How to Clean Dog Toys Without Ruining Them

Somewhere in your house there is a plush duck that has crossed a line. It is matted, it smells like a gym bag, and your dog still carries it from room to room, which is exactly why you would rather clean it than quietly drop it in the trash.

Most toys can be saved. The catch is that a plush duck, a rubber ball, and a rope tug are three different cleaning problems, and the method that rescues one will quietly ruin another. “Can I wash this?” is one of the questions our store team fields most often, and it arrives about every material on the shelf, which tells me the packaging is not answering it.

So here is the whole answer, sorted by what the toy is made of: how plush survives a washing machine, how rubber and nylon actually get clean, why rope is the exception, how often any of this needs doing, and the point where a toy needs replacing instead. And if the toy bin itself is the problem, the guide to matching dog toys sorts out what belongs in it.

Quick answer: Most plush dog toys machine-wash on cold and gentle inside a zipped garment bag, then air-dry completely. Rubber and nylon toys clean up with hot water, dish soap, and a brush for the grooves. Rope toys wash hot but have to dry all the way through, and they are the ones to replace rather than rescue.

Key takeaways

• Plush goes in cold, on gentle, inside a zipped garment bag or a knotted pillowcase, and comes out to air-dry. Dryer heat is what wrecks seams, glued-on eyes, and squeakers.
• Check the toy before it goes in. A split seam or a squeaker working its way loose turns one wash into stuffing spread through your machine.
• Rubber and nylon want hot water, dish soap, and a brush for the textured grooves. Top-rack dishwasher only if the maker says so.
• Rope is porous and holds water in its core. Wash it hot, dry it all the way through, and plan on replacing it rather than nursing it along.
• Wash the daily slobber toys about weekly and the rest of the rotation about monthly, and clean or replace everything after a contagious illness on your vet’s guidance.
• Cleaning cannot fix damage. Exposed stuffing, a loose squeaker, or missing chunks means the toy is finished, not dirty.

Can you wash dog toys in the washing machine?

Most plush dog toys can go in the washing machine, on cold and gentle, inside a zipped garment bag. What cannot go in: anything with a battery or electronics, toys with plastic or metal hardware that will bang around the drum, and any toy already coming apart at the seams. Rubber and nylon do not belong in a washer at all.

The dividing line that actually matters is porous versus non-porous. Plush, rope, and fabric absorb, so they hold water along with whatever else came home with them, and drying is most of the job. Rubber, nylon, and hard plastic absorb nothing, so they clean fast and dry fast, but the ridges and hollow chambers that make them interesting to chew are exactly where film and old food hide.

Sort the pile by material before you start anything, then follow the map below.

Toy material	How to clean it	Dry time	Retire it instead when
Stuffed plush	Cold gentle cycle in a zipped garment bag, mild detergent, extra rinse	12 to 24 hours air-drying, longer for thick toys	Stuffing is showing or the squeaker has come loose
No-stuffing plush	Same cold gentle wash, or a sink wash with mild soap	A few hours to overnight	Seams have split into strips or open holes
Crinkle plush	Cold gentle wash, air-dry only, never the dryer	Overnight	The crinkle film is exposed or torn out
Burrow and puzzle plush	Wash the small pieces and the base separately, both like plush	Overnight, longer for a thick base	Pieces are shredded or the openings are torn wide
Rubber and silicone	Hot water and dish soap, bottle brush through the hollow, rinse hard	Under an hour, hollow side down	Rubber is gouged or cracked, or chunks are missing
Nylon and hard plastic	Hot soapy water and a stiff brush worked into the grooves	Under an hour	Sharp edges, splinters, or nubs worn to nothing
Rope and cotton	Hot wash or hot soak, then dry all the way through the core	24 hours or more, hanging in open air	Strands are unraveling, or it still smells after a real wash

One practical habit that makes all of this easier: wash in two batches instead of one. Half the toys go through while the other half stay in circulation, so your dog is never standing in front of an empty basket waiting on a wet duck.

How to wash plush dog toys without wrecking the seams

Run plush toys through a cold, gentle cycle inside a zipped garment bag with a mild detergent, add an extra rinse, and let them air-dry completely. The garment bag is the step people skip, and it is what keeps a squeaker or a plastic eye from beating around the drum and taking a seam with it on the way.

Inspect it first. Run a thumb along every seam and squeeze the toy all over. Most plush toys ship with a squeaker sewn in, so the squeaker pocket is worth a real check: if the disc slides freely under the fabric or you can feel a hard edge through a thin spot, that toy needs retiring, not laundering. A hairline seam split that survived a quiet week will not survive a wash cycle.

Bag it. A zipped mesh garment bag is ideal. A pillowcase knotted shut works just as well and costs nothing. Either one keeps hard parts from slamming the drum, stops long limbs and ears from wrapping around the agitator, and catches any stuffing that does escape before it reaches your machine’s filter.

Cold and gentle. Hot water shrinks and mats plush fibers and softens the glue behind eyes, noses, and patches, so cold water on the gentle or delicate cycle is the setting for every plush toy. Wash toys together, not with your clothes, and load the drum loosely so they can move.

Go light on detergent, heavy on rinse. A small amount of mild detergent is plenty, and an extra rinse cycle is the part that matters. Detergent gets its own section below, because the rinse does more work than the brand does.

Air-dry, and mean it. Press the water out rather than wringing, since wringing twists and stresses the seams you just protected. Reshape the toy while it is damp, then hang it or lay it on a rack with air reaching both sides. A stuffed toy commonly wants 12 to 24 hours, and a thick one wants longer. Damp stuffing is where mildew starts, and a toy that smells worse a week after washing was almost never dry in the middle.

Spot-clean in between. For the one toy that never leaves your dog’s mouth, a damp cloth with a drop of mild soap on the slobber-glazed spots, blotted dry, buys you a week or two. That is how a favorite stays out of the machine and lasts longer.

No washer, or a toy too fragile for one? A sink of cool water and mild soap does the same job. Knead the toy like dough, rinse until the water runs clear, then press it in a towel and dry it the same way. For picking plush that holds up to both a heavy chewer and a wash cycle, the plush dog toys guide covers construction in detail.

Which detergent is safe for toys your dog chews?

A small amount of mild, fragrance-free detergent is the safe default, and how well you rinse matters more than which bottle you buy. Dogs mouth these toys for hours at a stretch, so the goal is a toy that leaves the machine with nothing left in the fibers. Skip fabric softener and dryer sheets entirely.

That last part is not a scare, it is just how softener works: it coats fibers with a residue and a fragrance designed to stay put through wearing and washing. That is a fine feature on a bath towel and a poor one on something that lives in a mouth. Same reasoning for heavily scented detergents. Your dog reads the world by smell, and a perfumed toy is both a residue question and a lousy toy.

Use about half the dose you would use for a comparable load of clothes, then add a rinse. If a toy still feels slick or stiff once dry, it did not get rinsed enough, so run it through water again. Half a cup of plain white vinegar in the rinse cuts residue and lingering odor for almost nothing, and a scoop of baking soda in the wash helps with smell too.

One label note while you are shopping the laundry aisle: “pet safe” on a detergent bottle is a marketing phrase, not a defined standard, so it is not doing the work the front of the bottle implies. The rinse is.

Cleaning rubber and nylon toys

Hot water, dish soap, and a brush handle nearly every rubber and nylon toy. The soap cuts the film that plain water leaves behind, and the brush is not optional, because the ridges, holes, and hollow chambers that make these toys good to chew are exactly where saliva and old food collect and turn.

For a hollow toy that gets stuffed with food, a bottle brush is the single most useful tool you can own. Run it all the way through the chamber, not just around the opening, because that is where the residue sits. Baked-on residue usually gives up after 10 to 15 minutes in a sink of hot soapy water.

Rinse until the toy stops feeling slick. That is the whole test, and it is more reliable than counting rinses. Then dry it hollow side down on a rack so water drains out instead of pooling inside, which takes well under an hour for most solid rubber.

The dishwasher is fine for many solid rubber and nylon toys, on the top rack, but only if the maker says so on the packaging or its site. Heated drying can soften or warp some rubber, so pick an air-dry setting. You do not need detergent for a plain hot rinse cycle. And when in doubt, a sink and a brush do the same job with none of the guessing.

Nylon and hard plastic get one extra step: look at them under decent light while they are clean. Chewing wears grooves into shavings and edges into points, and a scrubbed toy is the easiest time to notice that a bone has developed a sharp edge worth retiring.

Rope toys hold water, and that is the problem

Most rope toys are cotton or a cotton blend, and cotton wicks. A rope toy can feel dry on the outside while its core is still wet a day later, which is how a freshly washed toy turns sour by the weekend. Wash rope hot, dry it hanging in open air until the middle is genuinely dry, and treat rope as the toy you replace rather than rescue.

Method is simple. A hot wash with mild detergent in a garment bag works, and so does a 15-minute soak in a sink of hot soapy water followed by a hard rinse. Hot is appropriate here in a way it is not for plush, because you are dealing with cotton and the funk it holds.

Drying is the entire game. Hang the toy where air moves on all sides, outdoors in sun if you have it, and give it a full day before it goes back in the basket. A rope toy dropped into a toy bin while still damp is the exact recipe for the smell you just spent an hour removing.

If it comes out of a real wash and still smells, the rope is done. That smell is living in fibers you cannot reach.

Here is the honest part corporate copy will not say: rope is closer to a consumable than a durable good. It frays by design, it is among the cheapest things in the toy aisle, and the frayed strands are the actual risk, not the dirt. Veterinary consensus is consistent that swallowed string-like material can cause serious intestinal blockages, so a rope shedding long threads gets thrown out that day. Replacing it cheerfully is a better strategy than any cleaning routine.

Burrow toys, crinkle toys, and the odd shapes

Burrow sets and crinkle toys wash like other plush, with two adjustments: wash the small pieces separately from the big base so nothing gets lost or crushed, and keep crinkle toys away from the dryer entirely, because the thin plastic film that makes the sound does not take heat well.

Burrow and puzzle plush, the hide-a-squirrel style with little squeaky pieces tucked into a stuffed base, come in dozens of styles in our catalog alone, and the two halves get dirty at different rates. The small pieces take all the slobber, the base takes all the floor dirt, so the pieces tend to need washing two or three times as often as the base does. Count them into a mesh bag and count them out again, since a small piece can genuinely disappear into a washer’s folds.

Crinkle toys, which run to around a hundred styles in the catalog, are plush wrapped around a plastic layer. Cold wash, air-dry flat, no dryer. Set your expectations honestly too: the crinkle usually softens a bit over repeated washes. That is not damage, it is just what a thin film does, and it is one reason spot-cleaning is worth the effort on a crinkle favorite.

Two smaller notes. No-stuffing plush is the easiest thing in the basket to clean, because with no stuffing core there is nothing to hold water, and most are dry by the next morning. And a wet squeaker often sounds weak or dead right after a wash, which alarms people. Water in the chamber muffles it, and the sound normally comes back once the toy is dry all the way through.

How often should you clean dog toys?

Wash the two or three toys your dog carries around every day about once a week, and run the rest of the rotation through about once a month. Any toy that was in play during a contagious illness gets cleaned or replaced on your vet’s guidance, and food-stuffed toys get washed after every single use.

That last rule is the one most often skipped. A hollow toy packed with peanut butter or wet food is a dish, so treat it like a dish. Food left in a chamber at room temperature has all day to go bad, and no amount of your dog liking it changes the math.

Yard toys earn a rinse when they come inside, which costs 30 seconds at the hose and keeps mud out of your machine later. And a monthly wash of the full rotation has a bonus effect: pulling toys out of circulation and bringing them back is exactly the rotation that keeps toys interesting to a dog, which is a well-established point in behavior guidance.

After a contagious illness, the standard changes. Hard, non-porous toys can be disinfected with a dilute bleach solution, mixed exactly as the disinfecting directions on the bleach bottle describe, then rinsed thoroughly and dried completely. Never mix bleach with ammonia or any other cleaner, because those fumes are genuinely dangerous to you and your dog.

Fabric toys are the harder case. Plush and rope are porous and difficult to disinfect with any confidence, so a hot wash and a full dry, or simply replacing them, is the safer call. Intestinal parasites like giardia are the classic reason the question comes up at all, and reinfection from a contaminated environment is a real thing, so ask your vet what the specific illness requires. Your vet knows your dog and the bug in question, and a cleaning guide cannot.

When cleaning is the wrong call

Some toys do not need a wash, they need a bin. Exposed stuffing, a squeaker you can slide around under the fabric or see through a hole, missing chunks of rubber, and rope shedding long strands are all damage, and damage is a swallowing risk no cleaning fixes. Retire those and save the routine for toys that are still whole.

The trade-off that big-box copy never states plainly: washing extends a toy’s life, it does not upgrade its safety. A clean toy with a split seam is still a toy with a split seam, and a heavy chewer with the wrong toy still needs supervision no matter how fresh that toy smells. There is a fuller checklist for deciding when a toy is truly finished, and it deserves its own page rather than a paragraph here.

It also helps to accept what plush is. Most plush toys sit in the five-to-twenty-dollar range, and for a determined dog they are consumables on a schedule no laundry routine will slow down. That is a fair deal as long as you are honest about it, and it is why the pre-wash squeeze doubles as your inspection. The toy is already in your hands, so that is the cheapest moment you will ever have to notice a seam going.

Frequently asked questions

Can you wash dog toys with regular detergent? Yes, a small amount of regular detergent is fine as long as you rinse thoroughly. Choose a mild or fragrance-free formula, use about half the dose you would use for clothes, and add an extra rinse cycle so nothing stays in the fibers of a toy your dog will chew for hours. Skip fabric softener and dryer sheets.

How do you disinfect dog toys after illness? Hard, non-porous toys can be disinfected with a dilute bleach solution, mixed exactly as the disinfecting directions on the bleach bottle describe, then rinsed thoroughly and dried completely. Never mix bleach with ammonia or any other cleaner. Plush and rope are porous and much harder to disinfect with confidence, so a hot wash and a full dry, or replacement, is the safer call, and your vet should guide what the specific illness requires.

Can rubber dog toys go in the dishwasher? Only if the maker says so, and only on the top rack. Many solid rubber toys handle a top-rack cycle well, but heated drying can soften or warp some rubber, so choose an air-dry setting. When you are unsure, hot water, dish soap, and a bottle brush do the same job with none of the guessing.

How often should you wash dog toys? About weekly for the two or three toys your dog carries around every day, and about monthly for the rest of the rotation. Toys stuffed with food get washed after every use, the same as a dish. Anything in play during a contagious illness gets cleaned or replaced on your vet’s guidance.

Can you put dog toys in the dryer? Skip the dryer for nearly every dog toy. Heat stresses seams, softens the glue behind eyes and patches, and can damage the plastic film inside crinkle toys as well as a squeaker’s housing. Air-drying is slower, 12 to 24 hours for a stuffed plush toy, but it is what keeps the toy in one piece.

How do you get the smell out of dog toys? Most toy smell is dried saliva, so a proper wash with mild detergent and a thorough rinse removes it. If a plush toy still smells afterward, it almost certainly was not dry all the way through, and damp stuffing grows the exact odor you were trying to remove. Half a cup of white vinegar in the rinse helps, and full air-drying does the rest.

Cleaning dog toys stops being complicated the moment you stop treating them as one category. Sort by material, wash plush cold and gentle in a bag, scrub rubber and nylon with dish soap and a brush, dry rope like you mean it, and use the wash as your damage inspection. Keep that on a loose weekly and monthly rhythm and your dog’s toys will last as long as their construction allows, which is all any toy can promise. For the ones that have earned their retirement, our dog toy collection is where the next favorite comes from.

About the author. Brandon Kelly is the Pet Care Editor at Pets Perfect, where he spends his days in the catalog and with the people who buy and use this stuff. He is not a veterinarian, and nothing here replaces your vet’s advice for your individual dog.