How Often Should You Brush Your Dog?

By Meghan Jaskot, DVM

Grooming & Coat Care · August 16, 2026 · 4 min read

How often you should brush your dog depends on coat type first, season second — not a single weekly rule.

The fork isn’t “how often” — it’s “what coat am I actually working with.” A short-haired Beagle and a double-coated Husky are not on the same brushing calendar, and treating them like they are is how mats and skipped sessions both happen.

I’ve had this conversation more times than I can count with owners who show up for a nail trim and mention, almost as an aside, that they haven’t brushed their dog “in a while.” One that sticks with me: a seven-year-old Golden Retriever, about 68 pounds, who came in for a routine visit in late spring. The owner hadn’t changed anything about their routine — same weekly brush-out they’d done for years — but the dog was mid coat-blow and had gone from “a little extra fur on the couch” to a solid mat forming behind both ears and along the hind legs in under three weeks. Nothing was wrong with the dog. The routine just hadn’t kept pace with the season. We worked through it with a slicker brush and an undercoat rake over two sessions rather than one, and the owner moved to near-daily brushing for about six weeks until the coat settled back down.

Short coats get away with the least effort

Dogs like Beagles, Boxers, and Labradors have a single, close-lying coat that doesn’t tangle or mat the way longer or double coats do. According to the American Kennel Club, thorough coat-brushing and combing are more integral to a pet’s overall coat health than bath frequency itself — and for short-haired breeds, a once-a-week pass with a rubber curry brush or bristle brush is usually enough to lift loose hair, distribute skin oils, and catch any early skin issues before they become a bigger problem. You can go a little longer between sessions without real consequence. You can’t skip it for a month and expect the same result.

Medium and long coats need a real schedule, not a reminder

This is where owners most often underestimate the gap. Medium-haired and double-coated dogs — Shelties, Corgis, Retrievers — generally need brushing two to three times a week, and long-haired or high-maintenance coats like Poodles, Poodle mixes, and heavy double coats such as Akitas and Great Pyrenees genuinely do better with daily brushing. Curly and wavy coats fall into that same daily-or-close-to-it category, because those coats tangle at the base before it’s visible on the surface. If you’re deciding between a dog nail grinder and a proper coat brush kit for a new dog, the brush is the one that protects skin health day to day — the grinder solves a different, less frequent problem.

The undercoat is the part people skip, and it’s the part that mats

Here’s the piece that trips owners up even when they’re brushing “enough”: brushing the visible top coat and skipping the undercoat. On double-coated breeds, the soft insulating undercoat sheds dense fur that, left unmanaged, gets pushed toward the skin instead of shedding out — and that’s exactly how mats form, not from the outer coat being neglected. Preventive Vet is direct about this: matting is a coat-care failure, not bad luck, and it happens fastest in the areas with the most friction — behind the ears, in the armpits, around the collar line. An undercoat rake, used alongside a slicker brush, is what actually gets underneath rather than skimming the surface.

Seasonal shedding is the other variable owners forget to plan around. During a coat blow, a dog that’s fine on a twice-weekly schedule the rest of the year may genuinely need daily brushing for several weeks to keep pace with the volume of hair coming loose. It’s not a permanent change to the routine — it’s a temporary one, and it ends when the coat settles.

Where I land

I don’t think there’s a single honest number for “how often should I brush my dog,” and I’d push back on any guide that gives you one without asking what coat you’re working with. My actual recommendation: know your dog’s coat category, brush at the low end of that range as a floor, and treat shedding season as a signal to step it up rather than a surprise. If you’re inconsistent about brushing and also inconsistent about nail trims, that’s usually a sign the whole at-home routine needs a rework — and it might be worth reading through at-home grooming versus a professional groomer before you decide where to put your time.

The dogs I see with the fewest coat problems aren’t the ones with the fanciest brush. They’re the ones whose owners treat brushing as a fixed part of the week, not an occasional catch-up project. That’s the whole difference, in my experience — consistency beats intensity almost every time.