Are Shih Tzus HDB approved in Singapore?

The Shih Tzu is an HDB approved breed, listed at item 48 on the list of roughly 62 HDB approved dog breeds cleared for flat living. Approval means you may keep one in an HDB flat without an appeal, an exemption or a grey area to manage. The governing instrument is the Housing and Development (Animals) Rules 2024, and the approved small breed list itself lives on HDB's own guidelines on keeping pets page.

Everything else on this page follows from that one fact: what the rest of the rule set demands, what the licence costs, what happens if you get it wrong, and the part of Shih Tzu ownership that approval does absolutely nothing about.

Six requirements govern keeping a dog in an HDB flat, and the breed list is only the first. Miss any of the others and an approved breed will still land you in trouble. The table below is the whole picture in the order it usually matters to a buyer, from choosing the dog to signing the declaration.

The Code of Responsible Behaviour is the one most people have never heard of. It is a declaration you sign about noise, hygiene and control of your dog in shared spaces, and welfare groups such as SOSD spell it out plainly in their own adoption guidance.

Item 48 on the list is a bookmark, not a property of the breed. HDB publishes the approved breeds alphabetically and renumbers the whole list every time an entry is added or removed, so the ordinal drifts between revisions while the approval itself stays put.

You can see it happen in the first five entries. A widely reproduced 2024 version of the list carried 63 breeds and included an extra Bichon entry near the top; the current list carries roughly 62 and does not. Every breed after that point shifted up by one, the Shih Tzu included.

This is why pages searching for HDB approved dogs 2026 disagree with pages written two years ago, and why we will not treat the number as gospel. Quote it if it helps you find the entry, then check the live page before you rely on it.

A cross between two approved breeds counts as approved, provided the adult dog visibly resembles an approved parent. That covers most of the Shih Tzu crosses Singapore families ask us about, because their other parent is on the list as well.

The Shih Poo crosses a Shih Tzu with a Toy Poodle. The Malshi crosses it with a Maltese. The Pomshi crosses it with a Pomeranian. All three parent breeds are approved, all three crosses stay small, and all three are dogs we place.

One caveat matters more than the paperwork. Resemblance is judged on the grown dog, not the puppy, so buy a cross from a licensed seller who can tell you honestly what size the adult is likely to be. And a size label is not a breed at all, which is a separate honesty problem and the reason we explain why we refuse the mini and teacup labels rather than sell into them.

An HDB flat may now keep up to two cats alongside one approved dog, which is a genuinely recent change and one most breed-list pages have not caught up with. The cat management framework took effect on 1 September 2024 and made licensing and microchipping compulsory for pet cats, after 35 years of cats being banned outright.

AVS gave owners a two-year transition, and that window is nearly shut. Licensing has been free during the transition and it closes on 31 August 2026. From 1 September 2026 an unlicensed pet cat is an offence, and the AVS fee schedule for cats and dogs aligns on the same date.

If you are a cat household weighing up a first dog, do the cat licences first. It costs nothing today and it removes the one compliance problem that has nothing to do with your new puppy. NParks published the finalised cat management framework in full.

Licensing is a five-step sequence and it is easier than the breed list makes it sound. The whole thing is done online through the AVS pet licensing system, and the only step with a genuine waiting period is the microchip, because the chip number is what the licence record is built on.

First-time owners have one extra step: a short pet ownership course that AVS runs free of charge. It covers welfare law and what you are signing up to, and it is worth doing properly rather than clicking through. You can start the free AVS pet ownership course before your puppy is even home.

A Shih Tzu puppy from us goes home at about week nine, roughly a week after its second vaccination, and the licence is done before it leaves. We complete the licensing paperwork at the point of purchase, so nobody drives home with an admin task hanging over them.

The vaccination schedule runs at weeks six, eight and twelve, with an optional fourth at week sixteen if the vet advises it, and deworming happens at every one of those visits. Your puppy comes with its vaccination records, its microchip and its breed identification, plus a vet health check already done.

Sterilisation is the one milestone that lands after homecoming, usually from around seven months. That is the point at which the $35 one-time licence becomes available, and it is the last piece of compliance you will think about for the rest of the dog's life.

There is no general appeal route for a large breed in an HDB flat. This disappoints a lot of people, and the searches for it are constant, but the honest answer is that HDB does not run a case-by-case exemption process for breeds it has not approved.

Three recognised pathways exist, and none of them is an appeal. Project ADORE covers local mixed breeds up to 55 cm through an approved welfare group. The ADORE K-9 scheme rehomes retired service dogs. Certified assistance dogs are a medical pathway tied to a genuine need, not a size workaround.

The families we see handle this best are the ones who plan around the rule early. Deciding your housing and your breed together, before a deposit and before a name has been chosen, costs nothing. Discovering the conflict afterwards costs a dog its home.

Here is the part that no HDB list page will tell you, because none of them has to. Approval gets a Shih Tzu legally through your front door and then does nothing whatsoever. The grooming bill is still yours. The flat face is still yours. The twelve years of daily brushing are still yours.

Low shedding is how this breed gets sold, and it is true. It is also the wrong end of the fact. What you are buying is a high-maintenance coat: a groomer on retainer, a brush in your hand most evenings, and a decision at some point about whether to keep the long coat or move to a practical puppy cut for the heat.

We qualify buyers on that before we quote a price, which is a strange way to run a shop and the reason families come back to us. The dog is easy. The coat is the commitment.

Approval is a legal question; your neighbours are a practical one, and the second decides how pleasant the next decade is. Flat living puts your dog in a lift car with strangers several times a day, past open corridor doors, and within earshot of at least three other households.

The habits that keep that easy are small. Short lead in the lift with the dog at your feet, a quick ask before sharing a car with someone who looks uncertain, poo bags on you rather than at home, and toilet training onto pads so the corridor never becomes the toilet.

Barking is the complaint that starts most enforcement stories, and it is worth training against early. The Shih Tzu helps here: it is alert but not a persistent barker, which removes the single most common trigger before it happens.

Two years of matching puppies to Singapore families has left us with a fixed order of questions, and price is not the first one. We work through grooming, then climate, then patience, then space, and only then do we talk about which puppy. It is deliberately the reverse of how a shop is supposed to sell.

The order matters because the wrong answer to question one is not solved by any of the others. Somebody who cannot brush a dog daily will not brush it daily because the puppy is beautiful, and the dog pays for that in mats, skin problems and shave-downs. As Shih Tzu specialists in Singapore we would rather lose the sale than watch that happen.

Housing is the last question on our list, which is the whole point of this page. For a Shih Tzu, the HDB answer is already yes.

Our Shih Tzu puppies are $3,888–$4,888 all-in, published rather than quoted on request. All-in means the price on this page is the price at the counter: the licence paperwork, the starter kit, the delivery, the first training lesson and the first professional groom are already inside it.

We publish it because the alternative is what the rest of this market does, which is to make you ask. The lower anchors advertised elsewhere in Singapore are real, and so is what tends to be missing from them once you get to the shop. Compare the inclusion list, not the headline.

Aftercare sits inside the same number. Free boarding for up to a month after a deposit with vaccinations continuing on schedule and costs covered, five-day bring-back-if-sick support, and care advice for as long as you want it.