[Image: Pixabay]
South Africa is home to an estimated 7.48 million pet dogs, according to Statistics SA’s General Household Survey 2025, which found that 21% of households owned at least one dog. The survey also points to a clear pattern that dog ownership rises steadily with age, and rises even more sharply with household wealth.
Statistics SA described the trend in characteristically warm terms. “Every neighbourhood has one. The family whose dog enthusiastically greets everyone walking past the gate. The retiree taking the same faithful companion for an early morning stroll or the farm dog that’s always first to notice a visitor arriving.”
Most households keep it simple when it comes to pack size. Just over half (56%) have only one dog, and around 27% have two. Bigger households do exist, but they’re the exception, with only 3.4% of dog owners having five or more.
Geography plays a big role too.
The Northern Cape tops the list, with almost 35% of households owning a dog, just ahead of the Western Cape (34.1%) and Eastern Cape (31.8%).
At the other end of the scale, Limpopo (14.3%), Gauteng (15.9%) and Mpumalanga (16.1%) all sit well below the national average.
Dogs are also somewhat more common on farms and in villages than in cities: 23.9% of rural households own one, against 19.8% of urban households. Even so, because most South Africans live in towns and cities, roughly two out of three dog-owning households are urban, and close to three million of the country’s 7.48 million dogs live in the metros.
Age is one of the strongest patterns in the data. Just 11% of households run by someone between 15 and 34 own a dog. Among households headed by someone 75 or older, that figure nearly triples to just over 31%.
Family size matters too. Households without children have an 18% dog-ownership rate, rising to 25.5% among households with three or more kids.
As Stats SA put it: “Whether it’s children asking for ‘just one puppy’ or families enjoying the companionship that pets bring, larger households were more likely to include four-legged family members.”
Wealth, unsurprisingly, is one of the biggest dividing lines. In the wealthiest income quintile, 33.9% of households own a dog, compared with just 12.9% in the poorest, meaning richer households are more than twice as likely to have one. The gap is even starker by living standard measure: 41.8% of households in the top LSM bracket own a dog, roughly double the national rate.
As Nicola Mawson reported for IOL, South Africa’s dogs (and cats) add up to a serious commercial market. Trend analyst and Flux Trends founder Dion Chang puts the number of pets nationwide at more than 20 million, with the local pet economy worth an estimated R8 billion to R10 billion a year. That’s enough, he says, to make South Africa the world’s fourth most pet-friendly country.
Retailers have clearly clocked it. Chang, writing in an opinion piece for mba.co.za, cites Woolworths buying Absolute Pets in 2024, Pick n Pay’s pet club, and Shoprite’s Petshop Science stores opening alongside new Checkers branches as evidence of the scramble for pet spend. Spar has since jumped in too with Pet Storey, which Chang says is on track for 100 stores by the end of 2026.
The boom is linked to a global shift in how people think about their pets. They have become family members rather than animals to be kept outside, which opens the door to spending on everything from daily food to luxury extras.
Stats SA summed it up: “While every pet owner might insist that their pet is the best and cleverest, the data reveal one thing for certain: when South Africans choose a pet, they’re far more likely to choose a dog.”
We’re dog-people and we spend accordingly. Nothing wrong with that.
