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Massachusetts holds a dog’s owner or keeper strictly liable for the harm the dog causes. Under General Laws chapter 140, section 155, you do not have to show that the dog had bitten before, that the owner knew it was aggressive, or that anyone was careless. The state has had some version of this rule since 1791, and it has only two built-in defenses: that you were trespassing or committing some other wrong, or that you were teasing, tormenting, or abusing the dog.
This page walks through what you have to prove, how local leash rules fit in, who counts as an owner or keeper, the statutory defenses, fault, a child’s case, landlord liability, deadlines (including the two year notice step for claims against cities and towns), damages and the triple damages rule for dogs already found dangerous, the dangerous dog hearing process rewritten in 2012, reporting and rabies quarantine, settlement value, and insurance.
Dog Bite Laws handles dog attack cases. Talk to us for free, and pay no fee unless we recover money for you.
Massachusetts is a strict liability state, and its rule is very old. Section 155 of chapter 140 says that if any dog does damage to the body or property of any person, the owner or keeper “shall be liable for such damage.” The Appeals Court has noted that the statute has imposed strict liability for damage caused by dogs since 1791, and that for much of its history it awarded double or triple damages.
The Supreme Judicial Court has explained what strict liability means here. The owner or keeper is liable without proof that they were negligent or otherwise at fault, without proof that they knew the dog had a dangerous propensity, and even without proof that the dog actually had one. That is the opposite of the one bite rule used in some other states. A first bite from a dog with a spotless history is covered the same way as a tenth.
The statute is not limited to bites. It covers “any damage,” and Massachusetts courts have allowed statutory claims by a man whose hip was fractured when a dog grabbed his pants leg and tripped him, and by a woman pulled to the floor by a dog lunging for an open door. If a dog knocked you down, jumped on you, or chased you into a fall, you may still have a statutory claim. We explain more about a dog attack without a bite.
The older common law negligence claim still exists. It matters mostly against people who are not owners or keepers, such as a landlord, and it requires proof that the defendant knew or should have known the dog had dangerous propensities.
The state’s model jury instruction on dog liability, revised in May 2024, breaks a section 155 claim into three elements, each proved by a preponderance of the evidence (more likely than not):
The third element puts a burden on you. The Supreme Judicial Court has said a plaintiff must plead and prove that she did none of these things. In practice that usually means your own account of what happened, plus witnesses, photographs of where it happened, and anything showing you were somewhere you had a right to be. The big exception is a child under seven, covered below, where the burden flips to the owner.
Notice what is missing from the list. You do not need to show the dog was vicious, that the owner was careless, or that anyone was warned. The model instruction tells jurors in plain terms that the plaintiff does not have to prove the owner or keeper was negligent or knew the dog was dangerous. In practice, the work is identifying the right defendant, documenting the injury, and closing off any argument about trespass or teasing.
Massachusetts dog law leaves leash rules to cities and towns. Section 167 lets the mayor, aldermen, or select board order that all dogs be restrained from running at large, and section 173 lets a city or town pass additional animal control ordinances and bylaws. Check the local order or bylaw where the bite happened.
For a section 155 claim against the owner or keeper, a leash violation is not needed. The statute already makes the owner liable whether the dog was on a leash, behind a fence, or loose. Where a leash violation helps is as evidence: a citation or an animal control report showing the dog was off its property and uncontrolled corroborates your account and undercuts any suggestion that you went onto the owner’s land or provoked the dog.
Massachusetts does not treat a violated ordinance as automatic negligence. The Supreme Judicial Court has said the general rule is that violating a safety statute or ordinance does not in itself give rise to a cause of action but is evidence of negligence. So in a negligence claim against a landlord or another non-owner, a leash violation is one piece of proof, not the whole case. In Nutt v. Florio, a landlord case, the Appeals Court noted that the dog that bit a ten year old was unrestrained in violation of the municipal leash law, unlicensed, and unvaccinated, and then went on to ask what the landlords knew.
Section 155 reaches the owner or the keeper. An owner is the person with the right to possess the dog. Keeper is the harder word. Massachusetts courts describe keeping as harboring the dog with an assumption of custody, management, and control. The 2024 model instruction adds that harboring means housing, sheltering, or giving the dog a place of refuge, and that the dog’s mere presence on someone’s property, or their acceptance of it, is not enough on its own.
A few points from the cases:
The same rule can cut against a victim. A person who was herself the dog’s keeper cannot sue the owner under section 155. The Appeals Court held a veterinary technician bitten while preparing a dog for surgery was a keeper and could not recover, while a sister who briefly held her sibling’s dog by the collar to move it was entitled to have a jury decide. If you were dog sitting, walking, grooming, or boarding the dog, raise it with a lawyer right away. For more, see what determines ownership of a dog.
One more limit: an employee bitten at work by the employer’s own dog generally cannot sue the employer under section 155, because the Supreme Judicial Court held that workers’ compensation is the exclusive remedy against the employer in that setting.
The word provocation does not appear in section 155. The statute’s defenses are narrower and more specific. The owner or keeper is not liable if, when you were hurt, you were:
Massachusetts courts read these words in the victim’s favor. In Koller v. Duggan, a customer was badly bitten in the face after she bent down to pet the owner’s dog in a hair salon. The Supreme Judicial Court refused to treat petting as a technical trespass and said that teasing, tormenting, or abusing covers the entire range of wrongful acts against dogs. In Malchanoff v. Truehart, a three year old offered a dog a bone, and the court held that conduct which happens to set a dog off is not automatically teasing. The model jury instruction says friendly playing with a dog is not teasing. Background on dog bite provocation is here.
Trespass is also read sensibly. In Rossi v. DelDuca, an eight year old girl ran across a field to escape a dog that was following her and was mauled by two Great Danes kept there. The court held a jury could find she was not a trespasser, because a person is privileged to enter another’s land when it reasonably appears necessary to avoid serious harm. The model jury instruction describes trespass as entering or remaining on the defendant’s property without a right to do so. In Koller, the court refused to treat a business or social invitee’s friendly overture to a dog as a trespass.
Assumption of risk is not one of the statute’s defenses, and Massachusetts abolished it as a defense in negligence actions through chapter 231, section 85. The closest thing in a dog case is the keeper rule above: someone who took custody of the dog cannot sue its owner under the statute.
Massachusetts uses modified comparative negligence. Under chapter 231, section 85, a plaintiff’s own negligence does not bar recovery if it was not greater than the total negligence of the people the plaintiff is suing. Damages are then reduced in proportion to the plaintiff’s share. At 50 percent you recover half. At 51 percent you recover nothing. The person claiming you were careless has the burden to prove it, and the statute presumes you were using due care.
How that rule fits a section 155 case is a separate question. Section 85 is written for actions to recover damages for negligence, and section 155 is not a negligence statute: the Appeals Court has said it is indifferent to any question of negligence. The statute instead lists the specific victim conduct that defeats a claim (trespass, another tort, teasing). The state’s model jury instruction for dog liability contains no step for reducing an award by the plaintiff’s percentage of fault.
Where comparative negligence clearly does apply is the negligence side of a case, such as a claim against a landlord or another person who was not the owner or keeper. There your own carelessness can reduce the award, and above 50 percent can end it. Under section 85 the comparison is to the people you are suing, so who is named in the lawsuit matters.
Expect the owner’s insurer to argue anyway that you got too close or ignored a warning. Under the dog statute the question is narrower: whether what you did was a trespass, another tort, or teasing the dog.
Massachusetts gives young children a specific protection. Section 155 says that when the injured child was under seven years old, it is presumed the child was not trespassing, committing a tort, or teasing, tormenting, or abusing the dog, and the burden of proof is on the defendant. For a toddler bitten in a neighbor’s yard, the owner has to prove misconduct rather than the family having to disprove it. The 2012 dangerous dog law uses a similar under seven presumption in the hearing process.
For children seven and older the ordinary burden applies, but the cases still help. In Malchanoff, the Supreme Judicial Court approved telling the jury it could consider the child’s age, because age may bear on whether a child was even capable of teasing, tormenting, or abusing a dog. In that case the jury could find that a three year old who offered a dog a bone was not teasing it. If an adjuster is blaming your child, read whether a child can provoke a dog.
Deadlines are longer for children. Chapter 260, section 7 pauses the limitations period while the injured person is a minor, and Massachusetts sets full legal age at 18, so a child’s three years generally run to the twenty first birthday.
Parents have claims of their own. The Supreme Judicial Court has long allowed a parent to recover under section 155 for the consequential costs of a child’s dog bite, such as medical bills the parent paid. Chapter 231, section 85X also gives parents a claim for loss of consortium when a minor child is seriously injured. Do not assume a parent’s own claim gets the child’s longer deadline. Have it looked at early.
A landlord who does not own or keep the tenant’s dog is not strictly liable under section 155. That does not end the inquiry. In Nutt v. Florio, decided October 19, 2009, a ten year old tenant was bitten by another tenant’s pit bull. The Appeals Court held that because the landlords were not owners or keepers, the strict liability statute did not apply, and the claim was governed by common law negligence.
Under that negligence rule, a property owner owes a duty of reasonable care, including a landlord’s duty to protect tenants from reasonably foreseeable risks of harm. Knowing that a dog lives on the property is not enough. The victim must show the landlord knew or reasonably should have known the dog had dangerous propensities, and then failed to act reasonably. In Nutt, the child’s parents had complained repeatedly that the dog ran around unleashed and acted aggressively, another tenant had reported being charged by a pit bull, and the landlord had a no dogs policy. The court reversed summary judgment for the landlords and sent the case back, holding that these were questions for the fact finder.
Compare Brown v. Bolduc. There, the owners of the land where their adult daughter kept her Saint Bernard visited daily to tend horses and sometimes greeted the dog. The prior incident the victim relied on was the dog barking, while on a chain or leash, at a gas delivery man. The Appeals Court said it was for the owner and keeper to handle her dog, and the property owners were not liable.
So the landlord questions are practical: what complaints were made, to whom, and when; whether the lease banned dogs; and whether the landlord did anything about it.
Massachusetts dog bite claims generally have three years. Chapter 260, section 2A requires tort actions to be commenced within three years after the cause of action accrues, which for a dog bite is normally the day of the bite.
Claims involving government dogs carry a further problem. In Audette v. Commonwealth, a police officer bitten by a state police dog lost his section 155 claim because the Appeals Court held the Commonwealth has not waived its immunity from strict liability under the dog statute. The court reasoned that chapter 258, the Massachusetts Tort Claims Act, allows claims for a public employee’s negligent or wrongful act or omission, not strict liability. Chapter 258 also governs claims against cities and towns, and it has its own exceptions and limits. If a police dog, a municipal shelter, or a town-owned property is involved, talk to a lawyer well inside the two year presentment window.
These are outer limits. The deadlines that shape your case come much sooner: the ten day rabies quarantine, the animal control file, and photographs of the wound before it heals. Our guide to the dog bite statute of limitations explains how these clocks interact.
Massachusetts case law gives a realistic picture of what dog bites do. In reported decisions, a Saint Bernard’s bite to a guest’s nose took forty eight sutures and left permanent disfigurement; a salon customer’s upper lip was torn through, leaving permanent scars that plastic surgery could not remove and a speech impairment that affected her work for about a year; a veterinary technician needed surgery for tendon damage in her finger; and an older visitor pulled over by a dog suffered a hip injury requiring repeated operations.
If your pet was attacked too, the owner of the attacking dog is liable for that as damage to your property. The Appeals Court has held reasonable veterinary bills are recoverable even when they exceed the pet’s market value, though not damages for your own grief over the pet.
The goal of damages in a Massachusetts dog bite case is to put you back, as far as money can, where you would have been without the attack. The model jury instruction lists the categories:
Massachusetts adds interest at 12 percent a year from the date a personal injury lawsuit is filed under chapter 231, section 6B, which gives an insurer a reason not to drag a strong case out.
Punitive damages work differently. The Supreme Judicial Court has said punitive damages are not allowed in Massachusetts unless a statute expressly authorizes them, and section 155 does not. Two statutes come close. First, section 159 makes the owner or keeper liable for three times the damages when a dog that a hearing authority or court had already deemed dangerous wounds a person. Second, the wrongful death statute allows punitive damages of at least $5,000 where a death was caused by malicious, willful, wanton, or reckless conduct or gross negligence.
Claims against public employers are limited. Under chapter 258, section 2, a public employer is not liable for punitive damages, interest before judgment, or any amount over $100,000. For more on the categories, see dog bite compensation.
Massachusetts overhauled its dangerous dog law in 2012. Chapter 193 of the Acts of 2012, approved August 2, 2012, rewrote the definitions in section 136A and replaced sections 157 through 161 of chapter 140. The current system has two labels:
Under section 157, any person may file a written complaint with the local hearing authority, such as the select board, mayor, or police chief. The hearing authority investigates and holds a public hearing at which the complainant is examined under oath, then dismisses the complaint, deems the dog a nuisance, or deems it dangerous. A dog cannot be declared dangerous based only on growling or barking, or on its breed, or for a reaction that was not grossly disproportionate to being attacked, provoked, or threatened by someone committing a crime against its owner or keeper.
If a dog is deemed dangerous, the hearing authority must order one or more of the following: humane restraint (never chaining to a fixed object), secure confinement in a locked, roofed pen, muzzling and a short lead off the property, proof of liability insurance of at least $100,000, permanent identification such as a microchip, spaying or neutering, or humane euthanasia. The owner has 10 days to appeal to the district court, where a de novo hearing is available. Violating an order can bring fines, jail, seizure of the dog, and a five year ban on licensing any dog in Massachusetts. The penalties are in section 157A.
What a declaration means for you: it does not award money by itself, and you do not need one to win a section 155 case. A dangerous dog finding made before your bite matters a great deal, because section 159 then triples the owner’s liability. A finding made after your bite still creates an official record of what the dog did, including the complainant’s testimony under oath, and may lead to the $100,000 insurance requirement. Section 157 also bars cities and towns from regulating dogs by breed.
Massachusetts handles dog bite reporting through its rabies regulations, which are administered by the Department of Agricultural Resources and each municipality’s Animal Inspector. Under 330 CMR 10.04, any person who knows that a domestic animal has bitten or scratched a human must report it immediately to the Animal Inspector in the city or town where it happened, along with the date, a description of the dog, where it is, and the owner’s name if known. That includes you.
The Animal Inspector investigates, including the dog’s vaccination status and any unusual behavior. If the inspector finds that the dog bit someone, the inspector issues a written order placing the dog under a Ten Day Quarantine, and the regulation says the quarantine applies regardless of the biting dog’s vaccination status. Quarantine means strict confinement in an escape proof, solid walled building with a roof approved by the inspector, with leash walks only by or under the supervision of an adult. If the dog shows signs of rabies during the ten days, it must be euthanized and tested. The owner pays for the quarantine.
Why the ten days matter: the regulation describes quarantine as confinement for observing the animal for signs of rabies, and what that observation shows is information to share with your doctor when deciding about rabies shots. Whether you need treatment is a medical decision. If the dog cannot be found or its vaccination is unknown, read about being bitten by an unvaccinated dog.
Massachusetts requires every dog six months or older to be vaccinated against rabies under section 145B, with limited exemptions, and a town cannot license a dog without proof of vaccination or an exemption. The Supreme Judicial Court has treated a dog license issued to a person as evidence, though not conclusive, that the person owns the dog. Here is what happens after a dog bite is reported.
This page does not give a Massachusetts average settlement figure, because we could not tie one to a reliable published source, and we will not invent one. What does exist is national insurance data. For 2025 the Insurance Information Institute and State Farm reported that the average dog related injury claim cost $65,450, across 28,450 claims and $1.86 billion paid. That is an industry average across every claim, small and large. It is not a Massachusetts figure and it does not predict any one case.
What moves the value of a Massachusetts case:
Our Massachusetts average dog bite settlement page goes through these factors in more detail. For general ranges, see dog bite settlement amounts and the dog bite settlement calculator.
The dog owner’s homeowners or renters insurance is a key source of payment. The Insurance Information Institute says standard homeowners and renters policies typically cover dog bite liability up to the policy’s liability limits, usually $100,000 to $300,000, with the owner responsible for anything above that.
Two Massachusetts points. First, if the dog had been deemed dangerous, the hearing authority could have ordered the owner to carry at least $100,000 of liability insurance covering injuries from the dog’s acts, or show reasonable efforts to get it. If the dog that bit you had a prior order, ask whether that coverage was bought. Second, if the attack happened in a rental, ask whether the landlord carries its own liability coverage, since a negligence claim against the landlord is separate from the claim against the owner.
On breed, the law is in flux. The Massachusetts statute barring discrimination in homeowners insurance lists characteristics such as race, age, and disability, but not a dog’s breed. The PETS Act, whose Senate version would bar homeowners and renters insurers from considering a dog’s breed when deciding whether to provide, renew, or cancel a policy or when setting the premium, passed the Senate and the House in different versions in 2026 and was sent to a conference committee in late July 2026. As of October 6, 2026 it was not law.
Do not take the owner’s word that there is no insurance.
For the full sequence, read our guide on how to file a dog bite claim.
Dog Bite Laws handles dog attack cases. Massachusetts law favors bite victims on paper, but the details still decide outcomes: proving you were not trespassing or teasing when you are seven or older, identifying every owner and keeper, building a negligence case against a landlord who ignored complaints, finding out whether the dog had a prior dangerous dog order that triples the damages, and meeting the two year presentment deadline when a public employer is involved.
We gather the Animal Inspector’s quarantine order, the animal control file, the dog’s license and vaccination records, and any hearing authority record. We find the insurance, deal with the adjuster, and keep your words from being turned into a trespass or teasing defense. We work on a contingency fee, so there is nothing to pay up front and no fee unless we recover money for you. Founding attorney Michael Agruss built the firm to carry that load for injured people.
We take dog bite cases throughout Massachusetts, including Boston, Worcester, Springfield, Cambridge, Lowell, and Brockton. If you or your child was bitten, contact us for a free consultation, and we will tell you honestly whether you have a claim.
No. Massachusetts makes a dog's owner or keeper strictly liable under chapter 140, section 155, so a victim does not need to show the dog had bitten before or that the owner knew it was dangerous. Even a dog's very first bite is covered. The owner avoids liability only if the victim's conduct falls within the statute's narrow exceptions, and a victim seven or older has to prove it did not.
Only if what you did amounts to teasing, tormenting, or abusing the dog, or a trespass or other wrong. The Supreme Judicial Court has upheld findings that petting a dog and offering it a bone were not teasing, and the model jury instruction says friendly play does not qualify. If the injured person was a child under seven, the owner has to prove the child misbehaved, rather than the family having to prove the child did not.
Generally three years from the date of the bite. For a child, the clock usually does not start until age 18, giving a child until about age 21. If a city, town, or state agency may be responsible, a written claim must be presented to the public employer within two years, so do not wait on those cases.
Possibly, but not automatically. A landlord who did not own or keep the dog is not strictly liable under the dog statute. The landlord can be liable in negligence if it knew or should have known the dog was dangerous, for example after complaints from tenants, and failed to act reasonably. Records of complaints and the lease's pet terms are key.
That can triple your recovery. Section 159 makes the owner or keeper liable for three times the damages when a dog that a hearing authority or district court had deemed dangerous wounds a person. A prior order may also have required the owner to carry at least $100,000 in liability insurance, so ask about both.
You may. The statute covers any damage a dog does to a person's body, not only bites. Massachusetts courts have allowed statutory claims by people who were tripped or pulled over by a dog and injured a hip. The same proof applies: the defendant owned or kept the dog, the dog caused the injury, and you were not trespassing or teasing it.
Yes. State rabies regulations require any person who knows that a dog bit someone to report it immediately to the Animal Inspector in the city or town where it happened. The inspector then orders the dog into a ten day quarantine, even if it is vaccinated. The report also creates an official record that helps your claim.
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