Your puppy was doing fine and is suddenly having accidents again
A puppy who was reliable for two weeks and is now going indoors has almost always not forgotten anything. Something changed — usually the schedule, occasionally their health, rarely the training.
Check the boring explanations first
In rough order of how often they turn out to be the answer:
- The schedule quietly slipped. A week of working from home built a rhythm; going back to the office broke it. Nobody decided to change anything, so nobody noticed.
- More freedom than they earned. A puppy given the run of the house at twelve weeks has more places to go where nobody is watching. Reliability in one room is not reliability.
- More water. Warmer weather, saltier food, a new water bowl location. Drinking goes up, capacity goes down.
- A fear period. Many puppies go through a wobbly stretch somewhere around four to five months. Confidence dips, and so does bladder control.
- Something medical. Covered below, and the one to rule out if the change was abrupt.
The pattern worth actually looking for
Most regressions are not random. They cluster after one particular trigger — almost always waking, a meal, or a big drink — because that is the gap in the routine that stopped being wide enough as the puppy's habits changed.
This is specific enough to detect. Puppy Routine looks back over the last 14 days and asks whether two or more indoor accidents followed the same trigger within 90 minutes of it. Two is the threshold on purpose: one accident after a meal is noise, two is a pattern. When it finds one, it moves that window earlier rather than telling you to try harder.
You can do the same thing on paper. Write down the last ten accidents and what happened in the hour before each. If six of them follow breakfast, you do not have a training problem — you have a breakfast problem.
What to do about it
- Go back to the schedule that worked, for a week. Not a stricter one — the one from before it fell apart.
- Shrink the territory. Back to the rooms where they were reliable, and earn the rest again over a couple of weeks.
- Move the one window that is failing earlier by 15 minutes. Just that one, not the whole day.
- Clean with an enzymatic cleaner. Ordinary household cleaners leave a scent marker that a puppy reads as an invitation.
- Do not punish it. A puppy scolded for going indoors learns to go where you are not, which is a much harder problem to fix than the one you started with.
When it is a vet visit, not a training plan
Go sooner rather than later if the change was abrupt in an otherwise reliable puppy, or if you see straining, blood, dribbling the puppy does not seem aware of, a sharp increase in drinking, or accidents while asleep. Urinary tract infections are common in young dogs, and no schedule fixes one.
Puppy Routine is not veterinary advice, and neither is this page. Anything about your puppy's health or a behaviour that worries you is a conversation with a veterinarian or a qualified, reward-based behaviour professional.
How the app handles it
Accidents are logged like anything else, and they feed back into the predictions rather than sitting in a diary. If two follow the same trigger inside two weeks, the window for that trigger moves earlier and the app says which observation caused the change — so you can tell a genuine pattern from a bad afternoon. The potty schedule by age page explains where those windows start from.