The Best Dog Crates for Medium Dogs

The medium band is the inverse of the big-dog problem

We wrote a page about gear for Great Danes whose single finding was: the published specification stops before the dog does. Bed weight tiers end at 120 lb. Crate size charts end at 54 in. Harness charts end around 46 in. Crash certification ends at 110 lb. For a 150 lb dog, most of the market is extrapolation.

A 30–70 lb dog is the exact opposite, and it is worth saying plainly because it changes what a buying decision in this band is for. Nothing is constrained. Every crate type — folding wire, welded steel, modular panel, molded plastic, aluminum travel, furniture — is made in a size that fits your dog, usually in two or three sizes that fit. The size charts have your dog in the middle rather than at the end. And the crash certifications that exist were issued at weights that cover you: the certified crate list is short, but the test weights on it cluster exactly where a medium dog lives.

That means the question “which is the strongest crate for a medium dog?” is almost always the wrong question. The right one is which of four jobs the crate is doing, because each job has a different answer and three of the four answers are cheap.

What decides a crate for a medium dog, in order

1. The job. Home containment for a settled dog, containment for a dog that escapes, travel in a car, or a flight. These are four products, not four grades of one product, and the most expensive mistake in this category is buying up a grade instead of across a type.
2. The latch, not the panels. Dogs leave crates through the door. That is the finding behind the whole escape-proof crate roundup and it holds at every size: a slide bolt is the easiest thing in the assembly for a determined dog to work, and a dual latch is the single biggest upgrade available.
3. Whether any strength figure is published at all.Gauge, tube diameter, weld type. One maker in the category publishes a gauge. Everyone else sells an adjective — “heavy duty”, “professional-gauge”, “ultra strong” — and then declines to put a number behind it.
4. Whether the size chart gives you two numbers. Height and weight, not one or the other. A 55 lb dog can stand 19 in or 25 in at the shoulder depending on breed, and a chart that only gives pounds is guessing for you.
5. What the warranty excludes. In this category, read it as entertainment and then plan around it. Every warranty here excludes damage caused by the dog, including on crates explicitly marketed for dogs that destroy crates.
6. Whether the crate is a car restraint. It almost certainly is not. A wire crate is distraction prevention; an airline-compliant plastic kennel is compliant with an airline rule, which is not a crash standard. Only the CPS certified list answers this.

The one genuinely medium-specific decision: the divider

Here is the thing this band gets to do that no other size does. A 36 in wire crate with a divider panel covers a 15 lb puppy and the 60 lb adult it becomes, which means one crate for the dog’s life rather than two. That is the real argument for buying at 36 in rather than at 30 in, and it is why the cheapest product on this page is the one most people should actually buy.

It only works if the divider is used. A puppy in a crate sized for its adult self has room to use one end as a toilet and the other as a bed, which undoes the only training mechanism a crate offers. The measuring method and the one-inch rules are on what size crate does my dog need, and the divider is the reason that page says to buy for the adult dog and shrink the box rather than buying twice.

One sizing caution, because the band is wide. MidWest states 41–70 lb for the 36 in crate, and Diggs gives 30–50 lb for its Medium and 50–70 lb for the Intermediate. A 45 lb dog is therefore within three different makers’ bands at two different nominal sizes, which is not a contradiction — it is proof that the pound figure alone is not a specification. Measure the dog standing, nose to tail base and floor to the top of the head, and buy on the height number.

The number almost nobody will print

Across the entire crate market, one product in our registry publishes a steel gauge: the ProSelect Empire, at 20-gauge steel reinforced with 1/2 in diameter tubes on a 3/4 in tube frame. That is why it tops this page despite costing six times what the MidWest costs, and it is a slightly uncomfortable position to be in — we are rewarding a maker for publishing a figure rather than for having the best figure, because there is nothing to compare it to.

The contrast is instructive. MidWest sells the Ultima Pro as “professional-gauge” and will not say what gauge that is; we have asked that question on the heavy-duty crate roundup and the answer has not changed. Diggs builds a visibly better crate than either and publishes no gauge. Impact builds in aluminum and publishes no gauge.

So the honest reading for a medium-dog buyer: if the dog is not working on the crate, the gauge does not matter and you should not pay for it. If the dog isworking on the crate, the Empire is the only product where you can see what you are buying — and then its warranty excludes exactly that use, which brings us to the part of this category that never stops being absurd.

Every crate warranty excludes your dog

Collected in one place, because at this size the warranties are indistinguishable from each other and from nothing:

• ProSelect Empire:one year, excluding “breakage or damage caused by user or dog” — on a cage sold for dogs that claw or chew their way out of other cages.
• Diggs Evolv: one year, with terms that exclude damage caused by dogs who are not crate-trained or who chew the product. A crate is, for many buyers, the device used to crate-train the dog.
• Gunner G1:lifetime against defects, and it “does not extend to cover destruction done to the product by the pet”. Gunner also sells a separate steel chew kit, which is a tacit admission.

The practical consequence is that no crate warranty in this category is insurance against the thing you are worried about. Buy the latch and the steel, not the paperwork. If the dog is genuinely destroying crates, the fix is behavioral and mechanical rather than contractual, and the two pages worth reading first are how to make a dog crate escape proof and crates and separation anxiety, because a dog dismantling a door out of distress is not solved by heavier wire.