New Puppy Checklist: What to Buy Before Your Puppy Comes Home

Search for a new puppy checklist and you get thirty items with an add-to-cart button beside each one. Some of it you need. A good share of it you will replace inside four months, because it was sized for the eight-week-old in the product photo rather than the adult dog that will be sleeping on your couch next spring.

This is the version we would hand a friend picking up a puppy next weekend. It covers the gear that matters, the one sizing rule that stops you buying twice, what your breeder should be sending home in the car with you, and the vet and licensing timing that has real deadlines attached.

The short list: what to have in the house before pickup day

Eleven things. Not thirty. If you have these, the puppy is fine on night one and you can buy the rest once you have met the dog.

• A crate with a divider panel, sized for the adult dog. This is the item people get wrong most often, so it has its own section below.
• The exact food the breeder is currently feeding, enough for at least a week. Not the food you intend to switch to. Buy that later.
• Two stainless steel bowls. Stainless because it does not scratch, does not hold bacteria in the scratches, and cannot be chewed into shards.
• A flat collar and an engraved ID tag with your phone number on it. Order the tag before pickup so it goes on the same day the puppy arrives.
• A six-foot flat leash. Nylon or leather. Not retractable.
• Two bottles of enzymatic cleaner. Two, not one. Regular household cleaner removes the stain and leaves the scent marker, which tells the puppy that spot is the toilet.
• A baby gate or an exercise pen. Containment you can see through beats a closed door.
• One or two chew toys in different textures. A bin of fifteen teaches a puppy that everything on the floor is fair game.
• Nail clippers and a soft brush, for handling practice more than for grooming. A puppy that accepts feet being touched at nine weeks is a very different vet visit at nine months.
• Poop bags. More than you think.
• A soft washable bed or blanket for inside the crate, cheap enough that you will not resent it being destroyed.

That is the whole list. Everything else on this page is about timing, sizing, and paperwork, which is where the money and the frustration actually go.

Size the crate for the adult dog, not the puppy

The crate is the single most expensive item on the list and the one most often bought twice. The rule that prevents that: the crate must let the adult dog stand up without ducking, turn around, and lie flat on its side. Buy that size now, and use the divider panel to shrink the usable space while the puppy is small.

The divider is the entire point. A puppy given the run of a full-size crate will sleep at one end and use the other end as a bathroom, which is the opposite of what a crate is for. Block it down to just enough room to stand, turn, and lie down, then move the panel back as the puppy grows.

Wire crates are sold in standard lengths, and the manufacturers map them to adult weight ranges rather than breed. Find your puppy's projected adult weight, then read across.

Crate length	Adult weight	Breeds that usually land here
24 inch	Up to 25 lb	Chihuahua, Pug, Shih Tzu, miniature Dachshund, Yorkshire Terrier
30 inch	26 to 40 lb	French Bulldog, Cocker Spaniel, Shetland Sheepdog, Beagle
36 inch	41 to 70 lb	Border Collie, Australian Shepherd, Whippet, Bulldog, Boxer
42 inch	71 to 90 lb	Labrador Retriever, Golden Retriever, German Shepherd
48 inch	91 to 110 lb	American Bulldog, Rottweiler, Cane Corso, Doberman

Two caveats. If your puppy's projected adult weight sits between two rows, go up a size, not down. And if you are bringing home a giant breed, a Great Dane or a Mastiff, you are past the point where standard wire crates work and you should be looking at 54-inch models or a purpose-built kennel. Our puppy crate guide covers the models, and large breed crates covers what happens when the dog outgrows the chart.

If you do not know the projected adult weight, ask the breeder what the sire and dam weigh. A responsible breeder knows both numbers without checking.

What to buy now, and what to leave in the cart

This is the part retailers structurally cannot write, because half of it is advice not to spend. Delaying these purchases is not about frugality. It is that buying them now means buying them wrong.

The one exception worth spending on early is puppy proofing your house, because that cost is cable covers and cabinet latches, and the alternative cost is an emergency vet bill.

What the breeder should send home with you

No checklist written by a store will tell you this, because none of it is for sale. What comes home in the car with the puppy tells you as much about the breeder as anything you saw during the visit.

• Three to five days of the food the puppy is eating right now, so a diet change is never stacked on top of the stress of moving.
• A written feeding schedule. Brand, amount, and times. Not a verbal "about a cup, twice a day."
• A vaccination and deworming record with dates, product names, and the clinic's name on it. A handwritten note with no vet identified is not a record.
• The microchip number and the transfer paperwork, so the registry lists you rather than the breeder.
• A signed copy of the contract or health guarantee, including whatever it says about hereditary conditions and what happens if the puppy fails a vet check in the first week.
• Registration papers, or a written commitment with a date. If a puppy was sold to you as registered or as a purebred, Canada's Animal Pedigree Act requires the seller to provide the duly transferred certificate of registration within six months of the sale. That is a statutory obligation, not a courtesy, and it is section 64 of the Act.
• Something that smells like the litter. A blanket or a small toy. It is the cheapest thing on this list and it does more for the first three nights than anything you can buy.
• A phone number, and a real invitation to use it. Breeders who want the call at week three are the ones still answering at year eight.

If a seller sends the puppy home with nothing but the puppy, treat that as information. Our guide to questions to ask a dog breeder covers what to establish before you get to this point, and buying a puppy online in Canada covers the checks that matter when you have not met the breeder in person.

The paperwork nobody puts on a checklist: your municipal dog licence

Dog licensing in Canada is municipal. Not federal, not provincial. Your city sets whether it is required, what it costs, and what happens if you skip it, which is why national checklists tend to leave it out entirely.

Toronto is a useful example because its rules are typical and its numbers are published. The City of Toronto requires a licence for every dog and cat in the city, renewed annually. A spayed or neutered dog costs $25 a year. An unaltered dog costs $60. Failing to license can bring a $240 ticket, with a maximum fine of $5,000.

Two practical consequences. First, most Canadian municipalities price the unaltered dog higher, sometimes at more than double, so a puppy licensed before it is spayed or neutered will usually cost more in year one than in year two. Second, some cities want proof of rabies vaccination at the point of licensing, and your puppy will not have that until it is old enough for the shot. Check your own municipality's rules in the first week rather than assuming, because the requirement starts when the dog lives with you, not when the dog turns one.

Booking the first vet visit, and why the puppy is not covered on day one

Book the appointment before pickup day, not after. Most clinics want to see a new puppy inside the first week, and that visit does three things: confirms the health you were told about, establishes a relationship with a clinic before you need one urgently, and puts your puppy onto a vaccination schedule that has a hard closing date.

The 2022 AAHA Canine Vaccination Guidelines call for at least three doses of a combination core vaccine between 6 and 16 weeks of age, given 2 to 4 weeks apart. Leptospirosis, which AAHA classes as a core vaccine, is given as two doses 2 to 4 weeks apart starting at 12 weeks. Rabies is separate again, and its timing is partly set by provincial rules.

Here is the part that changes what you do in month one. Your puppy has almost certainly had one dose when it comes home, and one dose is not the series. Full core protection is not in place until after the last dose lands, around 16 weeks. The socialization window, meanwhile, closes at roughly 14 to 16 weeks, which means the two overlap awkwardly. The answer is not to keep the puppy in the house until 16 weeks and hand yourself a fearful adolescent. It is controlled exposure: carry the puppy through busy places, visit friends with known vaccinated adult dogs, run the vacuum, invite people over. Skip the dog park and the pet store floor.

Our first vet visit guide covers what happens in the appointment, and the puppy vaccination page lays out the schedule in more detail.

The first 48 hours

Gear is the easy part. The first two nights are what people actually remember.

• Put the crate beside your bed on night one. Not in the kitchen. A puppy that can hear you settles faster, and you will hear the 3 a.m. request to go out in time to act on it.
• Last water about two hours before bed, one final trip outside right before lights out, and an alarm set for three to four hours later. A nine-week-old cannot hold it overnight, and waiting for the crying means you are rewarding the crying.
• Feed the breeder's food for at least the first week. Transition slowly after that, over five to seven days. Our puppy food guide covers what to move to.
• Keep it quiet. No welcome party. The puppy has just lost its entire family and every familiar smell in one afternoon.
• Expect loose stool. Stress does that. Call the vet if it runs past 24 hours, if there is blood, or if the puppy is not drinking.