Should You Let Your Dog Sleep in Your Bed?

In this article:

• Why do dogs want to sleep in their people’s beds?
• Do all dogs want to sleep in bed with their people?
• Will letting a dog sleep in your bed make them misbehave?
• What are good reasons to let a dog sleep in your bed?
• What are downsides of letting a dog sleep in your bed?
• How can you train a dog to sleep somewhere else if they’re used to being in your bed?

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When my now-wife and I first brought our dachshund home, she slept in a crate within view of her people. This continued until one fateful night around a year later when she complained, making sounds that we found sympathetic, and we lifted her into our own bed. More than a decade later, there have been no further negotiations; when it’s time for bed, the dog sleeps with us.

Was letting our dog into our human bed a terrible mistake? To find the answer, I reached out to several experts in dog behavior and cognition, plus one who teaches a college neuroscience course focused on sleep. Their verdict: There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but it’s fine to share a bed with your dog if you both want to and can sleep well while doing so.

“Where a dog ‘should sleep’ is a weirdly contentious issue,” said Alexandra Horowitz, PhD, who leads the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College. “I’m in favor of letting dogs choose, as much as possible, just as I’d like to choose where I can sleep.”

Before you and your own pet get under the covers in matching pajamas, here are the details.

A lot of dogs want to sleep with their people, because they love being near their families

Science confirms what everyday dog people have observed: Many dogs like sleeping in their people’s beds.

“There’s a lot of research suggesting that, when given the chance, dogs choose to sleep as close to humans as possible,” said Maddie Messina, a certified dog trainer and founder of Paws for Thought Dog Training. “If it’s something that is not impacting your life negatively, and if it is something that your dog enjoys and you enjoy, then I’m all for it.”

Dr. Horowitz explained that, basically, dogs often want to be in our beds because they love us. “While it’s clear to humans that one bed is ‘our’ bed and another spot—a pillow on the ground that we maybe spent a lot of money on—is the ‘dog bed,’” she said, “this is not clear to dogs. They want to be where you are, and even in your absence, they want to be where your smell is. So the ‘human bed’ is often much more desirable.”

Not all dogs want to sleep in humans’ beds, and not all the time.

Still, every dog is different, and not every single one dreams of sleeping on your down comforter. The easiest way to tell what your dog wants at bedtime is to observe their behavior.

Zazie Todd, PhD, a psychologist and certified dog trainer who wrote Wag: The Science of Making Your Dog Happy, said that a dog who wants to sleep in your bed will make their preference obvious. “They will probably jump on your bed,” she said, “unless they’re a little dog—in which case they’ll be trying to jump onto your bed and ask you to be picked up.” (Note from a dachshund person that if your dog is at risk of IVDD, it’s important to give them a ramp or lift them up instead of letting them jump.)

Dr. Todd notes that the choice should go both ways. “[Your dog] should be able to get off the bed if they want to,” she said. “If you put them on there and they change their minds, they can get off and vote with their feet and go somewhere else.”

Ellen Furlong, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at Transylvania University in Kentucky, also emphasized the benefits of giving a dog choices. “[Dogs] don’t really have a whole lot of control over their environment,” she said. “Giving them the choice of where to sleep, and whether to sleep alone or with another dog, or with their favorite people, is an easy way to give them some autonomy.”

Letting your dog into bed won’t make them misbehave.

Perhaps you’ve seen a trainer on social media claim that letting a dog into your bed will undermine your authority, or overheard a conversation among other dog owners in the park saying that dogs who sleep next to their humans “think they’re in charge.” Our experts said there’s no scientific backing for these assertions.

“Dogs are not trying to be ‘in charge,” Dr. Horowitz said. “Dogs work well in human families because they naturally, like their wolf cousins and ancestors, live in family packs. Wolf parents are in charge of a wolf pack—and so, too, are you in the position of being their substitute parent in your human-dog pack. You are in charge of when they eat, go out, when they can relieve themselves, who they can socialize with. What dogs are trying to do when they sleep in your bed is to be close to their family. You don’t have to let them, of course, but I promise that if you do, they will not suddenly be in charge of you.”

As Dr. Furlong put it: “I think the dog has no doubt who’s in charge. There are so many other ways that we are in charge in the home. They really have no reason to think that they are suddenly in charge just because they get to sleep in the bed with their favorite people.”

“I think it’s very cruel,” said veterinarian, ethologist, and trainer Ian Dunbar of the notion that, if you and your dog are both happy to sleep in the same bed, you must still not permit it to happen. He extended the principle to other ways of asserting one’s dominance over a dog. “All this stuff, like, ‘the dog can’t go through the door first, you can’t feed him first.’ Absolute rubbish.” He warned that this attitude can harm your bond with your dog.

“A human has to be in control at certain times,” Dr. Dunbar said, “because they’re responsible for their dog, and insisting on rules that the dog wouldn’t understand.” So you can’t let your dog do whatever they want. But the enforcement of rules should be for practical reasons. “I can train my dog to eat before me, or after me. I can train my dog to sleep with me, or on the floor,” Dr. Dunbar said. “He’s not dominating me. Is the dog influencing my behavior? I hope so. But that’s not a crime. That’s the give-and-take part of relationships. And I want to know the dog’s point of view.”

Why can it be good for you to let your dog sleep in your bed?

Kristin Supe, PhD is a senior lecturer at Ohio State University who teaches the sleep-focused neuroscience course we mentioned earlier. She noted that there are those who feel more secure with their dogs next to them at night. “Some people have a really hard time sleeping,” she said, “because they feel like they have to monitor their environment. And if you have a dog with you, you can outsource some of that and trust the dog to monitor the environment so you can improve your sleep.”

Dr. Supe added that the benefits could be especially significant for children who are able to handle the responsibility of sleeping with a pet. “If they have a pet available,” she said, “that might help with some of those nighttime fears, [and] maybe some of those big emotions.”

The joys of having your dog closer to you don’t need to be complicated or technical. Dr. Horowitz listed some: “The infinite pleasure of a head rested on your leg in bed, or a dog lying so her whole back presses against your body. Someone staring at you when you wake up, waiting for the day to start. Being there for sleep-barking and sleep-running. Knowing just as soon as your dogs do when a ghost or any other creature enters your room.”

What are some downsides of a dog sleeping in your bed?

While many dogs and people enjoy sharing a bed, there are, of course, legitimate reasons you might want to stay separated at bedtime.

If you have asthma or allergies that the dog aggravates, for example, it wouldn’t be advisable to share a bed. If you’re immune-compromised and at risk of certain infections, that could be another reason. Dr. Furlong shared that she had personally contracted Lyme disease, likely from a tick that had crawled off of her dog at night—a reminder of the importance of tick checks.

“Some of the dogs I work with have conflict aggression, fear-based aggression, resource aggression,” said Messina. Those dogs, she said, “will do things like attack their owners’ feet at night.” For obvious reasons, they’re not good candidates to co-sleep with people.

And, while research on the subject is mixed—one study, for example, found that women slept better on average with a dog than with a human man as a bed partner—some people find it harder to sleep with dogs in their bed.

“If it’s harder for you—or for the dog—to sleep well if you share a bed, find another arrangement that is more suitable to you both,” Dr. Horowitz said. “We were able to get a king-sized bed to allow two dogs to sleep with us; any smaller, and one of us (probably me) would be relegated to being curled up in the fetal position at the corner of the bed.”

“My dog snores a lot,” said Dr. Todd, “and on the nights when he decides he does not want to sleep in our bedroom, to be honest, sometimes I’m relieved.”

As we noted above, the research on humans sleeping with dogs doesn’t consistently show that having a dog in your bed makes it harder or easier to sleep. Dr. Supe says that your best bet is to trust your own feelings about how bedtime is going. “Your subjective sense of if you slept well can be really accurate sometimes,” she said.

Whether sleeping with a dog works for you depends not only on your tendencies, but also the dog’s. Dr. Dunbar slept comfortably with his previous dog, but can’t do so with Mars, who lives with him now. His old dog, he said, “laid in a straight line, head on the pillow, and wouldn’t move all night long.” Mars, meanwhile, is “a beast, and has no idea of personal space… he will stretch out and put a foot in my face and push me. He isn’t aware that his paws and claws actually hurt.”

So Mars sleeps on his own, and doesn’t mind.

How to train your dog to sleep somewhere else if they’ve been sleeping in your bed

Maybe you need to change your dog’s sleeping arrangements, and they’ve become accustomed to a certain lifestyle. What’s the easiest and most humane way to handle the transition?

First of all, we’re not going to sugarcoat it: You might be in for a training challenge. Dr. Todd said the best-case scenario is that, if you decide to let your dog into your bed, they stay there. “That’s much better for them because otherwise, if they’re used to it and you try to move them, they’re going to be potentially a bit sad about it.”

Messina agreed. “It’s hard to teach a dog to be comfortable sleeping on the ground again, or in the crate, because it is inherently less reinforcing than sleeping with humans.”
Still, the experts said that it is definitely possible to train a dog to sleep in a new spot. The keys are consistency, patience, and positive reinforcement as your dog spends more time in their new sleeping place. You can gradually move the dog further from your bed, for longer periods of time, only continuing when they’re comfortable at each step. 

And, even if your dog doesn’t sleep with you, that doesn’t have to mean you’re any less close. Dr. Dunbar and Mars have to sleep separately, but that just makes the mornings more special. “When my alarm goes off,” Dr. Dunbar said, “he’s on the bed within a second.”

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