Methodology
This page describes what Pawgraded publishes, where each figure comes from, and — just as importantly —what we refuse to publish because we cannot source it. It is written so you can check our work rather than take our word for it.
1. What we publish, and the source for each
| What | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Breed traits — size, weight, height, lifespan, energy, shedding, trainability, temperament | American Kennel Club breed standards and registry records, cross-checked against national kennel club standards (FCI and others). Where sources disagree on a range, we publish the wider range. |
| Health conditions and risk levels | Peer-reviewed veterinary literature — including the Royal Veterinary College's VetCompass programme — and breed-club health surveys. A condition is listed only where at least one credible source documents elevated prevalence in that breed. |
| US average premiums | NAPHIA 2026 State of the Industry Report (2026-06-21), covering the 2025 calendar year. NAPHIA aggregates data representing roughly 99% of US and Canadian pet health insurance premium. |
| Market spending context — category totals for US pet spending | American Pet Products Association (APPA), US pet industry expenditures. APPA publishes industry totals by category; it does not publish a per-dog figure publicly, which is why we do not quote one. |
| Largest claims paid and most common conditions claimed | NAPHIA 2026 State of the Industry Report, Section 6. These are settled claims reported by NAPHIA members, covering the 2025 calendar year. |
| Typical treatment cost ranges — the figures shown in breed guides | Indicative US ranges for the procedure or condition, published as a range and labelled as indicative. Veterinary prices vary by several multiples between a rural general practice and a metropolitan specialty hospital, so no single figure would be honest. These ranges are not from NAPHIA — the report publishes premiums and claim totals, not procedure prices — and they are not an input to any premium figure on this site. They feed only the severity grading described in section 4. |
| State premium index | Computed from NAPHIA's published state distribution: each state's share of US premium divided by its share of US insured pets. A two-number division, reproducible from the report. States with a pet share under 1% are marked as rough, because the report's one-decimal rounding dominates the result there. |
| Insurer coverage terms — limits, deductibles, reimbursement rates, waiting periods, exclusions | Each insurer's own policy documents and published plan pages, read directly. Terms change; we date the comparison page and re-check on a schedule. |
Every figure in that table is also collected in one place, with its source and reporting period attached to each number, in our pet insurance statistics page.
2. What we do not publish, and why
We do not publish a premium figure for any specific breed, or for any breed-and-state combination.
This is a deliberate limit, not an oversight. Pet insurers file rates by ZIP code, and underwriting runs on an individual dog's exact age, medical history, and chosen deductible and reimbursement level. There is no public dataset of breed-level or state-level premiums — not from NAPHIA, not from any state insurance regulator, not from any carrier.
Which means any site showing you "French Bulldog in California: $70–$120 per month" has invented that number. It is usually a plausible-sounding multiplication of a breed guess by a state guess, presented to four significant figures. It is not a rate, and treating it as one leads people to the wrong decision.
We used to publish figures like that. Earlier versions of this site generated per-breed and breed-by-state premium estimates from two internal numbers that had no documented source. We removed them. The only premium figures on Pawgraded today are the national averages from NAPHIA and the state index derived from NAPHIA's published distribution, both of which you can check against the source report.
3. How breed trait scores work
Each breed is scored 1–5 on energy, shedding, trainability, kid-friendliness, pet-friendliness, grooming needs, and barking. Scores are assigned against the full breed population — a 5 means top quintile, not "perfect." Every score starts from breed-club and registry descriptions, then is checked against at least one independent source (veterinary behavior literature or large owner surveys) before publication. A score is a population average, not a prediction about an individual dog.
4. How health risk levels are assigned
Each listed condition carries a high, moderate, orlow badge. The level combines documented prevalence in the breed with typical treatment cost: a common, expensive condition (hip dysplasia in large breeds, for example) ranks high; a rare or inexpensive one ranks low. The treatment-cost input is the indicative range described in section 1 — it moves a condition between severity bands, and it never becomes a dollar figure we publish as a rate. Risk levels are reviewed when new prevalence studies publish.
The "high-risk condition count" we rank breeds by is exactly that count — how many of a breed's five listed conditions are graded high-severity. It is a transparent metric rather than a model: you can reproduce any ranking on this site by opening the breed profiles and counting. It is also a proxy, not a price. Two breeds with two high-risk conditions each are treated as equal, even though an insurer's actuaries may not weight them equally. We use it because it is checkable, and because the alternative — a premium ranking — cannot be sourced at all.
5. How we rate pet insurers
Insurer ratings (0–5, one decimal) are an editorial assessment of published coverage terms. They weight annual limits and payout structure (35%), exclusions and waiting periods — especially for hereditary and cruciate conditions (30%), deductible and reimbursement flexibility (20%), and claims experience as reported in state regulator complaint indices and large public review corpora (15%).
Price is not an input to the rating. We cannot run a standardized quote panel across carriers without collecting ZIP-specific quotes for a fixed dog profile, and we do not do that. A carrier can be well rated here and still quote you more than a competitor for your specific dog — which is why the comparison page tells you to request quotes from several carriers with identical settings.
Affiliate relationships do not affect ratings. See ouraffiliate disclosure.
6. Corrections
We date-stamp every guide and update affected pages when a source changes — a new industry report, a revised policy document, a corrected prevalence figure. If you find an error, email[email protected] with the source, and we will correct it or explain why we read the source differently.