Licensed dog breeders, by council

174 businesses licensed to breed dogs, copied from the public registers of 17 authorities. Use it to check a licence number you have been given.

Where these 17 registers come from

There is no national register of licensed dog breeders, and there is no legal requirement for a council to keep a public one. Licensing is done separately by each of the 374 local authorities in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, under three different sets of regulations - the 2018 regulations in England, the 2014 breeding regulations in Wales, and the 2021 regulations in Scotland.

DEFRA's statutory guidance tells English councils to publish their list of licensed businesses and the star ratings. Many do. But they publish it however they like: a PDF, a spreadsheet, a page behind a search form, a licence register rendered by script, or nothing at all. We checked all 374 authorities - twice, the second time with a browser for the ones that publish through script - and found a register we could read and verify at 17 of them.

Most of the rest publish a single list covering boarding kennels, day care, pet shops, exhibiting and riding stables together, with no column saying which is which. We do not guess at those. A register that lists a boarding kennel as a breeder is worse than no register at all, and it is the error a breeder would spot in a second.

This grows as councils publish better. If yours publishes one and it is not here, send us the link.