Guide
American Bully Weight and Size Chart
A quick reference for adult size and puppy milestones, plus the one thing the numbers can’t tell you about a dog.
Weight follows the dog; it does not define the dog. A class is assigned by how tall the dog stands at the withers, so an adult male lands anywhere from roughly 30 pounds in the pocket range up to about 120 in a big XL purely as a side effect of its height and how heavily it is built. Read the charts below as a map of the territory, not a contract.
Start with body condition, not the scale
Before any table, the thing I would have a new owner learn is how to read the dog with their hands, because that beats a bathroom scale every time. Three checks, done every couple of weeks:
- run flat fingers along the side under light pressure and you should meet ribs beneath a thin covering;
- look straight down and the body should pinch in behind the ribs into a waist;
- view from the side and the underline should rise from the ribcage toward the belly.
Pass those three and the number on the scale is almost beside the point. Fail all three and the dog is overweight no matter which row of the chart it sits in, and that carried weight is the single biggest thing deciding how long it lives.
I don’t run hip or elbow screening on the parents and I make no claim that I do, so read nothing here as a guarantee about one puppy’s finished frame. All I can give you is what each class actually measures and the sort of dog mine grow into.
Adult weight once the dog is finished
| Class | Male | Female |
|---|---|---|
| 30 to 55 lb | 25 to 50 lb | |
| Standard | 50 to 80 lb | 40 to 70 lb |
| Classic | 45 to 75 lb | 35 to 65 lb |
| XL | 80 to 120 lb | 70 to 100 lb |
Each cell is a span to expect, not a goal to hit. I would steer anyone away from chasing the top of the XL row in particular: all that mass has to be carried by joints that need to last a dozen years, and a heavy dog in good condition is a very different animal from a heavy dog that is just carrying fat.
Puppy weight, month by month
| Age | Standard | XL | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 weeks | 6 to 10 lb | 10 to 15 lb | 14 to 20 lb |
| 12 weeks | 11 to 17 lb | 18 to 26 lb | 24 to 34 lb |
| 4 months | 15 to 23 lb | 25 to 36 lb | 33 to 46 lb |
| 6 months | 22 to 34 lb | 36 to 52 lb | 48 to 68 lb |
| 9 months | 27 to 44 lb | 45 to 66 lb | 62 to 88 lb |
| 12 months | 30 to 50 lb | 50 to 74 lb | 72 to 102 lb |
| 18 months | Adult weight | Adult weight | Filling out, near adult |
A healthy puppy can wander outside every figure here, so don’t panic at a number. Puppies grow in spurts and plateaus, and three quiet weeks are often the pause before a jump. Watch the trend and the condition of the dog rather than any one weigh-in; if your vet is satisfied with the body score, the scale reading is not the thing to lose sleep over.
What the classes are measuring in the first place
| Class | Male, at the withers | Female, at the withers |
|---|---|---|
| XL | 20 to 23 in | 19 to 22 in |
| Standard | 17 to 20 in | 16 to 19 in |
| Classic | 17 to 20 in | 16 to 19 in |
| 14 to 17 in | 13 to 16 in |
Those heights are the actual definition. The withers is the high point of the shoulders, and you take the measurement with the dog squared up on a flat floor. Nothing about weight is written into the class at all, which is the whole reason a pair of dogs in one class can be twenty pounds apart and both correct.
Notice what is missing: XXL. That is a seller’s word for an outsized XL rather than a tier of its own, and I spell that out on the XXL page instead of letting the term float around. The micro label gets the same honest handling.
When does the growing stop?
Expect the height to be settled by twelve to eighteen months. The width, the chest and the overall mass carry on arriving until something like two to three years, so a bully around its first birthday often strikes its owner as leggy and only half the dog from the photos. Give it time.
That slow finish is exactly why the early stretch deserves care: while the plates are still open and the frame is soft, an eager young dog is easiest to injure and the damage is hardest to see. Skip the bike runs, the repeated leaps off height and the marathon stair sessions until it has matured, and lean on your vet to say when yours is done.
I send puppies home between nine and twelve weeks, with their current ages listed on the availability page. For the most reliable read on a particular puppy’s adult size, ask me the dam and sire weights; parent size predicts the outcome better than any growth table.
Ask what a given puppy will grow into
Tell me which puppy and I’ll give you the parents’ weights and a straight estimate, not the one that sells the dog.