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Average Cost to Buy French and English Bulldog Puppies
French bulldog puppies cost around £3,100 and English bulldog puppies cost around £3,700 to buy in the UK. If these seem surprisingly high, you're right—Bulldog puppy prices have increased tremendously since before the coronavirus lockdown. We've researched prices so you'll know what to expect to pay for a Bulldog in 2021, including the extra cost to get a health-tested puppy or a particularly desirable colour.
How Much are French and English Bulldog Puppies?
The average cost of a French Bulldog puppy is £3,100 and the average cost of an English Bulldog puppy is £3,700 in the UK. To find these prices, we gathered hundreds of pricing data points for Bulldog puppies for sale in the UK from Pets4Homes, for puppies with a pedigree and without, and for puppies with a health check and without.
In particular, we found that puppies who've had a series of recommended health tests cost a bit more—£500 to £1,000 more on average—but this extra cost helps ensure you're buying a puppy who is less likely to suffer from health problems later in life.
| How Much are Bulldog Puppies? | French Bulldog | English Bulldog |
|---|---|---|
| Average Puppy Cost | £3,100 | £3,700 |
| Cost of Health-Tested Puppies | £4,100 | £4,200 |
| Cost of Popular colours (e.g., Merle) | £4,700 | £4,400 |
Popular colours command a significant premium. For example, our data showed that breeders were asking an average price of £4,700 for merle French Bulldog puppies, and £4,400 for English Bulldog puppies—a 50% premium for French Bulldogs (only an 18% premium for English Bulldogs).
The most expensive French Bulldog puppy we found for sale was an Isabella (the rarest colour), health-checked puppy for £10,000; the most expensive English Bulldog we found was a "fully suited" girl going for £8,000. The cheapest French Bulldog puppy we found was £1,200; English Bulldog puppy prices started at £1,500.
Huge Increase in Bulldog Prices
Bulldog puppies have essentially more than doubled in price recently. French Bulldog puppies cost 138% more now than they did in 2019; English Bulldogs have gone up 95% in price since we last gathered puppy pricing data around two years ago.
| How Much Have Bulldog Puppies Increased in Price? | French Bulldog | English Bulldog |
|---|---|---|
| Early 2019 | £1,300 | £1,900 |
| Late 2020 | £3,100 | £3,700 |
| Percentage increase 2019 to 2020 | 138% | 95% |
Why are English Bulldogs so expensive?
One reason English Bulldogs cost so much is that 80% of English Bulldog births are performed via caesarian section due to their large heads. As a result, breeders need to factor in the cost of birthing by a qualified vet to make sure mum and pups are all safe, which contributes to the cost of the puppies. While the average cost of a scheduled dog C-section in the UK is around £800, the cost of a cesarean for litters born at night jumps up to around £1,450.
Other Costs of Bulldog Ownership
Besides the purchase price of your puppy, the other major cost of Bulldog ownership is the cost of health care. Bulldogs are known for recurring health illnesses such as breathing problems, spinal, eye, skin and dental conditions, which can cost their owners hundreds or even thousands of pounds to treat. For this reason we recommend that you also budget enough for pet insurance. The cost of pet insurance for a bulldog starts from under £40 a month for Lifetime cover, but around 1 in 7 bulldog owners pays more than £100 a month for pet insurance.
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FAQs
Increase in Number of Bulldog Puppies for Sale
To get an idea of how many more bulldog puppies are for sale now than a few years ago, we looked back in time at the Pets4Homes website using the Wayback Machine, a tool that saves snapshots of webpages at various points of time. There we found snapshots of the French and English Bulldog 'inventory' from 2016. This shows there were 1,518 French Bulldogs for sale in 2016 compared to 2,954 today. So there are essentially twice as many puppies for sale on that platform now than 4 years ago. The number of English Bulldogs for sale on the site has increased from 712 to 1,162 over the same time period (a 63% increase).
Methodology
To find out how much the average Bulldog puppy costs in the UK, we gathered over 250 data points on the cost of French and English Bulldog puppies for sale from Pets4Homes. We looked at the most recently posted ads. This included a mix of puppies that have been health checked and puppies that have not. We analysed this data to determine average costs for each type of Bulldog and also for the additional cost to buy a health-checked puppy, as well as the costs of premium colours.
For the 2019 to 2020 analysis, we compared data we gathered in early 2019 to data we gathered in November 2020.