BreedQuest › Dog law, country by country

Dog law, country by country

Most of what a dog needs is the same everywhere. The paperwork is not. A dog that walks freely in one country needs a licence, a muzzle and a five-figure insurance policy in the next one — and the rules that decide which is which have no English equivalent, so they never arrive by translating an English pet site. These pages cover the ones with real consequences.

Where the money and the paperwork actually go

Potentially dangerous dogs in SpainSpain's PPP regime, as it actually stands: the eight breeds, the physical test that catches mixes, the municipal licence, the 120,000 € insurance, and what Ley 7/2023 did and didn't change.Listenhunde: the breed lists of the sixteen statesThere is no federal breed list in Germany — there are sixteen. Which states still have one, which five dropped theirs, what category 1 and 2 mean, and how the Wesenstest gets a dog off the list.Hundesteuer: Germany's dog tax, city by cityGermany taxes dogs by municipality, not by state. What the rate is in the fifteen biggest cities in 2026, why the second dog costs more, and why a listed dog can cost ten times as much.

How to read these pages

Every page here carries the date we last checked it against the primary sources, and lists those sources at the foot. That is deliberate: this is the part of a pet site most likely to be quietly out of date, and a page about a licence fee with no date on it is a guess.

None of it is legal advice, and none of it outranks the text it summarises. Regional and municipal rules change more often than national ones and are frequently stricter — where a page says to check your own comunidad, Bundesland or Gemeinde, that is not a disclaimer, it is the actual next step.