How much longer can your team cover the gap?
Most owners who find this page have had a doctor seat open for six months or more. The expensive part is rarely the recruiter fee. It is what an open seat quietly does to the production you never booked, and to the doctors who stayed.
No pitch on this page. Five ways to fill the seat, including the ones we do not sell.
The vacancy shows up on your rota. The cost shows up somewhere else.
Where does that money actually go?
Three places, and only one of them arrives as an invoice you can see.
The appointments you never booked
A closed slot does not reschedule itself. It becomes a client who called somewhere else and, often enough, stayed there. This is the largest number in the calculation above and the least visible one in your P&L, because it never appears as a line item.
The premium on covering it
Relief keeps the doors open, and that is worth paying for. It is also the most expensive way per day to have a doctor in the building, and it buys you a shift rather than continuity. Your clients meet someone new each time.
The doctors who stayed
This is the one that turns a vacancy into two. The associates absorbing the extra caseload are the same people you cannot afford to lose, and they are being asked to carry the gap indefinitely with no date attached.
What has the open seat cost you so far?
Most owners we speak with have never put a figure on it. Change these to match your practice. Nothing is sent anywhere, and nothing here is a quote.
What one full-time doctor would see
Your average client transaction
Days you currently buy cover for
What you pay per relief day
These starting values are placeholders, not industry figures. We do not publish averages we cannot source. Replace every one of them with what is true at your practice and the arithmetic below becomes yours.
- Production not captured
- $142,800
- Relief cover bought
- $28,800
- Running rate
- $28,600 / month
If nothing changes between now and this time next year?
Another $171,600 over the next six months, and the same again in the six after that. What would have to change for that not to happen?
This is deliberately conservative. It counts production and relief spend only. It does not attempt to price the overtime, the turnover risk on the doctors covering the gap, or the clients who booked somewhere else and did not come back.
Relief covers the shift. It does not fill the seat.
Every option on the next list buys you something different. Only one of them is designed to make this the last time you run the search.
Five ways to fill a veterinary seat
Four of these have nothing to do with us. They are still sometimes the right answer, and you deserve to hear where ours falls short before you spend an hour on a call.
Relief and locum cover
Keeping the schedule open right now. If you are drowning this month, this is the correct answer and nothing else on this list is.
It is cover, not continuity. The rate per day is the highest of any option here, your clients see a rotating face, and the seat is still open the morning the locum leaves.
Contingency recruiters
Reaching doctors who are already licensed and already looking, without paying anything until someone signs.
You are competing for the same small pool of domestic candidates as every corporate group in your state, most of whom can outbid you. Placement fees are real, and so is the chance the candidate is gone within the year.
Raising the offer
Sometimes it genuinely is the answer, and it is worth testing honestly before spending anywhere else.
It resets your whole compensation floor, because your existing associates will and should find out. If the local pool has no available doctor at any price, a higher number does not create one.
Hiring a new graduate
Long runway, and a doctor you get to shape in your own clinic's way of working.
Mentorship capacity you may not have while short-staffed, a slower ramp to full production, and the same bidding war as every other practice in the region each spring.
Permanent international placement
A licensed doctor from an accredited school who is choosing your practice rather than fielding six other offers in your county, and who has strong reasons to stay.
It is the slowest option on this list, and it is honestly the wrong one if your problem is next Tuesday. Licensing and visa steps are real and cannot be rushed. It only makes sense as the thing that ends the cycle, not as cover.
Veterinarian is a listed profession under the USMCA, so the TN route has no lottery and no annual cap. That is what makes a slower path a predictable one rather than a gamble.
What the slow option actually involves
If you are going to wait nine months for anything, you should know exactly what happens during them.
We agree it is even a fit
A short call about your seat, your timeline and your region. If relief or a local recruiter is the better answer for your situation, we will tell you that and you will have lost twenty minutes.
You see real candidates
Licensed doctors from accredited schools, with their graduation year, exam status, English level and earliest availability. You interview whoever you want to and you choose. Nobody is assigned to you.
Licensing and visa run in parallel
Credential verification, the national exam and state licensure on one track. The TN visa petition is handled by independent licensed immigration attorneys, not by us, which is the only correct way for that work to be done.
They arrive, and they stay
Relocation and onboarding support through the first months. A doctor who moved countries for this role has meaningfully different reasons to stay than one fielding three competing offers across town.
Before you take anyone's word for the shortage
We published what the workforce data actually says about veterinary supply and demand, including the parts that undercut the way this problem is usually sold to clinic owners. Read it before you talk to us or to anybody else.
The questions owners actually ask
- How fast can you fill a seat?
- Nine to fifteen months from first call to first day, depending on where the doctor is in their licensing and which state you are in. If you need somebody in the building this quarter, we are the wrong call and relief is the right one. We would rather say that now than on month four.
- What does it cost?
- It depends on the role, the state and the timeline, so quoting a number here would be guessing at your situation. We will walk through it plainly on a call, before you have invested any real time. Terms are published in full on our clinic terms page.
- Are these doctors actually licensed?
- They are qualified veterinarians from accredited schools who complete United States licensure, including the national board examination and your state's requirements, before they practise. Some hold graduate credentials that let them skip the equivalence programme entirely, which is what makes the shorter timelines possible.
- Do you handle the visa?
- No, and you should be cautious of any staffing company that says it does. Immigration petitions are legal work and are handled by independent licensed immigration attorneys. We coordinate the process and make sure it runs on schedule alongside licensing.
- What if they leave?
- Replacement terms are part of the agreement and are published on our clinic terms page rather than buried in a contract you see at signature. Ask about them on the first call.
- We are a single-doctor practice. Is this for us?
- Often it fits better than it does for larger groups, because a second doctor changes an independent practice more than a fifth doctor changes a corporate one. The honest constraint is the wait, not your size.
Worth a conversation, or not?
Tell us how long the seat has been open and what you have already tried. If permanent international placement is not the right answer for your situation, we will say so on the call and point you at what is. That costs you twenty minutes.