Our Methodology

A number with a tilde - like ~7% - is an estimate we derived, not a prevalence a study measured directly. The derivation is always written out in the note under that card, so you can check our work. Numbers without a tilde come straight from a published study.

From an odds ratio. Many studies report only relative risk: French Bulldogs have 5.4 times the odds of luxating patella compared with crossbreds (O'Neill et al. 2016). On its own that is not a probability. But the same study measured the all-dog baseline: 1.3% of 210,824 dogs. Applying the odds ratio to the baseline odds - not simple multiplication, which overstates risk for common conditions - gives roughly ~7% of French Bulldogs. We only do this conversion when a documented baseline exists, and the note names both the ratio and the baseline it was applied to.

From screening databases. For hip and elbow dysplasia, patella and thyroid disease we use the OFA screening database - for example, 19.7% of over 192,000 Golden Retriever hip x-rays submitted to OFA were graded dysplastic. These are voluntary submissions, biased toward breeder-screened dogs, so the true population rate may differ in either direction. Every OFA-derived number says so in its note.

Carrier frequencies are not disease rates. "~13% carriers" means 13% of tested dogs carry one copy of the gene - most of them will never develop the disease. We keep the word carriers in the number so the two never get confused.

When no baseline exists, we say it in plain words. If a study proved elevated odds but no baseline lets us compute a percentage, the card says "5.4x the average dog" instead of a made-up percent. And where nothing has been counted at all, it says Not studied yet or Documented, not counted. Bloat is the honest example: published lifetime figures exist for exactly two breeds (Great Dane 36.7%, Rottweiler 3.9%), so only those two pages show one - every other breed shows its relative odds and nothing more.

This is also why some pages carry fewer percentages than others: a rare breed with three honest numbers beats a popular breed with nine invented ones.

RealVetCost is built by a dog owner who is a UX designer and programmer - not a veterinarian, an insurance broker, or a financial advisor. The site started after a $1,200 emergency vet bill that no one had prepared us for. The goal is simple: publish the real numbers we wish we'd had, in plain language, with the sources shown.

Because we're not licensed professionals, we don't give medical or financial advice. We aggregate published data and explain it. For any decision about your pet's health or your money, talk to a licensed vet or advisor - and we say so on every page.

Treatment and procedure costs are compiled from published US veterinary cost data - veterinary hospital price lists, pet-insurance claim reports, published cost studies, and real invoices shared with us. We publish ranges, not single averages, because real vet bills vary by region, clinic, and severity.

Breed health risks draw on veterinary prevalence research, breed health surveys, and insurer condition data - how often a given breed actually develops a given condition. Where a solid figure exists we use it; where it doesn't, we say the risk is elevated rather than inventing a number.

Insurance mechanics - waiting periods, exclusions, deductibles, bilateral clauses - come straight from insurers' own policy documents and state regulations (for example the NAIC Pet Insurance Model Act), not from marketing pages.

Every profile and article carries a Sources section listing what we relied on. If a claim isn't sourced, treat it as our summary, not established fact.

Three numbers get confused constantly, including sometimes by us: annual diagnosis rate (how many dogs of this breed were diagnosed with a condition in a single year of vet records), lifetime risk (the odds a dog develops it at some point in its life), and relative risk (how this breed compares to dogs generally, not the odds of getting the disease at all).

A real example: German Boxers have the highest mast cell tumor rate of any breed studied. In the underlying study, that means about 1.9% of Boxers were diagnosed with a mast cell tumor in a single year of veterinary records - and their risk is roughly 10x the average dog's, which is what makes the breed notable. It does not mean "1 in 4 Boxers will get cancer," a version of this statistic we ourselves published and later corrected once we re-checked the source against the actual paper.

When you see a percentage on this site, check the evidence label next to it (§ "How we grade every risk number" above) and expand the note under the card for what exactly was measured, with numbered citations into that breed's source list. We'd rather a number look less dramatic and be right than the other way around.

The lifetime cost figure on each breed page is an estimate, not a bill you will receive. It adds three things across the breed's typical lifespan: routine care (checkups, vaccines, dental, parasite prevention), pet-insurance premiums at typical US rates, and the most likely breed-specific health issues weighted by how common they are.

It deliberately excludes food, grooming, and one-off emergencies we can't predict - so it is a floor for medical-and-insurance spending, not a total cost of ownership. We present it as an attributed estimate precisely because no one can know your pet's real bill in advance.

On some breed pages you'll see a band showing where that breed's lifetime cost sits against every other breed we profile. The band's low, median, and high points, and the "costs more than X% of breeds" figure, are calculated at build time from the full set of breed profiles on the site - so the comparison reflects our own dataset, not an outside claim.

As we deepen or correct individual breed data, these bands update automatically on the next build. The number is only ever as good as the underlying estimates in § 3.

Anything that could cost a reader real money or affect an animal's care gets extra scrutiny: laws, insurer rules, statistics, named studies, and treatment costs are each checked against a primary source, and we keep the exact quote we relied on. When sources disagree, we say so and give the range rather than pick the number that reads best.

We correct errors. If you find something wrong - a stale figure, a policy that changed, a broken assumption - email us and we'll fix it and note the update.

We earn revenue through affiliate links and advertising, explained in full on our Affiliate Disclosure. It doesn't change what we publish: we describe insurers' traps and weak points as plainly as their strengths, and we never present a figure to favor a partner. The whole point of the site is to be the source we couldn't find when we needed it.

Questions about how we arrived at any number? Email marcel@uxcode.cz.