2026 State of the Veterinary Workforce

Pet ownership in the United States reached a new high in 2025: 95 million households, about 71% of the country, now own a pet. Total industry spending hit $158 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $165 billion in 2026. Veterinary care is the single largest slice of that wallet after food, at 32.4% of household pet spending, and the average pet-owning household reported spending about $1,700 on their pets in 2025, roughly $200 more than in the previous two years.

Demand is also compounding faster than the customer base itself. The Mars Veterinary Health workforce analysis found pet-owning households growing about 1.5% per year while demand for pet healthcare services grows about 6.1% per year. People are not just getting more pets. They are treating the pets they have like family members, and buying more care per animal.

Sources: APPA industry statistics, AVMA pet-owner economics, Mars Veterinary Health

The AVMA counts 133,475 U.S. veterinarians as of 2025. The profession is now roughly 69% female (91,889 women to 40,595 men), one of the most complete gender shifts of any doctoral profession. Most veterinarians work in companion-animal practice, with smaller segments in mixed, equine, food-animal, and laboratory-animal medicine.

Pay reflects the demand. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median annual wage at $125,510 as of May 2024, and projects employment of veterinarians to grow 10% from 2024 to 2034, much faster than the average across all occupations, with about 3,000 openings projected each year over the decade.

Sources: AVMA U.S. veterinarian numbers, BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook

The most cited forecast comes from a 2023 analysis for Mars Veterinary Health by economist Dr. James Lloyd: the U.S. could need up to 55,000 additional veterinarians by 2030, with a projected shortfall of 14,000 to 24,000 companion-animal veterinarians, roughly 11% to 18% of the need. More than 12,500 companion-animal veterinarians are expected to retire by 2030, and the widely quoted implication is that up to 75 million pets could lack access to care by the end of the decade.

In late 2024, a workforce study by Brakke Consulting commissioned by the AVMA pushed back: it projects that existing and planned veterinary colleges will keep supply roughly in line with demand through 2035, with no dire shortage or excess. Its key assumption is that demand growth normalizes after the pandemic-era spike, and it notes that supply of companion-animal veterinarians is now growing faster than pet-owning households.

Both can be partly right. The optimistic view depends on demand cooling and on 13 proposed new veterinary schools all reaching accreditation. And even the AVMA-commissioned study does not claim the pain is over today: clinics in rural areas, food-animal medicine, and shelter medicine face acute gaps that national averages hide, and any practice owner who has run a DVM job posting in the last three years has felt how thin the applicant pool is right now. Whichever forecast proves closer for 2030, the hiring market of 2026 is still severely supply-constrained.

Sources: Mars Veterinary Health, AVMA / Brakke Consulting

The education pipeline is expanding at a record pace. First-year seats at U.S. veterinary colleges passed 4,000 for the first time in the 2022-23 school year, up 37.7% from a decade earlier, and 13 proposed new schools would add nearly 40% more capacity within ten years if all are accredited. But the Brakke study itself estimates that by 2035 only about 4% of practicing veterinarians would have graduated from those new schools. New capacity arrives slowly.

Meanwhile the licensing exam has become a tighter valve. The NAVLE composite pass rate fell from 95% in 2020 to 86% in 2023, a three-year slide the profession has struggled to explain, before recovering slightly to 88% in 2024. Every point below the historical norm is a class of would-be doctors delayed at the door.

The pipeline also leaks at the far end. Roughly half of veterinarians report burnout, a rate that has stayed stubbornly high across three cycles of the Merck Animal Health Veterinary Wellbeing Study, which estimates burnout costs the profession about $1.93 billion per year. Support-staff turnover exceeds 30% annually in many markets, which pushes more load onto the doctors who remain.

Sources: AVMA on college seats, VIN News on NAVLE pass rates, Merck Animal Health Wellbeing Study

Here is the number that should get more attention: over the past decade, an average of just 282 foreign-trained veterinarians passed the NAVLE each year. The AVMA's ECFVG equivalency program certified 168 international graduates in 2022, from 41 countries. Against a projected gap measured in the tens of thousands, the international channel is running at a rounding error, not because the talent does not exist, but because the path is slow and poorly understood.

The structural pieces are already in place. Veterinarian is a listed profession under the USMCA's TN visa, which has no annual cap and no lottery, is issued in three-year renewable increments, and is available to citizens of Mexico and Canada. All five Canadian veterinary schools are AVMA-accredited, and many licensed Canadian veterinarians have already passed the NAVLE, the same exam U.S. graduates take. In Mexico, the national university UNAM held full AVMA accreditation from 2011 through 2025, which means its graduates from that window are recognized as accredited-school graduates: a finite, credentialed pool that can move to U.S. licensure without the multi-year equivalency process other international graduates face.

No serious analysis claims cross-border recruiting alone closes a five-figure gap. But it is the only supply lever that operates in months instead of years, and it is available to any clinic today.

Sources: AAVMC supply and demand study, AVMA ECFVG, AVMA accredited colleges list

Four things worth watching. First, demand keeps compounding: APPA projects industry spending to reach $165 billion in 2026, and veterinary care has been taking a growing share of it. Second, the NAVLE recovery is fragile: one year of improvement after a three-year slide is a data point, not a trend. Third, new-school capacity will not meaningfully arrive before the 2030s, so the 2026 hiring market stays supply-constrained regardless of which long-range forecast wins. Fourth, the UNAM accreditation window closed at the end of 2025, which makes the existing pool of accredited-window Mexican graduates a fixed asset: it can only shrink as those veterinarians are hired.

We will update this report annually, and future editions will add VetBridge USA's own placement and candidate data as our marketplace grows.