A Simple Weekly Routine for a Healthy Bearded Dragon

A healthy bearded dragon receiving daily care

Updated September 21, 2026. Every temperature, schedule and ratio below was read that day from the veterinary-school and veterinary-reference pages listed at the end; nothing here is quoted from a seller or a care forum.

Picture a new keeper on day nine. The dragon ate well for the first week, the tank looks exactly like the photo on the box, and yet the lizard is now sitting on the cool side with its eyes half shut and ignoring crickets. Nothing dramatic happened. What happened was that nobody checked the basking surface since day one, the calcium tub was used twice instead of four times, and the water dish has had a skin on it since Thursday. A weekly routine exists to stop exactly that slow drift, and the first sixty days are when it drifts fastest, because the owner is still learning what normal looks like.

This is the routine I would hand that keeper, written as a seven-day card with a number to hit for each job, followed by the places where the published numbers disagree and what the arithmetic of a juvenile's feeding week actually looks like.

The seven-day card

Each row has a pass condition. If you cannot say whether the row passed, it did not. Temperatures are in Fahrenheit, measured at the surface where the dragon actually lies, not on the glass.

WhenJobPass conditionWhere the number comes from
Every day, morningRead basking spot and cool side with a probe or infrared thermometerBasking 88–95°F, ambient 80–85°F (UC Davis); WSU lists a hotter 95–110°F basking rangeUC Davis Vet Med; WSU Veterinary Teaching Hospital
Every dayChange water in a shallow dish the dragon can step intoFresh water, no filmNC State Veterinary Hospital; UC Davis
Every daySpot-clean droppings and uneaten insectsNothing left from yesterdayWSU (daily spot cleaning)
Every feedingSize insects to the headNo insect longer than the width of the dragon's headNC State
NightLights off, check the drop70–75°F overnight; about 14 hours light and 10 darkUC Davis
Once a weekDisinfect the water dishDilute bleach wash, rinsed and driedUC Davis
Once a weekWeigh on a gram scale and write it downWeight flat or rising in a juvenile; any two-week fall goes to a vetCautious default (see the judgement section)
Once a weekLook at the UVB bulb's install dateInside its replacement window (3–6 months per UC Davis; 6–8 months for juveniles and yearly for adults per WSU)UC Davis; WSU

Two jobs on that card are not in any one sheet as a weekly task: weighing and the bulb-date glance. They are there because both failures are invisible day to day. A dragon losing a few grams a week looks identical in the tank, and an old UVB tube still glows.

Basking at 88°F or 110°F? Three university sheets, side by side

I read three teaching-hospital or veterinary-school pages on the same morning. They agree on the shape of the routine and disagree on almost every number inside it.

SettingUC Davis (Vet Med health topics)Washington State University VTHNC State Vet Hospital
Basking surface88–95°F95–110°Fnot stated on feeding page
Cool side / ambient80–85°F day75–80°F—
Humidity40–60% RH30–40%—
UVB bulb lifereplace every 3–6 monthsjuveniles 6–8 months, adults yearly—
Juvenile calcium dusting3 times a week4–5 times a weekdusting mentioned, no count; gut-load insects 24–72 h before
Adult calcium dustingweekly1–2 times a week—
Adult diet split—25% insects, 50–55% greens, 20% vegetables, under 5% fruit50% dark greens, 20% vegetables, 25% animal matter, 5% fruit maximum

Why would careful vets land fifteen degrees apart on basking heat? Mostly because they are describing different things. A range of 88–95°F reads like a safe air-and-surface target for a pet in a living room, while 95–110°F reads like the top of the gradient under the lamp, the spot a dragon uses for minutes at a time before moving off. Both assume the animal can walk to somewhere cooler. The bulb-life gap is similar: UVB output falls with hours of use, and a sheet that assumes long photoperiods and cheaper tubes will say replace sooner.

Which way is cheaper to be wrong? For heat, erring toward the lower basking number with a genuinely cooler end costs you a slightly slower digestion; erring high with no escape route costs you a dehydrated or burned animal. For UVB, replacing a tube at month six that might have lasted twelve costs the price of one tube; running a dead tube for six extra months in a growing juvenile is how metabolic bone disease starts. So for a first-time keeper I would take the lower heat figure and the shorter bulb interval, and not argue about which sheet is right.

Counting a juvenile's week: how many meals get powder

The feeding page from NC State gives the clearest schedule by age: two to three feedings a day under one month, twice a day from one to four months, once a day from four months to adulthood, and every day or every other day for adults. Put the two calcium recommendations against that and you get the table below. This is my arithmetic, not a figure any of the sources publishes.

DragonFeedings per week (NC State)Dusted meals at UC Davis rateShare dustedDusted meals at WSU rateShare dusted
2-month juvenile14321%4–529–36%
6-month juvenile7343%4–557–71%
Adult, daily feeding7114%1–214–29%
Adult, alternate days3–4125–33%1–225–67%

The practical lesson is that "three times a week" means something very different for a baby eating fourteen times and a six-month dragon eating seven. A keeper who dusts "most meals" for a young juvenile is already above both recommendations; a keeper who dusts "now and then" is almost certainly below them. Pick fixed days, for example Monday, Wednesday, Friday plus Sunday if you follow WSU, and write them on the card rather than relying on memory. UC Davis also suggests a multivitamin once a month for juveniles and adults alike, which is easy to forget without a calendar entry.

Days 1 to 60: the four places a routine usually cracks

Week 1 — measuring the wrong spot. The stick-on dial on the glass reads air near the glass. The dragon lies on a rock under a lamp. Until you own a probe or infrared thermometer, you do not know your basking number. Pass condition: one surface reading a day, logged.

Weeks 2 to 3 — the water dish goes stale. The novelty wears off and water gets topped up instead of changed. UC Davis asks for daily replacement plus a weekly dilute-bleach wash of the pan. Pass condition: the weekly wash has a date next to it.

Weeks 3 to 6 — insects creep up in size. Juveniles grow, keepers buy the next size of cricket early, and suddenly the insects are longer than the head is wide, which NC State tells you not to feed. Pass condition: hold one insect next to the head before each new batch.

Weeks 6 to 8 — nobody has weighed the animal since the pet shop. This is the one that hides everything else. A falling weight is often the first sign that heat, UVB, or feeding has drifted. Pass condition: seven weekly weights in a notebook by day 60.

My call for a first-time keeper

If I were setting this up for someone new, I would not start with the full card. I would start with three rows only — the daily surface temperature, daily water, and the weekly weight — for the first fourteen days, because those three catch the failures that are expensive to fix. Only when those feel automatic would I add the calcium days and the bulb-date check. The honest cost of this approach is that the first two weeks look under-managed on paper. The benefit is that a routine a nervous new owner actually follows beats a perfect one abandoned on day ten. And when two university sheets disagree, I would pick the more cautious number, write down which one I chose, and ask a reptile vet at the first check-up rather than switching back and forth.

The sixty-day checklist

  • Day 1: bulb install date written on the fixture; thermometer that reads surface temperature in place.
  • Day 1: first weight recorded in grams.
  • Daily: basking and cool-side readings, water changed, droppings removed.
  • Fixed calcium days chosen and written on the card for the dragon's current age.
  • Weekly: water dish bleach-washed, weight recorded, insect size checked against the head.
  • Monthly: multivitamin day on the calendar.
  • Day 60: seven weights on paper; if the line is falling, book a reptile vet rather than adjusting three things at once.

Keep reading on this site

For the lamp itself, including target UV index and distance, see our bearded dragon UVB guide. Floor choices are covered in substrate options and impaction risk, and if you raise your own feeders, the cricket colony guide explains why bins crash.

Tip: The weekly weigh-in only works if the scale reads in single grams and has a flat platform a small container can sit on. Digital gram scales made for small pets do this well. (These are Amazon Associate links — we may earn a small commission on qualifying purchases.)

Reference pages read on September 21, 2026

All figures are for captive Pogona vitticeps kept indoors, in Fahrenheit and percent relative humidity, as published by the named US institutions on the date above. This is general husbandry information, not veterinary advice for your animal; a reptile veterinarian who has examined your dragon should set its individual targets.

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