Home Remedies for Hot Spots on Dogs

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Serena Faber-Nelson Updated 27 August 2026 · 8 Min Read

Pet lifestyle expert Serena Faber-Nelson is the founder of Pretty Fluffy. A contributor to Everyday with Rachael Ray, Modern Dog Magazine, Cesars Way and more; her modern, stylized take on DIY dog treats has seen her recipes viewed millions of times over. Serena is the author of the go-to dog mom bible, Dog Mama, and the popular dog treat recipe book, Healthy Homemade Dog Treats.

Hot spots are one of the few dog problems that can genuinely get worse while you are standing there looking at it. A small pink patch at breakfast can be a raw, weeping sore the size of your palm by dinner, because every lick makes it itch more and every itch earns another lick. That speed is why home remedies for hot spots on dogs are searched so often, and usually at 11pm, when the vet is closed and your dog will not settle.

A small, early hot spot really can be handled at home. The catch is that the popular remedies are mostly the wrong ones, and a few of them will set your dog back rather than forward.

What a Dog Hot Spot Looks Like

A hot spot is not dry skin, dandruff, or a scab. Vets call it acute moist dermatitis, and the word doing the work in that phrase is moist. You are looking for a patch of skin that is bright red, raw, and wet or oozing, with a clear border between the sore and the normal skin around it. The fur over it is usually gone or matted flat with discharge.

Two other tells. It is warm to the touch, which is where the name comes from, and it often smells, a sour and unmistakably infected smell you tend to notice before you find the sore. Your dog will be fixated on it, and may snap if you go near.

They turn up most often on the cheek, neck, hip, or the base of the tail, and nearly always start with a dog worrying at one spot. If your dog has been licking their paws raw, or nibbling at one patch with their front teeth, you are watching the beginning of one.

How to Treat a Hot Spot on a Dog at Home

To treat a hot spot on a dog at home, trim the hair back from the sore, clean it with a dilute chlorhexidine solution or a mild antiseptic made for dogs, and pat it completely dry. Keep the area uncovered so air can get to it, and use a recovery cone so your dog cannot reach it. Most small, early hot spots settle within three to seven days on this routine. Anything larger than a coin, bleeding, or smelling infected needs a vet rather than home care.

Taken step by step:

Trim the fur back

Clip the hair away from the sore and a little way beyond its edge, using clippers rather than scissors. Scissors and a flinching dog are a bad combination. This step matters more than it sounds, because hair traps discharge against the skin and keeps the area damp, which is exactly what the infection wants.

Clean it, gently

A dilute chlorhexidine solution is the standard choice and is what most vets reach for. A mild, unscented soap works if that is what you have. Cornell's Riney Canine Health Center makes the point that once the redness fades and a healthy scab forms, you stop cleaning and leave the scab alone. Picking it off restarts the whole process.

If your dog needs a full bath as part of this, use something built for irritated skin rather than whatever is in the shower. Our roundup of dog shampoos for sensitive skin covers the gentle options.

Dry it, and leave it uncovered

Pat the area properly dry with a clean towel, then let it breathe. Do not bandage a hot spot and do not put a sock over it. These sores heal by drying out, and covering one traps the moisture that caused the problem in the first place.

Stop the licking

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that decides whether anything else works.

VCA Animal Hospitals describes hot spots as self-trauma driven by a lick-itch-lick cycle, where licking irritates the nerve endings in the skin, which makes it itchier, which brings on more licking. Until you break that loop, you are cleaning a wound your dog is reopening every twenty minutes.

A recovery cone is the reliable answer. Inflatable collars and soft cones are kinder to live with and work well for spots on the body, though a determined dog will still reach a hip or tail base with one on.

Watch it for two days

Improvement should be obvious and fast. Less redness, less weeping, a smaller footprint, a dog who is not straining against the cone. If it looks the same after two days, or worse at any point, stop home treatment and book the vet.

Do Natural Hot Spot Remedies Actually Work?

This is where most articles hand you a bullet list and move on. Here is the honest version, remedy by remedy.

Apple cider vinegar for hot spots on dogs

Keep it off. Diluted apple cider vinegar earns its reputation on mild, itchy, intact skin, which is the context we recommend it in our guide to home remedies for a dog's itchy skin. A hot spot is not intact skin. It is an open, inflamed wound, and vinegar is an acid, so it stings sharply on contact. You get a dog who now associates you reaching for that patch with pain, which makes every subsequent cleaning harder.

Is colloidal silver good for hot spots on dogs?

There is no good evidence that it helps, and it is not something veterinary dermatologists recommend. It is marketed hard as an antibacterial and sits in a lot of natural pet cabinets. But a hot spot is a superficial bacterial infection with an effective standard treatment, and swapping that for something unproven costs you the days when the sore is easiest to shift.

Coconut oil for dog hot spots

Good for dry skin and dull coats. Wrong tool for this job. Coconut oil is occlusive, meaning it seals the surface it sits on, and a hot spot needs the opposite. It also tastes excellent to most dogs, so it turns the sore into something worth licking. If you want the skin-and-coat benefits, a small amount in food is a better use of it than anything applied to the wound.

What else people try

Cooled black or green tea as a compress is mild and does no harm, though it will not clear an infection. Aloe vera soothes but causes vomiting if licked off, so it only works somewhere your dog cannot reach. Human ointments are a firm no, since hydrocortisone, antibiotic creams, and petroleum jelly all invite licking and some are toxic to dogs.

What Causes Hot Spots on Dogs

A hot spot is a symptom, not a diagnosis. Something made your dog itchy first, and the sore is what happened next. Treat the sore without finding the trigger and you will be doing this again in a month.

Fleas are the most common culprit by a distance, and for a flea-allergic dog a single bite is enough to start the cycle. Keeping flea and tick prevention current year-round is the highest-value thing on this list. Environmental and food allergies come next, and they tend to produce recurring hot spots in the same few places. Trapped moisture is the classic summer cause, from swimming or a bath where a thick coat never fully dried. Ear infections and impacted anal glands both drive licking and chewing near the source. And a proportion of hot spots are behavioral, from dogs who lick to self-soothe when they are bored, anxious, or alone too long, which is where enrichment and boredom busters earn their keep.

Thick-coated and double-coated breeds get more than their share, so Golden Retrievers, Labradors, German Shepherds, Newfoundlands, and Saint Bernards all sit in the higher-risk group.

When to Call Your Vet

Roughly a third of dogs brought in for what looks like a hot spot turn out to have something else underneath, such as a deeper infection or a bite wound. Home care is for the small and obvious ones, and there is no prize for waiting.

Book the appointment if the sore is bigger than a coin, if it is bleeding or producing colored discharge, if your dog will not let you near it, or if you cannot stop them getting at it. Same if there is no clear improvement after two days, or if hot spots keep returning. A fever, lethargy, or a dog off their food makes it a same-day call.

Recurring hot spots in particular are worth investigating properly, since they usually point at an allergy nobody has pinned down yet, and repeated skin infections can also be a sign your dog needs probiotics alongside whatever else is going on.

Preventing Hot Spots From Coming Back

Prevention is mostly unglamorous maintenance, which is why it works.

Dry your dog to the skin after swimming and bathing rather than just the top coat, paying attention to the neck, armpits, and base of the tail. Brush often enough that mats never form, because matted fur is a lid over damp skin. Keep flea prevention going through winter as well as summer, since indoor heating keeps the cycle alive. And watch the calendar in warm weather, when humidity and swimming make this a seasonal problem. Our dog summer safety guide covers the wider list.

If your dog is on their third or fourth hot spot of the year, the underlying cause is the thing to chase, not the sore. That usually means an allergy workup with your vet, and sometimes a diet change. Our guide to the best dog foods for allergies is a reasonable starting point for that conversation, though it is a conversation to have with a vet rather than a switch to make alone.

The Short Version

Clip, clean, dry, cone, and watch it closely for two days. Leave the vinegar, the coconut oil, and the silver in the cupboard. And treat a hot spot as a message rather than an event, because the sore is the easy part and whatever caused the itch is the thing that decides whether you are back here next month.