Almost everything on this page follows from a decision taken in the 1890s.
Before it, the Bulldog was a working animal: “a muscular and athletic animal bred and used to attack bulls for sport”, closer in build to a Staffordshire Bull Terrier than to the dog we sell today. Bull-baiting was banned in 1835. Show breeders then rebuilt it for the ring, and by the end of the 1890s they had an animal with “more exaggerated conformation than its ancestors — in particular, a shorter face with a protruding underjaw, heavier build and bowed forelegs.”
Critics called the result delicate and degenerate. Their complaints (short lives, heat intolerance, difficult births, skin disease, noisy breathing) are the same five headings this page has to cover 130 years later.
The breed ranks tenth in the United States for 2025, down one place from ninth the year before.
Fifty pounds, forty pounds, and no height at all
The panel above shows a weight range for each sex. The document those ranges trace back to does not use ranges. The American breed standard names a single target: “The size for mature dogs is about 50 pounds; for mature bitches about 40 pounds.” One word is doing a lot of work there, and it is “about”. The spread above is our dataset’s arithmetic around those two points. We went looking for a large weighed-population dataset for this breed and did not find one, so read the panel as the show ring’s intention.
Height is stranger. The standard gives no figure for it at all. It gives a ratio instead. “The circumference of the skull in front of the ears should measure at least the height of the dog at the shoulders.” Define a breed so that its head is as big around as its legs are long, and you get this silhouette by design.
One thing this size makes easy. Most of our growth warnings concern very large dogs, and the largest published growth standards stop at 40 kg of adult weight, or 88 lb. A Bulldog is little over half that, and our own model was fitted across this band, so the table below sits inside the range the maths was built for.
Three lifespan figures that mostly agree
You will meet 9.8 years, 7.39 years and 7.2 years. All three are real UK measurements. Unlike some flat-faced breeds, where published lifespans differ by a factor of three, these sit close enough together to be useful.
| Figure | What it measures | Sample |
|---|---|---|
| 9.8 years | modelled median survival | 584,734 dogs, 155 purebreds |
| 7.39 years (95% CI 7.08–7.69) | life expectancy at birth, from a life table | 476 Bulldogs |
| 7.2 years (IQR 4.9–9.3) | median age of dogs that died in one year | 181 deaths among 1,621 Bulldogs |
The top row comes from the biggest longevity study yet run on UK dogs. Its hazard ratio for this breed was 1.8 (95% CI 1.7–1.8), roughly 1.8 times the rate of dying at any given age. Dogs overall reached a median of 12.5 years. The same paper sorted purebreds by skull shape and gave three separate results: medium-muzzled breeds reached 12.8 years, flat-faced breeds 11.2 years on 88,103 dogs and 40,644 deaths, and long-muzzled breeds 12.1 years. So the flat face costs about a year and a half, and this breed loses roughly another year and a half beyond that.
The middle row is a life table, which asks a different question: given the death rates seen at every age, how long would a newborn be expected to live? For 476 English Bulldogs the answer was 7.39 years, against 11.23 years across 30,563 dogs of all kinds.
The bottom row is the bluntest. Records from 1,621 Bulldogs in 2013 included 181 deaths, and half of those dogs were under 7.2 years old. Females outlived males, 7.9 years against 6.7 (P = 0.021). Only 110 of the 181 deaths had a cause written down, and among those heart disease led at 13 dogs (11.8%), then tumours at 12 (10.9%) and brain disorders at 10 (9.1%).
One caution applies to every prevalence figure below. This is a young population: Bulldogs in a 2016 sample had a median age of 2.65 years against 4.42 years for other dogs. Diseases of old age get counted less often because fewer of these dogs reach old age.
What they are like at home
Start with the limit on any sentence beginning “this breed is”. A survey of 18,385 dogs, 2,155 of them genotyped, found that “Breed explains just 9% of behavioral variation in individuals.” The other 91% is the dog in front of you.
Now the gap. The cross-breed aggression survey used on our other pages, the C-BARQ comparison, needed at least 45 dogs per breed and covered 33 breeds recruited online plus 11 through breed clubs. We read both lists. The Bulldog is in neither, so no ranking exists and we will not invent one.
What we can offer instead is dull and real. In UK vet records for 2016, aggression was noted in 44 of 2,662 Bulldogs (1.7%) against 498 of 22,039 other dogs (2.3%). The odds ratio was 0.79, and its confidence interval crossed 1, so that is not a real difference. Unwanted behaviour of any kind was logged in 124 Bulldogs (4.7%) against 5.3% of the comparison dogs, again no real difference. Records catch only what got written down. That is a low bar, but it beats a stereotype.
What owners say when asked properly
638 Bulldog owners, part of a 2,168-owner study also covering Pugs and French Bulldogs, got two questions that pull in opposite directions.
Would you get this breed again? Across all three breeds 93.0% said yes, with no significant difference between them. Would you recommend it to a first-time owner? Only 56.2% of Bulldog owners said yes, below French Bulldog owners at 64.6% and Pug owners at 73.7%.
Their reasons for recommending it were personality, tolerance of a small quiet household, and suitability around children. Their reasons against were health costs, ethical worries about how the dogs are bred, and maintenance: snoring, shedding, cleaning. People who love this dog are noticeably reluctant to hand one to a beginner.
The first two years
The months when they stop listening
Adolescence is documented, not folklore. The study behind it carries two separate groups of young guide dogs. Carers scored 285 of them for trainability at 5, 8 and 12 months, and 8 months was the low point. Trainers who knew those same dogs less well scored them higher at that age. A second group of 93 dogs was given a real sit command at 5 and 8 months, and they ignored it for their own carer but not for a stranger. Two groups, not one, but the same relationship phase showing up twice.
Owner complaints follow the same curve. Across a UK puppy cohort, the peak came at the 12-month survey, where 42.1% of owners (513 of 1,219) flagged at least one unwanted behaviour, before the figure fell back to 29.9% by 18 months.
Neither study included Bulldogs. What is specific here is what else is happening in those same months.
Two dates that belong in the first year
Cherry eye is the prolapse of the gland behind the third eyelid, and in 905,543 UK dogs the median age at first diagnosis was 0.63 years, before eight months old. Dogs under one year had 10.82 times the odds (95% CI 9.17–12.76) of dogs aged two to four. A red bulge in the corner of a young dog’s eye is a same-week appointment.
The other date is the first birthday. Airway grading for this breed starts at 12 months, which is when your own dog becomes gradeable.
Across their life
None of this is a diagnosis, and plenty of Bulldogs never meet most of it. Treat it as a list of subjects to put to your vet.
The scale first. Of 2,662 Bulldogs in UK first-opinion practice during 2016, 2,017 (75.8%) had at least one disorder recorded that year, against 65.9% of 22,039 other dogs: 2.04 times the odds (95% CI 1.85–2.25). Of 43 specific disorders examined, the breed had raised odds for 24 and lowered odds for 6.
Skin comes first, not breathing
Skin disorders of any kind were recorded in 779 of those 2,662 Bulldogs (29.3%), against 12.4% of the comparison dogs. Within that, skin fold dermatitis, inflammation in the damp trench between two folds, hit 178 Bulldogs (6.7%) against 45 of 22,039 other dogs (0.2%). The odds ratio, 38.12 (26.86–54.10), is the highest of any disorder measured in the breed. Sore inflamed feet reached 4.8%, and demodicosis, the mite overgrowth that follows a struggling skin barrier, 2.1%. In an earlier year of records, pyoderma appeared in 142 of 1,621 Bulldogs (8.8%, 95% CI 7.4–10.2). Ear canal inflammation was logged in 431 Bulldogs (16.2%) against 1,600 of 22,039 other dogs (7.3%).
The standard is candid about the cause. It calls for a head and face “covered with heavy wrinkles”, and at the throat “two loose pendulous folds, forming the dewlap”. Fold disease is a consequence of the written breed, not a deviation from it, and it is the part of this page you can most affect day to day, by drying and checking every crease as routine.
The airway, and the two things worth measuring
BOAS is brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome: soft tissue crowding an airway that was shortened faster than its contents were.
How common it looks depends on the method. Vet records show it in 112 of 2,662 Bulldogs (4.2%) in one year, against 0.2% of other dogs, an odds ratio of 19.20 (13.31–27.69). Exercise-test the dogs instead and the picture changes. Cambridge researchers assessed 201 bulldogs and 51.2% were affected. A record counts what a vet typed. A test counts what is there.
Owners hear less of it than the score says. Among 2,168 owners of flat-faced dogs, including 638 with Bulldogs, 39.1% of the dogs (847 of them) scored in the range that signals real airway obstruction. Bulldogs came out with the highest breathing and sleep-disruption scores of the three breeds. Yet only 2.4% of Bulldog owners called sleeping a problem, and across the whole survey just 17.9% thought their dog had a breathing problem at all. What Bulldog owners did notice more than the others was eating: 7.2% flagged it, against 4.1% and 4.2%.
That Cambridge work modelled each breed separately, which is why this page can be specific rather than general. In bulldogs the final model held six variables and explained 37% of the difference between affected and unaffected dogs. Two conformation measures survived it:
- Skull index, skull width divided by skull length. Each 0.01 rise carried an odds ratio of 1.05 (1.01–1.09). A wider, shorter skull, in other words.
- Neck girth ratio, neck circumference divided by chest circumference. Each 0.01 rise carried 1.29 (1.18–1.43).
The authors put one usable cutoff in the paper, and it is narrower than it is usually quoted: “A NGR higher than 0.71 in male bulldogs was predictive of BOAS with approximately 70% sensitivity and specificity.” Male bulldogs. It is not a threshold for females, and it is not a threshold for other flat-faced breeds.
Two more findings from that model. Body condition score mattered, at an odds ratio of 1.56 (1.07–2.3), so a heavy Bulldog is a worse-breathing Bulldog, and obesity was already recorded in 253 of the 2,662 dogs (9.5%). Our guide to judging a puppy’s weight by hand is the practical end of that. Narrowed nostrils were present in 44.2% of the bulldogs measured, a lower share than in the other two breeds, and they did not survive into the final bulldog model.
Before you reach for a tape measure, read the authors’ verdict on their own method: “most of the conformational soft tape measurements in the present study had poor inter-observer agreement in all three breeds”.
The grade that a supreme court now leans on
Cambridge vets and the Royal Kennel Club built the Respiratory Function Grading Scheme so that breathing could be scored by a trained vet rather than guessed at. A dog is graded from 12 months on a scale of 0 to III, and the scheme says the check “should be repeated every two years for their lifetime, or until you stop using them for breeding.”
It reaches North America too. The Orthopedic Foundation for Animals licensed the exam. Grade 0 means the dog “is clinically unaffected and free of any respiratory signs of BOAS”. Grade III means it “is clinically affected and has severe respiratory signs of BOAS.”
How many breeds the North American scheme covers is, as we write, genuinely unclear, and the confusion is on OFA’s own page. An April 2026 update says thirteen more breeds “have been added to the list of breeds eligible for exams and official RFGS certification”, naming the Boxer, Boston Terrier, Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Pomeranian, Shih Tzu, Chihuahua and seven others. Further down, the same page still reads: “The screening program is currently open to Pugs, Bulldogs, and French Bulldogs.”
Both sentences are live on the page at once. The update is the newer of the two, so we would take it as current, but we are not going to tell you the older line is not there. None of this changes anything for a Bulldog, which has been covered since the scheme began.
Here is why that grade matters more for this breed than any other. Norway’s Supreme Court ruled on Bulldog breeding on 10 October 2023, and it did not ban it. The majority held that breeding was lawful “provided this is done within a clear framework which ensures breeding minimises the incidence of dogs suffering extreme BOAS”: in practice, only dogs graded 0 or 1. Norwegian commentary notes that this matched what the country’s kennel club already asked for.
That history is easy to report wrongly. A 2022 veterinary paper stated that breeding of the breed was banned in Norway. It was, when that was written, and then the higher court took a different view.
For a buyer this collapses into one request: both parents’ grades, with dates. The Royal Kennel Club’s own list for this breed calls breathing grading and eye testing good practice, and adds hip scoring, elbow scoring and a hyperuricosuria DNA test (a urinary stone risk) as best practice. All checkable, all better than a photograph.
Birth is the statistic almost nobody quotes
If you are thinking about breeding, plan around this number before any other. A survey of 22,005 litters across 151 breeds found the Bulldog delivering 248 of 288 litters by caesarean section, 86.1%. Only two other breeds passed 80%: the Boston Terrier at 92.3% of 52 litters and the French Bulldog at 81.3% of 80.
The limitation is sampling. Breed-club members reported their own litters, and clubs are not a random slice of breeders. But a figure that far above the field is no artefact. Here surgery is the expected route.
The eyes
Two conditions dominate, and both come from the shape of the socket and lids rather than from an infection.
Cherry eye. Recorded in 151 of 2,662 Bulldogs (5.7%) in one year, against 39 of 22,039 other dogs (0.2%): an odds ratio of 26.79 (18.61–38.58). Across the whole 905,543-dog population, where the disorder ran at 0.20% overall, English Bulldogs reached 4.75% (4.32–5.19) and 24.08 times the odds of crossbred dogs (20.62–28.13).
Entropion, an eyelid that rolls inward so the lashes rub the eye. Recorded in 104 Bulldogs (3.9%) against 69 of 22,039 others (0.3%), an odds ratio of 11.61 (8.44–15.98). A study of 2,250,417 dogs under care in 2019, published in 2025, put conformational eyelid disorders at 0.36% of dogs overall. The English Bulldog was the commonest breed among its 3,029 confirmed cases, at 433 dogs, or 14.30% of those cases.
Dry eye was in there too, at 2.0% of Bulldogs and 12.24 times the odds (8.33–17.98). Any squinting or held-shut eye is worth a call.
The tail, the spine, and a finding that is not a disease
The screw tail is not a cosmetic quirk. It is a gene.
Researchers who genotyped 177 dogs from screw-tail breeds, including 33 Bulldogs, found a frameshift variant in DVL2, a gene in the signalling pathway that lays out the skeleton in the embryo. Every dog tested carried two copies except six Boston Terriers. In the authors’ words, “This DVL2 variant was fixed in Bulldogs and French Bulldogs”. It “segregated with thoracic and caudal vertebral column malformations in a recessive manner with incomplete and variable penetrance”.
Fixed means there is no unaffected line to breed toward. The tail the standard describes (“If ‘screwed,’ the bends or kinks should be well defined”) is the visible end of the instruction that also shapes the vertebrae.
Now the part that gets misreported. Malformed vertebrae are common on imaging. A 2024 review of the published scans points back to one 2017 study, which found thoracic hemivertebrae, wedge-shaped vertebrae that never formed squarely, in 73.2% of 41 neurologically normal English Bulldogs. Normal is the operative word. Those dogs were scanned because they were fine.
In the clinic the breed goes the other way. Spinal cord disorders were recorded in just 6 of 2,662 Bulldogs (0.2%) against 232 of 22,039 other dogs (1.0%), an odds ratio of 0.31 (0.14–0.71), significantly fewer, not more. An X-ray finding is not a disease. Hold both facts at once.
Heat
Across 905,543 dogs in one year, 0.42% of Bulldogs had a heat-related illness event (95% CI 0.30–0.58). Chow Chows came in at 0.50%. Small percentages, and then the figure that gives them weight: 14.18% of heat events across all breeds were fatal (11.08–17.96).
This is the risk you have most control over. Walk early, skip the car, and treat heavy panting on a warm day as an emergency.
The hips, and why the number is worse than it looks
This is the single starkest figure on this page, and it needs the bias explained before the number, not after.
Screening registries are voluntary. Owners pay for the X-ray, then choose whether to send it in. When researchers followed 93 X-rayed dogs through that decision, only 49 sets of films were ever submitted, and normal hips were 8.2 times as likely to be sent as abnormal ones. So a registry’s percentages are pulled toward good results. On top of that, the dogs who get screened at all are mostly breeding candidates, dogs somebody already thought were worth the money.
Now the number. The Orthopedic Foundation for Animals’ breed statistics, current to August 2026, cover 1,654 Bulldogs evaluated for hips. Of those, 447 were graded normal (27.0%), 36 were borderline (2.2%), and 1,171 were dysplastic, 70.8%. Of the dysplastic dogs, 200 were graded severe.
OFA ranks 219 breeds by that percentage. The Bulldog is third. Only the Olde English Bulldogge (73% of 318) and the Pug (73% of 1,281) come above it, and both are the same basic project: a compact dog bred to a heavy, wide-fronted build.
Read that against the bias and it gets worse rather than better. Seven in ten came back dysplastic in the sample most likely to look good: self-selected, paid for, and submitted by choice. Whatever the true rate across all Bulldogs is, it is not lower than 70.8%.
Elbows tell the same story on a smaller sample. Of 1,053 elbow evaluations, 615 were normal (58.4%), 14 borderline (1.3%) and 424 dysplastic, 40.3%. On elbows the breed ranks second, behind only the Chow Chow.
For scale, the largest published analysis of registry radiographs covered 1,056,852 hip records and 275,129 elbow records from 1970 to April 2015 across 60 breeds. A breed needed more than 1,000 hip records to qualify, and the Bulldog is not among the 60. At the clean end of that analysis sit the German Shorthaired Pointer, Flat-Coated Retriever, Belgian Tervuren and Belgian Sheepdog, all under 4%, measured the same way, out of the same registry, with the same submission bias working in their favour too.
One honest complication. Hip dysplasia is graded on how the joint looks on film, and a breed built to this shape may sit outside what the grading scale was drawn for. A dog can be graded dysplastic and never limp. So do not read 70.8% as “seven in ten Bulldogs go lame”. Read it as “the joint shape this breed is bred to is, on the standard measure, abnormal in most of the dogs anyone has measured.”
Which is why the primary-care picture reads milder, and both things are true at once. Musculoskeletal problems of any kind were recorded in 260 of 2,662 Bulldogs (9.8%) against 8.7% of other dogs, an odds ratio of 1.52 (1.32–1.75). Patellar luxation, a kneecap slipping out of its groove, ran at 1.5% with an odds ratio of 1.51 (1.07–2.13). Lameness and arthritis showed no real difference, and remember the age gap, since arthritis is largely a disease of older dogs.
The gap between 70.8% on film and 9.8% in the consulting room is the most useful thing here. Most of these dogs are not being brought in for their hips. That does not make the radiographs wrong. It means the disease is common, often quiet, and worth asking about before it is loud.
What else the registry counts
The same breed statistics cover screening tests that barely exist for other breeds, which tells you what this breed is watched for.
| Test | Evaluated | Abnormal | Also |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hips | 1,654 | 70.8% | 2.2% borderline |
| Elbows | 1,053 | 40.3% | 1.3% borderline |
| Tracheal hypoplasia | 2,338 | 6.0% | 7.1% equivocal |
| Respiratory function grading | 232 | 27.2% | — |
| Patellas | 3,690 | 5.6% | — |
| Eyes | 1,240 | 4.0% | — |
| Cystinuria | 618 | 6.3% affected | 38.3% carriers |
| Hyperuricosuria | 1,101 | 0.8% affected | 19.8% carriers |
| Congenital cardiac | 2,624 | 0% | 1 equivocal |
| Dentition | 72 | 19.4% | — |
| Hearing (BAER) | 100 | 3.0% | — |
Four rows are worth stopping on.
Tracheal hypoplasia (a windpipe that is narrow along its whole length, not just at the nose) is screened here because it is a known Bulldog problem. Add the 6.0% abnormal to the 7.1% equivocal and about one in eight evaluations was not clean. The breed sits top of that ranking, but be careful what that means: only five breeds are ranked for this test at all, because only flat-faced breeds submit for it. Being first of five is not being first of 219.
The respiratory grading result cuts against the research figure, and we would rather show you both than pick one. The scheme graded 232 Bulldogs and 27.2% came back affected. The exercise-test study earlier on this page found 51.2% of 201 bulldogs affected. Different populations, different thresholds, and the scheme is voluntary, but the two are far enough apart that no single number should be quoted as the breed’s BOAS rate.
The two urinary-stone DNA tests are the actionable rows. Cystinuria: 6.3% of 618 affected, and 38.3% carriers. Hyperuricosuria: 0.8% affected of 1,101, 19.8% carriers. These are cheap cheek-swab tests with unambiguous results, and a carrier bred to a carrier is where affected puppies come from. Ask.
The same denominator warning applies to cystinuria: six breeds are ranked, and this one leads them. What is worth carrying is not the placing but the carrier rate. Well over a third of the Bulldogs tested carried one copy, against 24% of French Bulldogs and none at all of the 698 Labradors screened.
The cardiac row is the good news, and it is real. Of 2,624 congenital cardiac evaluations, not one was abnormal. That fits the vet records, where this breed had lower odds of a heart murmur than other dogs.
Two caveats on the whole table. Every row is voluntary, so every row leans the way the hip row leans. And the totals differ wildly between tests (3,690 patella evaluations against 72 for dentition), so a low percentage on a small row is not reassurance.
What they get less of
Six disorders came out significantly lower, and they are findings rather than consolation. Retained baby teeth appeared in 1 dog of 2,662 (odds ratio 0.02) and fatty lumps in 1 (0.06). Gum disease reached 63 dogs (2.4%, odds ratio 0.23) against 12.6% of other dogs, itchy skin 10 (0.4%), fleas 23 (0.9%) and heart murmurs 17 (0.6%, odds ratio 0.47).
What we could not verify
A month-by-month Bulldog weight chart. Every one we opened was unsourced. The table here is our model’s output for a dog of this adult weight, not a record of what Bulldog puppies weighed.
Any daily exercise figure. No study measures this breed’s exercise needs. Since exertion is what exposes a marginal airway, a fixed minute count would be actively misleading.
That any line or breeder produces Bulldogs free of airway disease. Nothing we found supports it. Half the bulldogs in the one exercise-tested sample were affected. A geneticist who typed 102 registered bulldogs plus 37 seen at a teaching hospital concluded that whether the breed’s remaining diversity is “sufficient to use reverse selection to improve health … is questionable.” The checkable facts are the grades, not the pedigree.
Neck measurement as a home test. The 0.71 cutoff is real, but it applies to males only and the paper reports poor agreement between people measuring one dog. We will not hand you a number you cannot take reliably.
The minimum sample OFA requires before ranking a breed. We worked out what the rank counts by checking it against the underlying numbers, but OFA does not publish the threshold a breed must clear to appear at all. The smallest ranked hip entries sit around 100 evaluations, which is an observation, not a stated rule.
How this breed compares with others on temperament. The big cross-breed survey never enrolled it. Vet records show no raised odds of aggression, which is something, but it is not a personality profile.
Whether the breed’s breathing is improving. Grading has run for years and one national court now leans on it. We found no study measuring whether average grades have moved.