Yes, and the reason it goes unnoticed for so long is that a bored dog mostly looks like a sleeping dog. Dogs sleep twelve to fourteen hours a day normally, so a dog who has given up on the afternoon and gone to bed looks exactly like a dog who is content.
By the time most people notice, it is because something has been chewed.
The signs that come first
Following you room to room. Not greeting you, shadowing you. They are looking for something to happen and you are the only source of it.
The nudge. The nose under your arm while you are typing, the paw on the knee, the toy dropped in your lap every ten minutes. This is a request, and it is usually the first clear one.
Barking at very little. A leaf, a car door two streets away. A dog with nothing to do takes the job of watching the window seriously because it is the only job available.
Restlessness at a fixed time. Most commonly between three and five in the afternoon. Up, down, a circuit of the house, back down, up again.
Sleeping more than usual. The counterintuitive one. A dog with nothing to engage with will simply switch off, and people read it as a calm dog.
The signs that come later
Chewing things that are not their. Digging at carpet or at the lawn. Repetitive behaviors like tail chasing, flank licking, or licking one spot on a paw until it goes bald. Eating things they should not. A general edginess where they go from asleep to overexcited with nothing in between.
The licking one is worth taking seriously, because a repetitive behavior that starts as boredom can become a habit that persists even after the boredom is gone.
Which dogs get bored fastest
Breeds bred to work all day with a person, border collies, kelpies, malinois, working line spaniels, need a job and will invent a bad one if you do not give them a good one. Terriers were bred to hunt independently and get destructive rather than clingy.
Age matters as much. Between about six months and three years is the difficult window. Puppies sleep enormously, older dogs settle. Adolescent dogs have adult energy and no off switch.
Boredom or anxiety
Three questions usually separate them.
When does it happen? Boredom happens when you are home and busy. Anxiety happens the moment you leave.
What gets targeted? Boredom picks interesting objects. Anxiety picks exits: doors, windows, the frame around the front door.
Will they eat? A bored dog eats anything you give them. An anxious dog left alone often will not touch food at all, which is why the untouched lick mat is such a useful test.
What actually helps
Boredom is not a shortage of exercise, it is a shortage of things to do, and the two are not the same. A dog can be physically worn out and still bored.
Feed one meal out of something they have to work at rather than a bowl. Five minutes of training a day, which is more taxing than it sounds. Let them sniff properly on walks instead of marching. And give them something that moves on its own for the late afternoon slump, because the chase instinct is the one that produces the nose under your arm and no amount of food puzzles will satisfy it. A ball that rolls off and comes back by itself covers that without you throwing for half an hour, and the other balls in the range move differently for dogs who work out a pattern quickly.
Rotate everything. A toy that has been in a cupboard for a week is a new toy. For a day by day version of this, see keeping a dog busy while you work, and if things have already reached the furniture, why dogs destroy toys explains what is behind it.
How much does a dog actually need
Less than most articles suggest, but more consistently. For an average adult dog, one food based activity a day, one session of chasing or problem solving, and a walk where they get to sniff is enough to take the edge off. That is perhaps forty minutes of your day, and most of it is time you were spending anyway, just spent differently.
Working breeds and adolescents need roughly double, and they need it split across the day rather than delivered in one block in the evening. A single long session does not hold a dog through the eight hours before it.
If you are only going to change one thing, change the timing. Moving the good part of the day from after work to before it fixes the afternoon for a surprising number of dogs, because the restlessness builds through a long empty stretch rather than arriving out of nowhere at four o'clock.
The cheapest fix
Stop hurrying them past lamp posts. A walk where your dog chooses where to stop and is allowed to read the whole thing is worth more than twice the distance covered at your pace. It costs nothing, it takes the same twenty minutes, and for a lot of dogs it removes the afternoon restlessness on its own.
For simple ways to give a bored dog more to think about, see our guide to mental stimulation for dogs.