Georgia Dog Bite Statistics

Dog bite data gets cited badly. The same three numbers appear across hundreds of pages, most of them undated, several of them drawn from surveys conducted more than twenty years ago and presented as current.

Every figure on this page carries the year the data covers and the organization that published it. Where a widely repeated number is out of date or unsupported, that is stated rather than smoothed over. Where Georgia data simply does not exist, that is stated too.

Compiled and maintained by Zagoria Neely Injury Attorneys, a Georgia firm whose practice centers on dog attack and premises cases.

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Key Findings

• Georgia’s 671 dog-related injury claims in 2024 were a 35.6 percent increase over 2023, though the average cost per claim fell 18.8 percent in the same period.
• Nationally, claim volume rose 25.6 percent from 2024 to 2025 while the average cost per claim fell 5.5 percent, meaning more claims of lower average severity.
• No Georgia state agency or metro Atlanta county publishes dog bite incident counts, animal bite report totals, or dangerous dog classification counts in any accessible form.
• The frequently quoted figure of 4.5 million annual U.S. dog bites comes from a telephone survey conducted between 2001 and 2003, not from any current federal release.
• Children aged 5 to 9 are the highest-risk age group in every large population study located, and in children under 4 the majority of emergency-treated injuries are to the head or neck.
• The CDC study that produced most breed statistics states plainly that its data cannot be used to infer breed-specific risk.

How Many Dog Bite Insurance Claims Does Georgia Have?

Georgia recorded 671 dog-related injury liability claims in 2024. The Insurance Information Institute publishes this data annually with State Farm, and it is the only recurring, citable Georgia-specific dog bite figure available from a national source.

An important limitation applies. Triple-I publishes only the ten highest states plus an aggregate for everywhere else, in every year from 2013 through 2025. There is no public fifty-state table. Georgia did not appear in the 2025 top ten, and because the tenth-ranked state that year recorded 818 claims, Georgia’s 2025 total was below that figure. The exact number is not public.

The claims count also measures insurance activity rather than attacks. A bite that generates no claim does not appear here at all.

How Does Georgia Compare Nationally?

Georgia has sat in the national top ten for most of the past decade despite ranking eighth in population, and its average cost per claim has consistently run below the national average.

Source: Insurance Information Institute and State Farm.

The highest average cost per claim in 2025 was New York at $92,154, followed by Connecticut and California. California led on volume with 2,830 claims, then Florida with 2,347 and Michigan with 1,432.

How Many Dog Bites Happen Each Year in the United States?

There is no current federal count, and this is the most widely misreported area in dog bite data. The CDC does not publish an annual national dog bite total.

What the CDC does currently state is that nearly one in five people bitten by a dog requires medical attention, that children are more likely than adults to be bitten, and that injuries in children tend to be more severe. That page was last reviewed in June 2026.

The “4.5 million bites per year” figure traces to a single source: a telephone survey conducted from 2001 to 2003, published in the journal Injury Prevention in 2008, which estimated 4,521,300 people bitten annually and 885,000 requiring medical attention. It is a real study. It is not current, and it is not a CDC release.

The most recent peer-reviewed national emergency department estimate found 344,201 nonfatal dog bite injuries treated in U.S. emergency departments in 2018, with an average of 337,103 per year across 2005 to 2013. That analysis was published in Injury Epidemiology in 2020 by Tuckel and Milczarski.

For comparison, CDC surveillance data from 2001 recorded an estimated 368,245 people treated in emergency departments for dog bite injuries that year.

Who Gets Bitten, and Where on the Body?

Children are bitten disproportionately, and the injuries they sustain are concentrated in the head and face in a way adult injuries are not.

The California analysis, published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (volume 261, issue 5), examined 523,689 incident emergency department visits for dog bites over fifteen years. It found the median annual incidence rate at 97.6 per 100,000 person-years, rising from 69.2 in 2005 to 113.0 in 2019.

Bite location explains a great deal about why child cases are treated differently in both medicine and law. A dog’s head is roughly at a small child’s face height, and facial wounds carry permanent, visible consequences that wounds to a forearm generally do not.

How Many People Die From Dog Attacks?

CDC mortality data recorded 468 deaths from being bitten or struck by a dog between 2011 and 2021, an average of 43 per year. The annual figure ranged from 31 in 2016 to 81 in 2021.

The trend within that period is steep. Between 2018 and 2021, deaths more than doubled for both sexes, rising from 15 to 37 among males and from 20 to 44 among females. The data excludes rabies deaths, which are tracked separately.

Fatalities are a very small fraction of dog bite injuries and are a poor basis for policy, a point the CDC itself has made.

When Do Dog Bites Happen?

Bites peak in summer and fall in winter, by a wide margin. The California data recorded 53,306 emergency department visits for dog bites in July against 35,656 in February, a difference of roughly 50 percent.

Weather appears to drive part of this directly. A 2023 analysis in Scientific Reports examined 69,525 dog bite reports across eight U.S. cities from 2009 to 2018 and found bite incidence rose with temperature, ozone levels, and ultraviolet irradiation, and fell on rainy days.

The practical reading is that exposure increases in warm weather. More people outside, more dogs outside, more contact.

What About Postal Carrier Dog Attacks?

The U.S. Postal Service reported more than 5,200 dog attacks on postal employees in 2025, down from more than 6,000 in 2024. USPS publishes annual city and state rankings.

No Georgia city appeared in the 2025 or 2024 city rankings, and Georgia did not appear in either year’s top ten states. California led both years, with 673 attacks in 2025 and 701 in 2024.

Why Are Breed Statistics Unreliable?

Because nobody knows how many dogs of each breed exist, which means bite counts by breed have no denominator. The CDC-authored study that produced most circulating breed statistics said so explicitly.

That study examined 238 dog bite-related human fatalities between 1979 and 1998. Its authors wrote that the data “cannot be used to infer any breed-specific risk for dog bite fatalities,” and added that “to obtain such risk information it would be necessary to know the numbers of each breed currently residing in the United States. Such information is not available.”

The American Veterinary Medical Association identifies three compounding problems: the breed of a biting dog is often unknown or reported inaccurately, breed popularity shifts over time making year-to-year comparison unreliable, and visual breed identification is unreliable even among people familiar with dogs.

None of this means breed is irrelevant to an individual case. Under Georgia law, what matters is what a specific dog had done before and what its owner knew about it, which is a question about that animal rather than a category.

What Georgia Does Not Publish

No Georgia state agency or metro Atlanta county publishes dog bite incident counts. That is a finding rather than an omission, and it is worth stating plainly for anyone attempting to report on this subject.

The Georgia Department of Public Health’s rabies program publishes procedural guidance but no bite or post-exposure treatment counts. Georgia OASIS, the state’s public health data system, cannot produce a dog bite figure at all, because its emergency department module classifies animal bites inside an undifferentiated “all other unintentional injury” category.

At the county level, Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, and Gwinnett publish animal services procedures without incident statistics. Gwinnett County publishes daily shelter intake and outcome reports going back to 2017, but no bite counts and no dangerous dog classification totals.

Obtaining Georgia bite data would require open records requests to individual agencies. Journalists working on this subject can reach Georgia DPH Epidemiology at +1 (404) 657-2588.

For national context on rabies exposure, the CDC reports that roughly 100,000 Americans receive rabies vaccination following a potential exposure each year, and that more than four million Americans report being bitten by animals annually.

Methodology

Figures are drawn from federal health agencies, peer-reviewed literature, and the annual Insurance Information Institute and State Farm claims study. Each figure is labeled with the year the underlying data covers rather than the year of publication, because those differ substantially in this field and the gap is the source of most misreporting.

Insurance claim figures reflect claims filed with participating insurers and understate total incidents. Emergency department figures capture only injuries treated in emergency settings and exclude urgent care, primary care, and untreated bites. Georgia-specific figures beyond insurance claims are not publicly available.

Percentage changes described as calculated are derived from the published figures shown in the tables.

 Behind Every Number Is a Claim Somebody Had to Bring

Zagoria Firm Attorneys

Data on dog attacks is thin in Georgia because nobody is required to collect it, which means the 671 claims recorded in 2024 represent the injuries serious enough that someone pursued them. The rest are absorbed quietly.

If you were attacked by a dog in Georgia and are trying to work out what your situation involves, Zagoria Neely Injury Attorneys offers a Free Case Review at no cost and takes no fee unless there is a recovery. Our Georgia dog bite claims guide covers the process end to end.

Call (404) 653-0023 or contact us online.

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