What drives your pet insurance premium
Three things set the price of a policy: your dog's breed risk, your dog's age, and your ZIP code. Pick your dog below and see how each one applies — plus the real US average to compare against.
Your dog
Your premium factors
Breed risk tier
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State premium index
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Age effect
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Real US average, accident & illness
$70/month
$836 a year for a dog, per NAPHIA's 2026 report. Compare any quote you receive against this line.
Documented conditions driving this tier
Ready for a real number?
Only a carrier can price your actual dog. Request quotes from several with identical settings and compare the spread.
Compare insurersAlso see the full breed profile.
Not a quote, not an estimate, and not an offer of insurance. The risk tier is derived from documented breed health data; the state index is arithmetic on NAPHIA's published state distribution. Neither is a premium.
How each factor is derived
Breed risk tier
Each breed in our database carries a list of documented conditions, each tagged high, moderate, or low risk from veterinary prevalence literature and breed-club health surveys. The tier counts the high-risk entries: none or one is lower risk, two to three ismoderate, four or more is elevated. This is a count of documented conditions, not a price — but it is the same signal an underwriter starts from.
State premium index
NAPHIA publishes, for every state, each state's share of US insured pets and its share of US premium. Dividing premium share by pet share gives the average premium contributed by an insured pet in that state relative to the national average. It is a two-number division you can reproduce 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.
Age effect
We describe the direction rather than a multiplier. Premiums rise with age across every carrier and every breed, and the increase steepens after roughly age seven, when cancer, heart disease, and chronic conditions begin to dominate claims. We do not publish a numeric age factor because no public source establishes one — and because the magnitude varies by carrier, breed, and plan.
What we deliberately leave out
Deductible, reimbursement percentage, and annual limit are the three levers you control directly, and they move the price more than any breed characteristic. They are not inputs here because their effect is a matter of plan design rather than breed data. Readhow to choose a plan for those trade-offs.
Pet insurance FAQ
Why does this tool not show a dollar amount?
Because there is no public dataset of breed-level pet insurance premiums. Insurers file rates by ZIP code and underwrite each dog individually, so a "typical" breed price does not exist to look up. Any site that shows you one is multiplying two guesses together. What we can show you is the real national average, the real state pattern, and the breed risk factors that underwriters actually use.
So how do I find out what my dog will cost to insure?
Request quotes from at least three carriers using identical settings — same annual limit, same deductible, same reimbursement percentage. Spreads of 30% or more for identical coverage are routine, so one quote tells you almost nothing. Compare the results against the NAPHIA national average on this page to see where your dog lands.
Why do some breeds cost more to insure?
Premiums track expected claim costs. Breeds with high-prevalence hereditary conditions generate more and larger claims, so insurers price them higher. The breed risk tier below is built from the documented conditions in our database — it tells you the direction and roughly how strong the effect is, but not a price.
When is the best time to enroll a dog?
As early as possible. No US pet insurer covers pre-existing conditions, so every diagnosis that happens before enrollment is permanently excluded. A policy bought while your dog is young and healthy is both the cheapest and the only one that will cover the conditions that develop later.