Dog in the bedroom or on the bed: the difference is measurable
Published by Planète Pets · managing editor: Clément Lacaille · how our guides are written
The debate is usually framed as all or nothing: the dog sleeps in the bedroom, or it does not. The available measurements suggest that is the wrong question. Our bedding guidance is gathered in the dog bedding and habitat section.
Contents · 5 sections
The dividing line runs along the edge of the mattress
Patel, Miller, Kosiorek, Parish, Lyng and Krahn published in 2017, in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, an actigraphy study run in the homes of 40 adults without sleep disorders and their dogs, over seven nights each (see the study). The sleepers showed a sleep efficiency of 81% ± 7% and 71 ± 35 minutes of wake after sleep onset; the dogs, an efficiency of 85% ± 15%.
The result that matters lies elsewhere: human sleep efficiency was significantly lower when the dog was on the bed rather than simply in the room (p = 0.003). In other words, the dog's presence in the bedroom is not the issue; sharing the mattress is.
The sleeper does not notice
Hoffman, Browne and Smith followed, in 2020 in Animals, 12 women each sleeping with a single dog and no human partner, for 54,533 minutes of recording (see the study).
- The human moved 4.5% of sleep time, the dog 12.4%.
- The dog was moving at the same time in roughly half of the minutes in which the human moved.
- Above all the asymmetry is clear: the woman was about 3.5 times more likely to start moving while the dog was moving, whereas the dog was only 2 times more likely to move while the woman was. So the dog pulls the sleeper along more than the reverse.
- Yet the participants reported a waking they attributed to the dog on only a minority of nights, and three of them never did.
What these studies do not show
Neither uses polysomnography: actigraphy infers sleep from wrist movement and measures no sleep stage. A co-occurrence of movements in one-minute epochs is not an EEG micro-arousal, and a shared cause (noise, heat, a shifting mattress) may explain part of the synchrony. Both samples are heavily female — 88% in Patel, women only in Hoffman, alone in bed with a single dog. No data on men, couples or multi-dog households. Finally, neither study measures the dog's welfare according to where it sleeps: moving it to the floor may be neutral, good or unpleasant for the animal, and nothing here settles that.
A word on a widely circulated figure: the "83% versus 80%" sleep efficiency pair attributed to this study appears in no accessible primary source. We do not repeat it.
The test to run at home
- Move the bed, not the dog. A basket on the floor in the same room keeps the presence and removes the one contrast where a difference was measured — see our criteria for choosing a bed to match your dog's size.
- Do not trust your impressions. Hoffman's sleepers rarely reported being woken by their dog while it was stirring in one minute out of two.
- Keep a log over three or four nights — bedtime, rising time, a quality score out of five — dog on the bed, then dog on the floor. That is the protocol used in both studies, and the only way to know for your own case.
- If the dog itself sleeps badly, that is a different problem: our leads are gathered in our article on fragmented sleep in dogs.
Frequently asked questions
Should the dog be put out of the bedroom?
Nothing in these data suggests so. It is sharing the mattress, not presence in the room, that is associated with lower sleep efficiency.
What if my dog refuses its bed?
This is a gradual piece of training, to be worked on in the daytime before attempting it at night, and not to be started during an already unsettling period for the animal.
Do these results apply to a puppy?
No: dogs under six months were excluded from the 2017 study. Find all our guides on the dog hub.
An accessory from our shop for this use: Ice-silk cooling mat for dogs (62 × 50 to 100 × 70 cm) (€40.90) · the whole shop
An accessory from our shop for this use: Folding 3-step wooden pet stairs for beds and sofas ($75.90, ships from the US) · the US shop
This guide is part of Planète Pets’s Dogs universe. Our advice is general in nature: for any health concern, your veterinarian remains the only reference.