it.
Unknown breeds left out. 14,859 records in 2016 and 8,141 in 2026 had no usable breed. They’re excluded from the percentages.
Breeds are what owners pick. Nobody checks the breed on a license. The menu also changed over time, which is why we checked the doodle trend against the one label that didn’t change. The pit bull decline deserves the most caution: the “Terrier mix” entry grew from 0.7% to 2.0% over the same period, and a new “Terrier Crossbreed” entry appeared at 1.1%. Some dogs that would have been filed as pit bull mixes in 2016 may sit under those labels now.
Boroughs come from zip codes. We assigned each license to a borough from the first three digits of its zip code. A few hundred records with zip codes outside the five boroughs aren’t in the borough table.
Zip code table. Only zips with at least 300 licensed dogs of known breed, so small samples don’t top the list by accident.
If you use these numbers, please link to this page and to the city’s dataset. And if you spot an error, tell us and we’ll fix it.
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