One in five dog owners never washes the bed. Only 7.1 percent of those who do wash it weekly. Full results, question wording and limitations from our 990-respondent survey.
In 2022 we went looking for data on a simple question: what do people actually do with a dog bed once it gets dirty?
There was none. Not a study, not a survey, nothing public. Plenty of articles telling you to replace your dog's bed every year or wash it every week, none of them citing anybody. So we ran the survey ourselves.
990 dog owners answered. Here is what they said.
We are a dog bed company, so read this with that in mind. We have published the exact question wording, how we found respondents, the response counts and the limitations below, including the findings that do not help us. The numbers are what they are.
One in five people never wash the bed at all
We asked what people do when it is time to clean their dog's bed.
| When it is time to clean your dog's bed, do you: | Share |
|---|---|
| Wash it | 79.8% |
| Throw it away and buy a new one | 10.8% |
| Do not wash it, because it is not possible | 9.4% |
20.2% of dog owners are not washing the bed. Roughly half of those throw it out and buy another one. The other half have a bed they physically cannot clean.
That second group is the one nobody talks about. Nearly one in ten dog owners owns a bed that cannot be washed, and so simply does not wash it.
There is also a group this question does not capture: the people who do wash it and find the smell comes straight back anyway, because the urine is in the foam core rather than the cover.
And most of the people who do wash it, do not wash it often
Of the 788 people who said they wash the bed, we asked how often.
| How often do you wash it? | Share |
|---|---|
| Once a week | 7.1% |
| Once every two weeks | 18.4% |
| Once a month | 51.7% |
| Once every six months or more | 22.7% |
The standard advice you will find everywhere is to wash a dog bed weekly. 7.1% of washers actually do. Nearly three quarters go a month or longer between washes.
So the real picture is not that people wash their dog's bed every week. It is that one in five never washes it, and most of the rest wash it monthly at best.
62% replace the bed at least once a year
| How often do you replace your dog's bed? | Share |
|---|---|
| Every six months or less | 21.4% |
| Every year | 40.9% |
| Every three years or more | 37.8% |
62.2% buy a new dog bed at least once a year. One in five does it twice a year or more.
Worth being even-handed: 37.8% keep a bed for three years or longer, so this is not universal. But for most owners the dog bed is a consumable, replaced on a cycle closer to a pillow than a piece of furniture.
We looked at where those beds end up in a separate piece on dog beds and landfill.
81% would be glad to never wash one again
We asked how people would feel if they never had to wash a dog bed again. The options were Ecstatic or Happy, Free, and Indifferent.
65.1% chose Ecstatic or Happy. 15.9% chose Free. 19.0% were Indifferent.
Four out of five people had a positive emotional response to the idea of the chore disappearing. That is a strong result for a piece of laundry, and it says the task is not neutral. People resent it.
90% think the bed is a hygiene problem
90.3% said they believe their dog's bed has the potential to harbor allergens or germs.
Put that next to the washing data and you get the finding we found most striking. Nine in ten owners believe the bed is unhygienic. One in five never washes it. Most of the rest wash it monthly.
People are not unaware. They know, and they are not doing it anyway, which points at the task being the barrier rather than the knowledge. The published guidance, including what the CDC recommends for pet bedding, says weekly. Our data says almost nobody is anywhere near that.
And half of us are lying on it
52.0% said they or their children sometimes play or lie on the dog's bed.
This was the question we were least sure about including, and it returned one of the clearest splits in the whole survey. The dog bed is not furniture that only the dog touches.
Why we ran this
We built a bed you wipe instead of wash, and then checked whether the problem was real.
The Birchwood Bed has a sealed orthopedic foam core inside a wipe-clean shell. There is no cover to strip, no wash cycle, and nothing for liquid to soak into.
SEE THE BEDMedium $212 · Large $268 · Extra Large $320
Free shipping in the continental US.
One more thing, about a statistic you have probably read
Search for dog bed hygiene and you will find, over and over, that dog beds are "one of the top ten germiest items in your home." It is usually attributed to a university researcher, and it is repeated as established fact across dozens of sites.
We went looking for the underlying study. We could not find one. No paper, no dataset, no methodology, no sample size.
The research that claim is often implied to come from is the NSF International household germ study, which swabbed thirty household items in twenty two homes. Pet bowls ranked fourth and pet toys seventh. Dog beds were never tested. They are not in the study.
We have no interest in defending dog bed hygiene, and our own data says most people are not washing theirs. But the number everyone quotes does not appear to exist, and we would rather say so than repeat it.
Methodology, and what is wrong with it
If we are going to publish numbers we should tell you how we got them.
Sample. 990 dog owners. Responses collected between October 2022 and April 2024, with 99 percent arriving between October 2022 and May 2023.
How we found them. Respondents were approached cold by direct message on Instagram and chose for themselves whether to answer. They were not customers, and they were not following us when we approached them. Most followed only after being asked to take part. There was no panel, no quota and no incentive.
Method. Online questionnaire, self-reported, single choice per question. Question wording is reproduced verbatim in the tables above. Base sizes vary slightly by question because not every respondent answered every one; the replacement, cleaning, feeling, hygiene and lying-on-the-bed questions have a base of 988, and the washing frequency question has a base of 787 because it was only asked of people who said they wash the bed.
Who the dogs were. 95.4% of respondents said their dog uses a dog bed. Of those who gave a weight, 87.4% had dogs of 23 lbs or more, with 49.0% in the 56 to 90 lb range. This is a sample weighted towards medium and large dogs.
Limitations, plainly.
1. We funded it and we sell dog beds. We had a commercial interest in the answers. You should weigh that.
2. Respondents chose to answer. Because the approach was cold rather than sent to our own audience, this is not a survey of our customers telling us what we wanted to hear. But anyone who replied still selected themselves, which makes it a convenience sample and not a census-matched panel. No valid margin of error can be calculated from it, and we are not going to print one.
3. Self-reported hygiene behavior is flattering. People over-report washing and under-report never washing. Our 20.2% never-wash figure should be read as a floor, not an estimate. The true number is likely higher.
4. "Dog bed" was not defined for respondents. It covers a cheap pad, a folded blanket and a premium orthopedic bed. Replacement cycles mean different things across those.
5. The replacement question offered three options (six months or less, one year, three years or more) with no two-year option, which compresses the middle of the distribution.
None of that makes the findings worthless. It makes them what they are: the first published numbers on a question nobody else has asked, from a brand that will tell you where the soft spots are.
The claim we will stand behind
No peer-reviewed study and no publicly available survey has measured what dog owners actually do with a soiled dog bed. We asked 990 of them, and the answer is that one in five does not clean it at all, most of the rest clean it monthly at best, and nine in ten believe it is a hygiene problem while doing so.
If anyone has better data, we would genuinely like to see it.
If you are reading this because the bed in your house is being soiled nightly, the practical guide is here: what actually works in a bed for an incontinent or senior dog.
Stevie Hatch is the founder of Birchwood & Bark. Full question wording and response counts are reproduced above. Raw response data contains respondent contact details and is not published.
