Long Haired Dachshund: Coat Genetics, Health and Grooming

A long haired dachshund is one of the breed’s three coat varieties, alongside smooth and wirehaired, and you’ll find it in both sizes. Your dog has a sleek, often slightly wavy coat that’s longest on the ears, chest, underside, legs and tail, whichever size you choose.

Two things about the long coat are backed by research rather than breeder lore. It’s inherited as a recessive trait, which is why two smooth dachshunds can have a long-haired puppy. And in a large UK survey, long-haired dachshunds had lower rates of disc disease than smooth ones of the same size.

What makes a dachshund long haired

What should the coat actually look like? The AKC standard describes it as sleek, glistening and often slightly wavy, longer under the neck and on the forechest, the underside of the body, the ears and behind the legs.

On the tail, it says, the hair reaches its greatest length and forms “a veritable flag”.

The same standard lists what it counts as faults in a longhaired dog: a coat so profuse it masks the dog’s shape, hair of equal length all over the body, a curly coat, or a pronounced parting down the back. Short hair on the ears isn’t desirable either. If you’re planning to show your dog, those are the points a judge will look at; if you aren’t, they’re still a good picture of a well-kept coat.

Colors follow the same rules as the smooth coat, and long-haired dogs come in both standard and miniature sizes. The standard usually weighs 16 to 32 pounds, and the miniature is 11 pounds and under. If you’re comparing coats, our long hair vs short hair dachshund guide puts them side by side.

Why two smooth dachshunds can have a long-haired puppy

The long coat comes down to one gene. A 2009 study of dog coat genetics used 96 dachshunds of all three coat types and traced hair length to a variant in a gene called FGF5.

Every long-haired dachshund in the study carried two copies of the long-hair variant, while every smooth and wirehaired dachshund carried one copy or none, and the researchers concluded the trait is recessive.

Here’s what that means for you, by ordinary inheritance rather than anything the study tested directly:

Two long-haired parents each pass on the long-hair variant, so their puppies will be long-haired.
Two smooth parents that each carry one copy can produce long-haired puppies, on average about one in four.
A smooth dog with no copy can’t have long-haired puppies, whatever its partner’s coat.

So if a breeder tells you a smooth litter included one long-haired puppy, you’re not hearing about a mistake. Across all the breeds in that study, the variant turned up in 91% of long-haired dogs and only 3.9% of short-haired ones.

It also explains a question that keeps coming up on Reddit. A December 2025 r/Dachshund post asking “Can anybody tell when they are this young if it will be a long or short hair?” drew 266 upvotes. In a similar thread, an owner described how slowly the coat showed:

“My girl pancakes coat looked EXACTLY like this one until she hit 9 months then started slowly floofing out, and now she’s extremely long haired and fluffy!”
– r/Dachshund, December 2025 (101 upvotes)

A puppy’s coat can take months to show what it is. The parents tell you more, sooner. By the inheritance rules above, two long-haired parents can only have long-haired puppies.

Back health by coat type

Disc disease is the dachshund’s best-known health problem, and the DachsLife 2015 survey of 2,031 dogs breaks it down by variety. Here’s what owners reported as a vet-diagnosed case:

Variety	Cases / dogs	Disc disease prevalence
Standard smooth	49 / 201	24.4%
Miniature wirehaired	54 / 305	17.7%
Miniature smooth	127 / 744	17.1%
Miniature long-haired	46 / 346	13.3%
Standard long-haired	16 / 127	12.6%
Standard wirehaired	18 / 252	7.1%

Does the coat make a difference? Within each size, the long-haired dogs came out lower than the smooth ones: 12.6% against 24.4% for standards, and 13.3% against 17.1% for miniatures.

Please don’t read that as “long hair protects the back”. It’s an owner survey of mostly UK dogs, it shows an association rather than a cause, and the standard long-haired group was small enough that its difference from the lowest-risk variety wasn’t statistically significant. What it does tell you is that long-haired dogs weren’t at higher risk than smooth dogs of the same size in this survey, and that roughly one in eight long-haired dogs still had disc disease.

The same survey found dogs exercised for less than 30 minutes a day were at increased odds of disc disease in its first-pass analysis, which is one more reason to keep your long-haired dog walking daily whatever its coat. There’s more on prevention in our guide to dachshund health problems.

Grooming a long haired dachshund

The AKC says longhaired dachshunds may need more frequent brushing than smooth ones, depending on how thick the coat is.

It describes the breed overall as a moderate shedder and recommends you trim every dachshund’s nails monthly.

We haven’t found a breed-club figure for how often a long-haired dachshund should see a groomer, so we won’t invent one. The standard’s own description is a useful guide, though: if your dog’s coat is growing so thick it hides the outline of the body, it’s past what the breed is meant to look like, and a tidy-up is reasonable.

Are long haired dachshunds calmer?

It’s a common claim, but we couldn’t find a study that compares temperament between coat types in dachshunds. The AKC standard gives a single temperament description for all three coats, so we’d treat any “calmer” label as anecdote.

Long haired dachshund: common questions

Is a long haired mini dachshund a good pet?

It’s the same breed in a different coat and size, so the usual dachshund considerations apply to you, including the back. In DachsLife 2015, 13.3% of miniature long-haired dogs had disc disease, lower than miniature smooths.

Should you walk a dachshund every day?

Yes. In the DachsLife 2015 survey, dachshunds that exercised for less than 30 minutes a day had increased odds of disc disease, so a daily walk is worth the habit.