What an empty DVM seat actually costs your clinic (2026)

The short answer: the average US veterinary practice generated $554,982 in gross revenue per veterinarian in 2024, according to the AVMA's 2025 Veterinary Practice Owners Survey. That is roughly $46,000 of production a month, about $10,700 a week, or $288 an hour. Every one of those hours that a DVM seat sits empty is capacity your practice is paying rent, staff and equipment costs to keep available, and not selling.

Most owners we talk to have a precise number for what a recruiter would charge them and only a vague feeling about what the vacancy itself is costing. The vacancy is almost always the larger number, and it is the one that grows every week you wait.

Start with revenue per doctor, not salary

Salary is the wrong anchor. A veterinarian is a revenue-producing asset, not a line of overhead, and the useful figure is what one doctor generates rather than what one doctor is paid.

The AVMA's benchmarking work, presented at its 2025 Veterinary Business and Economic Forum, puts 2024 revenue per veterinarian at $554,982 and revenue per veterinarian per hour at $288. The same data set has the average practice at $1.5 million in gross revenue and roughly 15 scheduled appointments per doctor per day, down from 16.6 in 2021.

Run that hourly number against your own schedule and the picture gets uncomfortable fast. One unfilled ten-hour shift is roughly $2,880 of production. A four-day-a-week associate role left open for a month is somewhere near $46,000. Those are averages across all practice types, so treat them as a starting benchmark and replace them with your own production reports as soon as you can pull them.

Worth noting for context: revenue per veterinarian has fallen in inflation-adjusted terms from nearly $600,000 in 2019. Capacity per doctor is not what it used to be, which makes each doctor you actually have more valuable, not less.

The research number for a single departure

There is peer-reviewed work on exactly this question. Neill, Hansen and Salois, writing in Frontiers in Veterinary Science in 2022, modeled the economic cost of burnout in veterinary medicine and put the median cost of turnover at approximately $104,000 per veterinarian who leaves.

That figure breaks into two parts. Replacement cost, which they estimate at about 66 percent of annual salary, or roughly $58,000 against the median salary data they used. And lost revenue during the vacancy itself, approximately $46,000, calculated on an average DVM vacancy of 40 days.

Scaled across the profession, the same study estimates that veterinarian turnover costs the US industry somewhere between roughly $997 million and $1.075 billion a year in lost revenue, and close to $1.93 billion once veterinary technicians are included. The authors describe their estimates as a lower bound.

One caution on mixing these numbers with the AVMA figures above. The study's $46,000 vacancy estimate and the AVMA's $554,982 per-doctor revenue figure are built on different revenue measures and different years, so they are not the same quantity and should not be added together. Use the research figure to understand the shape of the cost, and use your own production data to size it.

The costs that never reach the P&L

Three of the largest costs of an open seat are real, and none of them appear as a line item anywhere.

The first is client attrition. The AVMA's 2024 data shows the average practice carrying 3,351 active clients, declining by roughly 95 clients a year since 2019, and 1,499 active clients per full-time-equivalent veterinarian, down about 15 a year over the same period. Clients who cannot get an appointment in a reasonable window do not queue politely. They call the practice down the road, and the good ones do not come back when your schedule opens up. A vacancy converts a temporary capacity problem into permanent revenue loss.

The second is the load on the doctors you still have. Every appointment the open seat cannot take is either declined or absorbed by the remaining team. That is precisely the mechanism the burnout research describes, which means a long vacancy raises the odds of a second departure. The most expensive version of an open DVM seat is the one that becomes two open DVM seats.

The third is relief coverage. Locum staffing keeps the doors open and it is the right call in a crisis, but per hour of coverage it is usually the most expensive way to staff a practice, and the relief doctor leaves with every client relationship they built. It buys time. It does not fill the seat.

How long is the seat actually open?

This is where honest reporting runs out of data. The 40-day average vacancy in the turnover research is a three-year average covering 2018 to 2020, which predates the current hiring market entirely. We could not find a credible, current, published average time-to-fill for associate DVM roles, and we are not going to invent one.

What we can say is what practice owners consistently report and what the supply data supports: postings that used to close in weeks now routinely stay open for months. If your own seat has been open longer than 40 days, the research figure is understating your cost, not overstating it.

That makes the honest version of the calculation a simple one you can run yourself. Take the appointments one veterinarian handles in a week, multiply by your average revenue per appointment to get the weekly capacity of the open role, multiply that by the number of weeks the seat has already been open, then add recruiter fees paid or quoted and any relief coverage spend. That total is what the vacancy has cost you so far. There is a worksheet laid out in exactly those steps in our 2026 State of the Veterinary Workforce Report.

Is the shortage real, or just hard hiring?

It is worth being straight about this, because the answer changes what you should do.

The projections disagree with each other. A 2023 report commissioned by Mars Veterinary Health concluded the US could still face a shortfall of up to 24,000 companion-animal veterinarians by 2030 even after accounting for expected graduates. A separate workforce study published in 2024 found no dire shortage anticipated in the coming years. Both were produced by serious people using defensible methods, and they reach different conclusions.

For a clinic owner, the debate is somewhat academic. Whether or not the national picture resolves, the pool of licensed US veterinarians actively looking to change jobs in your market this quarter is small, and every domestic recruiter is competing for that same pool. Recruiters do not create veterinarians. They move them between clinics, which means the fastest domestic hire is usually someone else's vacancy.

The channel most owners have not priced

There is one supply channel that adds doctors rather than reshuffling them: licensed veterinarians from Mexico and Canada.

Veterinarian is a covered profession under the USMCA trade agreement, so qualified candidates are eligible for the TN visa, which has no lottery and no annual cap. Graduates of AVMA-accredited programs, including every Canadian veterinary school and UNAM's accreditation window covering its 2011 to 2025 graduates, sit the same NAVLE licensing exam that US graduates take rather than going through the equivalency backlog. Some states shorten the runway further. New York, for example, issues a limited permit that lets a qualified international veterinarian practice under supervision while completing full licensure, which can mean a doctor producing months earlier than the license date alone would suggest.

None of this is a shortcut around licensure, and immigration filings and legal advice have to come from licensed, independent immigration attorneys. It is a different candidate pool, reached through a legal pathway that already exists, and it is the one pool your competitor down the street is almost certainly not recruiting from.

This is the channel VetBridge is built around. What we can do today is walk you through the pathway, the timeline and the real cost of your specific open seat, and be straight with you about which parts of it we can move and which parts are set by the state board and the exam calendar.

Whatever you decide, run the vacancy math first. The number is almost never what owners guess, and it is the only figure that puts every other cost in this article in proportion.