Most expensive and cheapest breeds to insure

The most expensive dogs to insure

The top of the table is dominated by giant breeds and breeds carrying expensive inherited conditions. The Great Dane's published young-adult range reaches $88/month, and the Doberman Pinscher's published figure is $77/month; up here, the gap between adjacent breeds is smaller than the gap between coverage profiles.

The pattern behind the ranking is the conditions listed on each breed page: bloat and dilated cardiomyopathy in the Great Dane and Doberman, cancer in the Bernese Mountain Dog and Rottweiler, breathing and skin problems in the two bulldogs, and cancer and heart disease in the Boxer. Insurers are not pricing the dog's size or popularity — they are pricing the expected vet bills those predispositions produce. Read the French Bulldog's row carefully, too: its range starts the lowest in this group and ends the highest, because it spans an insurer's thin-profile example price and standard-profile market medians at two different annual limits. Range width is information, not noise.

The cheapest dogs to insure

The bottom of the table is mostly small, long-lived breeds with unremarkable claim profiles — plus a couple of surprises.

The very cheapest figures carry a caveat: the Chihuahua's $11.16/month floor, for example, is one insurer's example price for a thin coverage profile — a $1,000 deductible at 70% reimbursement, for a dog in Texas — not a market median, and the same breed's standard-profile figures sit higher inside its range. And cheap premiums are not the same as cheap ownership: the Dachshund is inexpensive to insure as a young adult, yet its defining risk — back surgery for intervertebral disc disease — is precisely the kind of bill that its senior figures begin to reflect.

Cats: the whole ranking fits in a narrow band

All 8 published cat breeds sit between $23 and $29/month as young adults — the entire cat table spans less than the gap between two adjacent breeds at the top of the dog table. Pedigree and hairless breeds price highest; the mixed-heritage Domestic Shorthair and the Siamese price lowest.

One condition recurs across the pedigree cats: hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is listed for the Maine Coon, Ragdoll, Bengal, British Shorthair and Sphynx alike — which is why five breeds with little else in common cluster within a few dollars of each other here.

Why the ranges are wide — and why we rank by midpoint

A breed's range is built from published figures produced under different coverage settings: annual limits of $5,000 versus unlimited, deductibles from $250 to $1,000, reimbursement at 70% versus 90%. The low end of a range is usually a thin profile and the high end a rich one, for the same dog. Ranking by the midpoint keeps any single source's profile from deciding a breed's position, at the cost of hiding that width — which is why every breed page prints the full range with its sources, and why how pet insurance works is worth reading before any of these numbers.

Choosing a pet? Read the premium as information

A premium is the insurance market's actuarial opinion of a breed's expected vet costs. A breed that costs twice as much to insure is, on the evidence insurers price from, roughly twice as expensive to keep healthy — before food, grooming, training or your time enter the calculation. That does not make the expensive breeds bad choices; it makes the premium a budget line to plan alongside the purchase price, not a surprise to discover afterwards. Young-adult figures are also only the opening chapter: premiums climb steeply with age, and the senior ranking looks quite different from this one.

To price a specific breed at a specific age, use the cost calculator — it draws on the same published data, band by band.

Keep reading

• How pet insurance works
• Is pet insurance worth it?
• Pet insurance cost by state
• Pet insurance for senior pets

Or run your own numbers in the breed-by-breed cost calculator — pick a breed and an age band and it prices the same published data used across this site.