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Georgia does not make a dog owner automatically pay for a bite. Under O.C.G.A. 51-2-7, the owner or keeper is responsible when the dog was vicious or dangerous, the owner knew it, and the owner carelessly managed the dog or let it run loose, injuring someone who did not provoke it. Georgia gives victims a shortcut on the first part: if a city or county ordinance required the dog to be on a leash or at heel and it was not, that is enough to prove the dog’s vicious propensity. The Supreme Court of Georgia has held that you still need to show the owner knew something, either about the dog’s behavior or that it was loose.
This page covers the statute and what you must prove, how local leash ordinances work, who counts as an owner or keeper, the defenses, Georgia’s 50 percent fault bar, a child’s case, landlord liability, deadlines including the short notice periods for claims against a city or county, damages, the Responsible Dog Ownership Law, reporting and rabies, settlement value, and insurance. One recent change matters to almost every case: Georgia’s 2025 tort reform law, SB 68, changed how medical bills are proved and how damages are argued, starting April 21, 2025.
Dog Bite Laws handles dog attack cases. Talk to us for free, and pay no fee unless we recover money for you.
Georgia’s dog bite statute is short. O.C.G.A. 51-2-7 says a person who owns or keeps a vicious or dangerous animal, and who by careless management or by allowing the animal to go at liberty causes injury to someone who did not provoke it, “may be liable in damages.” Its second sentence adds that, in proving vicious propensity, it is enough to show a city, county, or consolidated government ordinance required the animal to be at heel or on a leash and it was not. The section has not been amended since 1985.
That one word, may, carries the whole Georgia rule. The 1985 amendment changed “shall be liable” to “may be liable,” which the Supreme Court of Georgia says clarified that the standard is negligence, not strict liability. Georgia is therefore a version of the one bite rule: the law presumes dogs, regardless of breed, are harmless, and a victim must prove this dog was dangerous and its owner or keeper knew it.
The court has also made clear the nickname is misleading. In Steagald v. Eason, decided March 6, 2017, it held that the rule does not literally require a first bite. What is needed is at least one incident that would cause a prudent person to anticipate the attack that happened. A dog that snapped at two people a week earlier was enough to send that case to a jury.
Other theories exist, such as premises liability against a property owner, but nearly every Georgia dog case turns on two questions: what the owner knew, and whether a local leash ordinance applied.
The Supreme Court of Georgia listed the elements in 2020. Put plainly, the checklist looks like this:
The knowledge element is where Georgia cases are won and lost. In Harris v. Martin, decided October 16, 2024, a jury awarded a woman in her 70s $66,000 after a loose dog attacked her as she walked past its home. The Court of Appeals reversed because the record held no evidence the owners knew of the dog’s propensity to bite or to lunge at people, even though the dog had gotten loose before.
So gather the dog’s past: complaints to animal control, neighbors who were snapped at or chased, warnings the owner gave visitors, and what the owner said afterward. A beware of dog sign or a chain, by contrast, has not been enough on its own.
Georgia has no general statewide leash law for ordinary dogs. State law sets minimum standards and lets cities and counties regulate more strictly. Statewide rules cover narrower cases: a dog in heat may not roam off the owner’s property, and a dog classified as dangerous must be on a leash of six feet or less, crated, or working when off the property.
The local ordinance is what makes the second sentence of 51-2-7 work. If an ordinance required the dog to be at heel or on a leash and it was not, that proves vicious propensity. The Supreme Court of Georgia explained in S&S Towing & Recovery v. Charnota, decided June 16, 2020, that this sentence displaces the presumption that dogs are harmless and defines an unrestrained dog as vicious.
Here is the part most summaries leave out. The same decision held that the victim must still prove knowledge, in one of two ways: the owner knew of the dog’s vicious propensity in the ordinary sense, or knew the dog was unrestrained at the time of the injury. It disapproved older decisions saying knowledge stops mattering once an ordinance is broken.
The second route can be decisive. In Espinoza v. Morel (2023), owners away for a weekend left their German Shepherd tethered at a single point in a partly fenced yard, and it bit the woman they had asked to check on it. That restraint violated the county ordinance, the owners knew how they had left the dog, and the court held that satisfied the knowledge element. In Philip v. Pollock, decided October 30, 2025, the court held that a Cobb County rule requiring a dog on the owner’s premises to be indoors, in an enclosure, or on a leash counts as a leash ordinance. One practical point: the ordinance has to be properly proved in the court record, usually with a certified copy, or the court will not consider it.
The statute reaches anyone who “owns or keeps” the dog, and it defines neither word. An owner is the person the dog belongs to. A keeper is someone who, without owning the dog, was managing it, and Georgia courts look at who was managing the dog at the critical time.
Two Court of Appeals decisions show the line. In Johnston v. Warendh (2001), a woman who lived with two Rottweilers owned by others, and who opened the door they ran out of, faced a jury question on whether she was keeping them. In Cormier v. Willis (2012), a homeowner whose visiting adult daughter brought her own dog was not its keeper, because the daughter was managing the dog and he was out of state when it bit.
More than one person can be responsible. In Steagald the victim sued the adult son who owned the pit bull and both of his parents, in whose home he had moved with the dog, and the mother had seen the dog snap at people the week before. The Supreme Court sent the case to a jury on the knowledge question without deciding which of them counted as a keeper. If several people lived with, fed, or walked the dog, each may be worth naming. For more, see what determines ownership of a dog.
The Responsible Dog Ownership Law defines owner more broadly, reaching anyone possessing, harboring, or having custody of a dog, and the parents of a minor who owns one, but that definition governs dangerous and vicious dog classifications, not the civil claim.
Being a helper does not automatically end your case. In Espinoza, the owners had asked the woman to check on their dog while they were away, and after it bit her the Court of Appeals reversed the summary judgment against her.
The statute protects “another person who does not provoke the injury by his own act,” and the Supreme Court of Georgia lists the absence of provocation among the things the victim must show. The statute does not define provoke. We discuss the concept more generally in dog bite provocation.
Three other rules come up in Georgia cases:
Section 51-2-7 has no trespass exception written into it. A claim brought instead under Georgia’s premises liability statutes is different: those statutes limit what a landowner owes a trespasser, and a licensee, to avoiding willful or wanton injury. Separately, a dog cannot be classified as dangerous or vicious for biting someone who was trespassing, abusing it, or committing or attempting a crime against a person.
Write down how you came to be on the property, and who let you in, while you remember it.
Georgia uses modified comparative fault with a 50 percent bar. Under O.C.G.A. 51-12-33, the jury sets the victim’s percentage of fault and the judge reduces the award by that share. Subsection (g) then says the plaintiff is not entitled to receive any damages if the plaintiff is “50 percent or more responsible” for the injury.
Do the arithmetic. A victim found 49 percent at fault keeps 51 percent of the award. A victim found 50 percent at fault, an even split, gets nothing. Under a 51 percent bar, that second victim would recover half, so the one-point difference can decide the whole case.
Fault is divided among everyone who contributed, including a nonparty if the defense files notice at least 120 days before trial, and each defendant pays only its own share. A 2022 amendment made clear this applies whether one person or several are sued. In Harris v. Martin, for example, the jury assigned 90 percent of the fault to the dog’s owner and 5 percent each to two other men before the verdict was reversed on other grounds.
The 2025 tort reform law adds a procedural twist. Under O.C.G.A. 51-12-15, any party may demand in writing, before the pretrial order, that the jury decide fault first and hear damages evidence only afterward. The court can refuse in limited situations, one being an amount in controversy under $150,000. So your injuries may not be in front of the jury when it decides fault.
Expect the insurer to look for something you did, such as reaching toward the dog or entering a yard, and push your share toward the 50 percent line.
A child gets more time. Under O.C.G.A. 9-3-90(b), a person under 18 when a claim accrues gets the same limitation period after turning 18 that everyone else gets, so the child’s two years run out on the twentieth birthday. For claims against a county, a minor is allowed 12 months after reaching majority to present the claim.
A parent’s own claims are different. The extra time in 9-3-90(b) is written for the person who was under 18, and a parent’s own claim, such as for medical bills the parent paid, is not covered by that wording. Do not assume it waits for the child’s eighteenth birthday; raise it with a lawyer early.
Expect the owner’s side to point at your child’s behavior. Georgia judges a young child’s care by what that child’s mental and physical capacities allow, not by an adult standard. The Supreme Court of Georgia held long ago that a child of four and a half could not be guilty of contributory negligence, and for a child of seven, the Court of Appeals has treated the child’s care as a question for the jury. If an adjuster is blaming your child, read whether a child can provoke a dog, and keep the 50 percent bar in mind.
The knowledge rule is unforgiving here too. In one Georgia case over an infant’s death, the homeowner the dog lived with won summary judgment because nothing showed the dog had ever attacked or bitten a person. Ask neighbors, other parents, and animal control what they know. Separately, the owner of a dog classified as vicious may not leave it unattended with minors.
A landlord is not automatically responsible for a tenant’s dog in Georgia, and the Supreme Court of Georgia narrowed the path in 2019. In Tyner v. Matta-Troncoso, decided March 11, 2019, a woman attacked by a tenant’s two pit bulls two blocks from the rental house sued the landlord for failing to fix a broken gate latch. The court held that 51-2-7 applies only to a person who owns or keeps the dog, so it does not reach an out-of-possession landlord, and the leash ordinance shortcut cannot be used against one.
That left the landlord statute, O.C.G.A. 44-7-14. A landlord who has parted with possession is responsible only for defective construction or failure to repair. Assuming, without deciding, that this statute can be used for dog bites, the court held that even if the landlord knew about the latch, the injury was not reasonably foreseeable without evidence he knew the dogs had harmful tendencies. Knowing the tenants kept two pit bulls was not enough.
So, plainly: against a landlord who has handed over the property, you need evidence the landlord knew the dog was dangerous, plus a repair or construction failure that let the attack happen, and the Supreme Court has not decided that the landlord statute covers dog bites at all. A landlord who actually keeps or controls the dog may be a keeper in their own right.
Owners in possession, such as stores or apartment complexes in their common areas, owe invited visitors ordinary care under the premises liability statute, but Georgia courts still require evidence of the dog’s vicious propensity to show the owner’s superior knowledge.
Two years from the bite, for most people. O.C.G.A. 9-3-33 sets two years for injuries to the person and four years for a spouse’s loss of consortium claim. Government defendants come with much shorter notice deadlines that can end a claim long before the two years run.
Georgia law says a local government is never liable for a dog injury because it failed to enforce the Responsible Dog Ownership Law, so a claim against a local government needs some other legal basis. Under SB 68, a plaintiff can also dismiss without a court order only until 60 days after the answer, so a rushed lawsuit is harder to fix.
Treat all of these as outer limits. The deadlines that shape a case are shorter: the ten-day rabies observation, animal control’s investigation, and the weeks a wound takes to close. Our guide to the dog bite statute of limitations explains how these clocks interact.
Georgia’s Responsible Dog Ownership Law defines serious injury to include broken or dislocated bones, lacerations requiring multiple sutures, disfiguring avulsions, injuries requiring plastic surgery or a hospital admission, and protracted impairment of health, including an infection. That definition decides whether a dog is classified as vicious, and it tracks the injuries that drive civil claims.
A wound that looks minor on day one can look very different on day five, and photographs are often the only record of how it healed.
Georgia damages fall into the usual groups: medical bills, lost wages and earning capacity, and noneconomic damages, which Georgia’s 2025 law defines to include physical and emotional pain, anxiety, physical impairment, mental anguish, disfigurement, and loss of enjoyment of life. We have not found any Georgia statute capping compensatory damages in an ordinary dog bite case. For an overview, see dog bite compensation.
SB 68 changed two things about how damages are proved and argued, and the two have different start dates.
Punitive damages are possible but hard to get. O.C.G.A. 51-12-5.1 requires clear and convincing evidence of willful misconduct, malice, wantonness, or an entire want of care showing conscious indifference to consequences, and they must be requested in the complaint. Most awards are capped at $250,000, but there is no cap if the defendant acted with specific intent to cause harm or was impaired by alcohol or drugs.
When an attack is fatal, Georgia’s wrongful death statute lets the surviving spouse, or the children if there is no surviving spouse, recover the full value of the life of the person who died, as shown by the evidence.
Georgia’s Responsible Dog Ownership Law, O.C.G.A. 4-8-20 and following, enacted in 2012, sorts dogs into two classes by what they did, not by breed.
Each city and county designates dog control officers, county officers covering unincorporated areas and city officers the city limits. After a report, the officer investigates; if the dog qualifies, the owner must be mailed notice within 72 hours and has seven days to request a hearing. A dog believed to threaten public safety must be impounded immediately.
Every classified dog needs a certificate of registration, renewed every year. A vicious dog must also be kept in a secure enclosure with warning signs posted at every entrance and must have a microchip, its owner must carry at least $50,000 of liability insurance and may own only one, and outside its enclosure it must be muzzled and on a leash of six feet or less, or crated. A dog found to have seriously injured a person more than once must be euthanized, and an owner previously convicted under this law whose classified dog seriously injures someone in another violation commits a felony punishable by one to ten years in prison.
A classification does not award a victim money. What it gives you is proof. If the dog was classified before it bit you, the owner was mailed notice of that determination, which bears on what the owner knew, the hardest element in a Georgia case. A classification after the attack has been held relevant to whether the dog had dangerous propensities at the time, though not to what the owner knew.
In Georgia, rabies control belongs to each county board of health. Under O.C.G.A. 31-19-4, the owner or custodian of a dog that bit a person must notify the county board of health and confine the dog under the board’s rules, and a person bitten by an animal reasonably suspected of being rabid must notify the board immediately. Violations are misdemeanors.
Doctors report too: the Georgia Department of Public Health’s notifiable conditions list places bites by animals in its report-immediately group. Even so, report the bite yourself to the county environmental health office or animal control. That starts the observation period and creates a dated official record. Here is what happens after a dog bite is reported.
The state’s Rabies Control Manual, updated December 2024, says a dog that bites a person should be confined and observed for 10 days regardless of its vaccination status. The manual explains that the virus is in an infected dog’s saliva from a few days before illness begins until death, which is why watching the dog shows whether the person was exposed. The local rabies authority decides where it happens, such as the owner’s home, a veterinary clinic, or an animal control facility.
Whether you need rabies shots is for your doctor and the health department. The manual reports Georgia’s last human rabies case was in October 2000, from a bat, but do not wait out the 10 days without medical advice. Georgia requires dogs to be vaccinated through county board of health rules, and since July 1, 2026 a licensed veterinary technician may also give the shot under state rules. If the dog that bit you was never vaccinated, read about being bitten by an unvaccinated dog.
We have not found a published average settlement figure for Georgia dog bite cases. Georgia also does not appear in the 2025 top-ten state table that the Insurance Information Institute and State Farm publish for homeowners insurance dog bite claims. The national figure from Triple-I and State Farm for 2025 is an average of $65,450 per dog-related injury claim, across 28,450 claims. That industry average covers every claim, large and small, and does not predict any one case.
What actually moves the number in a Georgia case:
Our Georgia average dog bite settlement page works through these factors in more detail, and the dog bite settlement calculator gives a rough sense of ranges. For the national picture, see dog bite settlement amounts.
In most Georgia dog bite cases the money comes from the owner’s homeowners or renters liability policy, not from the owner’s own pocket. The Insurance Information Institute says those policies typically cover dog bite liability up to the policy limits, usually $100,000 to $300,000, and that the owner is responsible for anything above the limit. Insurers paid $1.86 billion on dog-related injury claims nationally in 2025, according to Triple-I and State Farm.
Two Georgia points. First, the owner of a dog classified as vicious must keep at least $50,000 of liability insurance for injuries that dog causes, and at each annual renewal a dog control officer checks that the owner is still complying. If the dog had already been classified, ask animal control for the registration file.
Second, breed. Triple-I reports that some insurers refuse certain breeds or exclude a dog after it bites, and it names Pennsylvania and Michigan, not Georgia, as states restricting breed-based cancellations. We have not found a Georgia law limiting this. So do not assume there is no coverage because of the breed, and do not take the owner’s word that there is no insurance.
If the owner rents, check the renters policy. If the bite happened while the dog was boarded, walked, or groomed, that business may have its own coverage. The insurer represents its policyholder, not you, so be careful on a recorded call.
For the whole process, read our guide on how to file a dog bite claim.
Dog Bite Laws handles dog attack cases, and Georgia is a state where preparation decides the result. The law starts from the presumption that dogs are harmless, so the work is building the proof that overcomes it: finding the earlier snap or complaint, getting the animal control and health department files, locating and properly proving the city or county leash ordinance where you were bitten, and showing the owner knew the dog was loose.
We identify every owner and keeper, check whether the dog was already classified, find every policy, and watch the government notice deadlines. We also prepare for the 2025 rules on medical bills, damages arguments, and split trials, and we handle the insurer so a friendly phone call does not become a share of fault assigned to you.
We work on a contingency fee, so there is nothing to pay to start and no fee unless we recover money for you. Founding attorney Michael Agruss built the firm around injury clients who need someone else to carry the paperwork.
We take dog bite cases across Georgia, including Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, Macon, Savannah, and Athens. If you or your child was bitten, contact us for a free consultation, and we will tell you honestly whether there is a claim worth bringing.
No. Georgia's statute, O.C.G.A. 51-2-7, says an owner or keeper may be liable, and the Supreme Court of Georgia has said the standard is negligence. You generally have to prove the dog was vicious or dangerous and that the owner knew it, plus careless management. A local leash ordinance violation can prove the dangerous part, but knowledge is still required.
It helps a great deal but does not finish the case. If a city or county ordinance required the dog to be leashed or at heel, the violation proves vicious propensity. You must still show the owner knew either that the dog was dangerous or that it was unrestrained when it bit you, that the owner was careless, and that you did not provoke it. The ordinance also has to be properly put into evidence.
No. The Supreme Court of Georgia held in Steagald v. Eason that the rule does not literally require a first bite. An earlier snap, an attempted bite, or other incident that would put a prudent person on notice can be enough. Barking and growling alone usually are not.
Your award is reduced by your percentage of fault, and if you are found 50 percent or more responsible you recover nothing. That is stricter than states where only a majority share bars recovery. Defendants can also ask the jury to assign fault to people who were not sued if they give notice at least 120 days before trial.
Generally two years from the bite. A child has until two years after turning 18. If a city is involved you must give written notice within six months, a claim against a county must be presented within 12 months, and a claim against a state agency needs written notice within 12 months. Do not let the two-year figure lull you; the evidence of the owner's knowledge fades much sooner.
Only in limited cases. After Tyner v. Matta-Troncoso, a claim against a landlord who has handed over the property needs evidence that the landlord knew the tenant's dog had harmful tendencies, plus a failure to repair or a construction defect that let the attack happen, and the court only assumed that the landlord statute applies to dog bites. Knowing a tenant had a dog, or even a particular breed, is not enough. A landlord who actually kept or controlled the dog is a different situation.
Yes, in several ways. SB 68, effective April 21, 2025, lets juries hear what health insurance pays or would pay for injuries occurring on or after that date, limits when and how lawyers can suggest a dollar amount for pain and suffering, and lets any party ask for fault to be tried before damages. It did not change the dog bite statute itself.
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