Puppy Weight Chart by Breed Size

A puppy weight chart maps the weight a puppy is expected to reach at each age, so a glance at the scales tells you whether your dog is growing at the usual pace for its size.

The trick is that there is no single curve. A Chihuahua and a Great Dane are the same species but follow growth paths so different that one chart could never serve both. The workable version is a set of curves grouped by adult size — toy, small, medium, large, and giant — each describing what share of adult weight a typical puppy has reached week by week. This guide explains how to read those curves, gives the expected percentages band by band, and shows what the numbers can and cannot settle.

How a Weight Chart Differs From a Milestone Chart

The phrase "growth chart" gets used for two different things, and mixing them up leads to the wrong worries. A weight chart is purely about mass: how many kilograms a puppy should carry at a given age, and whether yours is above or below that line. It is a feeding and size-planning tool.

A developmental milestone chart is a different document. It tracks when teeth come through, when the skeleton finishes maturing, and when behaviour settles — events that have little to do with the number on the scales and run on their own clocks. Those belong to a separate guide, and this page stays on the weight side throughout. If a puppy is hitting its expected weight but you have questions about teething or skeletal development, those are milestone questions, not weight-chart ones.

The Size Bands and Where Your Breed Fits

Every dog slots into one of five size bands, defined by the adult weight the breed is built to reach. Knowing the band is the first step, because it selects the curve your puppy should follow.

Toy breeds, under about 4 kg as adults, include the Chihuahua and the Pomeranian; they finish growing earliest. Small breeds, roughly 4 to 10 kg, cover dogs like the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. Medium breeds, around 10 to 25 kg, range from the French Bulldog to the Border Collie. Large breeds, 25 to 45 kg, include the Labrador and Golden Retriever. Giant breeds, over 45 kg, such as the Great Dane and Mastiff, take the longest to reach full size. For a mixed-breed puppy, estimate the adult weight first and let that pick the band rather than guessing from looks alone.

Expected Weight by Age, Band by Band

The table below is the heart of any weight chart: the percentage of adult weight a typical puppy of each band has reached at three checkpoints. Read it by finding your band's row, then multiplying your dog's expected adult weight by the percentage for its age.

The worked logic is simple. A medium-breed puppy expected to mature at 20 kg has reached about 47 percent of that by sixteen weeks, so it should weigh around 9.4 kg. The same arithmetic at six months (69 percent) puts it near 13.8 kg. The pattern across the rows is the real lesson: toy breeds are most of the way to adult weight by six months, while a giant breed is still under half-grown at the same age and keeps gaining well into its second year. To turn this into a daily number for the bowl, pair the expected weight with set daily feeding portions.

Reading Your Puppy's Position on the Curve

Plotting a puppy against the chart usually puts it on a percentile rather than dead on the median — a line a little above or below the centre. That position is information, not a grade. A puppy tracking the 40th percentile is simply a slightly smaller-than-average individual for its band, and one on the 60th is slightly larger; both are normal.

What matters is consistency. A puppy that holds its own line, wherever it sits, is growing exactly as it should. The signal to act on is a change of line — a steady tracker that suddenly climbs or drops across percentiles over a few weigh-ins. A climb is the more common and more correctable of the two, and is usually a portion question; the same logic drives an adult weight-management plan once a dog is grown. For the most precise read of where a named breed should sit, a breed-specific puppy weight tool compares your puppy directly against its own breed's range, while the size-class adult-weight estimator works from current weight when the breed is unknown.

A worked sequence shows the idea. Say a medium-breed puppy weighs 6.2 kg at twelve weeks, 9.0 kg at sixteen, and 11.3 kg at twenty, each landing close to the 45th percentile line for its band. The dog is not behind; it is simply a touch smaller than the median and growing along its own steady track. Had the same puppy instead read 6.2, then 7.0, then 7.4 kg, the flattening line rather than the below-median position would be the cue to review feeding and, if it persisted, to ask a vet.

Weighing Your Puppy So the Chart Means Something

A chart is only as good as the weights you plot on it, and home weighing is where most of the noise creeps in. A puppy that has just eaten a large meal or drunk deeply can read several percent heavier than the same puppy an hour later, and a wriggling pup on a swaying scale is hard to read at all. Because young puppies sit low on the completion curve, that small inconsistency translates into a larger swing in the apparent percentile.

A few habits keep the readings comparable from week to week. Weigh at the same time of day, ideally before a meal rather than after, and on the same scale each time. For a small puppy, a kitchen scale accurate to a few grams works well; for a larger one, step on a bathroom scale holding the puppy and subtract your own weight, repeating until two readings agree. Note the figure straight away rather than trusting memory, and plot it the same day.

Consistency matters more than precision to the gram. A chart built from weights all taken the same way shows a clean trend even when each reading is a little off in absolute terms, because the error is steady and the shape of the curve is what you are reading. One carefully taken weight a week beats three rushed ones, and it is the run of points, not any single dot, that tells you whether feeding needs a nudge.

What a Weight Chart Cannot Tell You

A weight chart predicts weight, and only weight. It cannot tell you whether a puppy's skeleton has finished maturing, whether its joints are sound, or whether a lean phase reflects a growth spurt or a problem. Those are clinical and developmental questions answered by physical examination and the developmental timeline, not by a kilogram figure.

It also says nothing about body condition. A puppy can land squarely on its expected weight while carrying too little muscle or too much fat, because the scale measures total mass rather than how that mass is distributed. Weight tracking works best read alongside a hands-on body assessment and, as growth winds down, a plan for timing the move to adult food. The chart is one instrument on the dashboard, not the whole panel.

When the Numbers Do Not Match the Breed Standard

Sometimes a puppy's plotted weight drifts away from the breed-standard line, and there are a few ordinary reasons before anything unusual. Measurement noise is the first: weighing a squirming puppy on a bathroom scale carries easily a few percent of error, which is amplified at young ages when the completion fraction is small. Re-weighing on a vet's floor scale often closes an apparent gap.

Genuine breed mixing is the second. A dog registered or assumed to be one breed may carry the frame of another, pulling its adult weight — and therefore its whole curve — toward a different band. When a chart and a puppy keep disagreeing, the adult-weight estimate is usually the part to revisit, not the puppy. Comparing how dogs grow with how cats age by comparison is a useful reminder that these curves are species- and size-specific, never one-size-fits-all.

Sources

The percentage-of-adult-weight figures follow the WALTHAM size-band canine growth standards published by Salt, Morris, German and colleagues in PLOS ONE in 2017, modelled from the records of more than five million dogs across five size bands up to 40 kg. Adult weight ranges by breed are taken from the American Kennel Club breed weight standards. The age at which each size reaches adult weight follows the American Kennel Club's veterinary-reviewed guidance on when puppies finish growing. The giant band above 40 kg was not separately modelled in the 2017 standards because of breed-to-breed variability, so giant-breed figures should be read as the widest estimates on the chart.