The Veterinary Squeeze

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  Empty clinical practice consultation room with treatment table and desk

American veterinary practices grew revenue again in 2025 while treating fewer animals, the fourth consecutive year of that pattern. The profession calls it pricing power. It is an arithmetic problem with a deadline.

In January, on a stage in Orlando, the economist who has tracked this industry longer than almost anyone said the quiet part in one sentence.

"Basic economics says when prices go up faster than everything else, people start making different decisions."

John Volk of Brakke Consulting was presenting to the Veterinary Meeting and Expo, and the numbers behind that line were these: American veterinary practices grew revenue roughly 2.5 percent in 2025, while patient visits fell about 3 percent. It was the fourth straight year the two lines moved in opposite directions.

The trade coverage that followed emphasized the revenue. That is the wrong number to emphasize.

A business that grows revenue while serving fewer customers is not necessarily in trouble. Airlines do it. Hotels do it. But it is a strategy with a mathematical horizon, because every year the price increase has to be larger to offset a shrinking base, and every year the price increase itself pushes more of that base out the door. At some point the curves cross.

American veterinary medicine has spent four years walking toward that intersection, and the affordability data suggests it is closer than the profession's revenue reports imply.

The four-year divergence

The visit decline is not a blip and it is not accelerating dramatically. It is steady, which is worse.

Vetsource, which aggregates transaction data from more than 6,400 US practices, recorded visit declines of 1.4 percent in 2023, 2.6 percent in 2024 and 3.1 percent in 2025. Three consecutive years of erosion, each slightly deeper than the last.

Revenue went the other way, and the mechanism is visible in a single metric. Revenue per patient reached $622 in 2024, up about 7 percent year over year, against $580 in 2023 and $543 in 2022. That $622 breaks into roughly $499 of professional services and $203 of product.

So the practice is billing about 15 percent more per animal than it did two years earlier while seeing measurably fewer animals. That is the entire growth story.

Underneath it, the client base is thinning in a way that compounds. Average active clients per practice have fallen by roughly 95 a year since 2019, landing near 3,351 in 2024. A practice losing a hundred clients annually and raising fees to cover the gap is running a treadmill, and the treadmill speeds up on its own.

The owners themselves were caught out by it. Going into 2025, only 13 percent of practice owners expected their business to decline. Twenty-nine percent reported that it did.

Two industries, one average

Before going further it is worth flagging a measurement problem that runs through almost every published statistic in this sector, because it changes what the national numbers mean.

The AVMA puts average practice gross revenue near $1.5 million. Vetsource's transaction panel puts it closer to $2.7 million.

Neither is wrong. They are counting different businesses. Vetsource's data flows through practice-management systems that skew toward larger and corporate-owned hospitals, while the AVMA's survey base captures far more independent single-doctor practices. The $1.2 million gap between those two averages is roughly the difference between the two halves of American veterinary medicine.

That matters for every figure in this article and for anyone underwriting a specific deal. A three-percent national visit decline is an average of a corporate hospital with marketing budgets, extended hours, referral relationships and an emergency arm, and an independent practice with one doctor, a receptionist and a client list built over twenty years. There is no reason to assume both experienced the same decline, and considerable reason to assume they did not.

The available evidence suggests the pressure is not evenly distributed. Corporate groups have absorbed roughly three-quarters of specialty practices, where referral volume and case complexity support higher revenue per patient. Independents are concentrated in general practice, where the declining categories, routine visits, preventive products, elective diagnostics, are exactly what clients cut first.

So the national divergence between revenue and visits probably understates what is happening at the small end and overstates what is happening at the large end. Anyone reading a national figure into a single-practice pro forma is importing a corporate hospital's performance into an independent's projections.

For a lender, the practical instruction is narrow: the sector-level statistics establish direction, not magnitude. The magnitude has to come from the subject practice's own three-year transaction history, broken into visit count and revenue per visit as separate lines. A practice growing revenue on a falling visit count is running the same treadmill as the industry, and the pro forma should say so explicitly rather than projecting the blended growth rate forward.

The wedge

The affordability picture is the cleanest part of this story because it comes from a federal series that nobody can dispute.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks veterinary services as its own consumer price index. Indexed to 1997, it stood at 267.2 in 2019. By 2025 it had reached 393.2, and the preliminary 2026 reading is 410.5.

The annual rates tell you how it got there: up 8.83 percent in 2022, 9.44 percent in 2023, 7.40 percent in 2024, and 6.46 percent in 2025. Four consecutive years of increases well above general inflation, in an economy where headline CPI ran 2.1 percent on an annual-average basis in 2025.

Cumulatively, veterinary prices rose roughly 47 percent between 2019 and 2025, and about 54 percent through the preliminary 2026 figure. Headline consumer prices rose approximately 26 percent over the same 2019 to 2025 window.

That gap, not the latest year-over-year print, is the affordability story. Veterinary care has become roughly twice as expensive relative to everything else a household buys, in six years.

The behavioral evidence follows directly. A Gallup survey found that more than half of American pet owners have declined or skipped veterinary care because of cost. The canonical baseline study, from the Access to Veterinary Care Coalition, found that 28 percent of families had not received needed veterinary care in the preceding two years, with financial barriers cited by 80 percent of those forgoing preventive care, 74 percent forgoing sick care, and 56 percent forgoing emergency care.

Volk describes the sequence of retreat with useful precision. Clients decline diagnostics first. Then non-essential procedures. Then preventive products. Each of those is a margin line, and they are being abandoned in roughly descending order of profitability.

The practitioners see it happening. Eighty-one percent of surveyed veterinarians said clients were more cost-sensitive in 2025, up from 72 percent the year before.

Insurance cannot close the gap

The standard rebuttal to affordability concern is that pet insurance is growing fast and will eventually absorb the increase. The growth part is true. The absorption part is not, and the numbers are not close.

North American insured pets reached roughly 7.6 million, with the US count up 9 percent year over year. US gross written premium hit $5.2 billion, growing 20.8 percent. By any normal standard that is a category doing well.

But US penetration is 4.27 percent, 5.99 percent for dogs and 2.29 percent for cats. More than 95 percent of American pets are uninsured.

The prior year's figures give the trajectory: 6.4 million US pets insured at 3.9 percent penetration, average accident-and-illness premiums of $749 a year for dogs and $386 for cats, and $3.07 billion in US claims paid.

Run the math against the problem. Total US veterinary spending is many multiples of $3 billion. Insurance is covering a small single-digit share of the bill, growing from a base so low that even sustained twenty percent compounding takes a decade to reach the low teens in penetration. It is not a solution to a 54 percent price wedge arriving now.

What has filled the gap instead is consumer credit, and the structure of that market is itself diagnostic. CareCredit approves roughly 5,700 new cardholders a day. Applicants who are declined get routed down to soft-pull products like Scratchpay and Cherry. An entire tiered financing infrastructure exists between the exam room and the invoice, which is not something that develops in a category people can comfortably afford.

The loan tape

Which brings us to the number that lenders quote about this industry, and why it deserves a caveat rather than a headline.

Veterinary services carries one of the lowest default rates of any industry code in the SBA 7(a) program. The most widely circulated figure puts it at roughly 4.1 percent of resolved loans, against an all-industry benchmark near 15.8 percent across more than 1.28 million resolved loans. Dental sits just above it at 4.6 percent. On a cumulative basis the veterinary book runs somewhere near 14,600 loans and $9.0 billion, at an average loan size around $616,000.

Two things about that figure need saying plainly.

The first is that it comes from a single commercial provider computing charge-offs against resolved loans, and it is not independently corroborated by any free primary re-derivation. The SBA publishes the underlying loan-level data quarterly through its FOIA release, but it does not publish default rates by industry code. Anyone citing 4.1 percent is citing one analyst's arithmetic on a public file. That arithmetic may well be right. It should still be attributed, and ideally reproduced.

The second is more consequential. A resolved-loan default rate is a rear-view mirror by construction. The loans that have resolved were overwhelmingly originated between roughly 2015 and 2022, into a market with rising visit volumes, cheap debt and expanding practice valuations. That market inverted starting in 2023. The approval cohorts from 2020 onward have not aged into their default window; the average distance from origination to charge-off in the 7(a) portfolio runs several years.

So the sector's excellent credit record describes loans made under conditions that no longer exist. That is not an argument that veterinary lending is unsafe. It is an argument that the 4.1 percent should not be used as a forecast.

The lending itself is remarkably concentrated. The entire veterinary SBA market in 2025 ran about $383 million across 307 loans from 67 lenders. Live Oak Bank alone accounted for roughly $219 million across 96 loans, about 57 percent of all veterinary SBA dollars. Fifth Third followed at $71.3 million across 36 loans, and Huntington at $18.0 million across 23.

Live Oak was also the single largest 7(a) lender in the country in fiscal 2025, at $2.68 billion across 2,148 loans and a 7.9 percent program share, with dentistry at $247.5 million and veterinary at $219.2 million as its two largest verticals. One bank's practice-finance desk is effectively the marginal lender for independent veterinary ownership in the United States.

That concentration cuts both ways. It has produced disciplined, specialist underwriting and an excellent loss record. It also means a single institution's appetite shift propagates nationally within a quarter, with no comparable bid behind it.

The regulatory environment tightened in the same window. SOP 50 10 8, effective June 1, 2025, restored a hard 10 percent equity injection on changes of ownership. Seller notes count toward that injection only if placed on full standby for the entire loan term, and are capped at half the required injection, five percent of a ten percent requirement. Any retained seller equity now triggers a full two-year personal guarantee, and partial buy-ins must be structured as stock purchases rather than asset purchases.

The agency was explicit about why. Fiscal 2024 was the 7(a) program's first year of negative cash flow in more than a decade, which it attributed to defaults among underqualified buyers.

That matters more in veterinary than in most property types, because veterinary practice acquisition is a goodwill purchase. There is usually no building, no equipment of consequence, and no liquidation value. The collateral is a client list and a doctor's willingness to keep showing up. When the SBA tightened seller-note treatment, it tightened it hardest on exactly this kind of transaction.

Working the other direction, effective July 4, 2026 the agency decoupled its two programs, allowing a single borrower up to $5 million under 7(a) and $5 million under 504 for a combined $10 million, announced by Administrator Kelly Loeffler in May. For a buyer combining practice goodwill with real estate, that is a meaningful expansion of capacity even as per-deal underwriting got stricter.

What the collateral actually is

The structural point about veterinary lending deserves more attention than the default rate, because it explains both the excellent historical record and the specific way it could fail.

A veterinary practice acquisition loan is, in most cases, a purchase of goodwill. There is frequently no owned real estate. The equipment is worth a fraction of the loan. What the buyer is actually acquiring is a client list, a location, a phone number that people already call, and the retiring owner's implicit endorsement.

That collateral profile has two consequences that pull in opposite directions.

The first is that it has historically performed extraordinarily well, and for a legible reason. Veterinary demand has been stable, recurring and emotionally insulated from economic cycles. A client list is a durable asset when the clients keep coming. The 4.1 percent record is not an accident; it reflects thirty years in which the underlying business rarely deteriorated.

The second is that goodwill has no liquidation value. When a hotel loan fails, the lender takes a building. When a gas station loan fails, there is land and there are tanks. When a veterinary loan fails, there is nothing to seize but a lease and some radiography equipment. Loss severity on a veterinary default is high precisely because frequency has been low.

That asymmetry is why the underwriting change matters so much here. Under the standards effective June 2025, the ten percent equity injection is hard, seller notes count only on full standby and only up to half the injection, and any retained seller equity brings a two-year personal guarantee. In a goodwill deal, those provisions are not paperwork. They are the entire cushion.

They also make the transaction harder to close. The traditional veterinary succession, retiring owner sells to an associate, seller-financing bridging most of the gap, is exactly the structure the new rules constrain. A buyer who could previously assemble a deal with a modest cash contribution and a large seller note now needs real equity.

Set that beside the exit problem described below and the shape of the risk becomes clear. The concern is not that veterinary practices will start failing at hotel-like rates. It is that a cohort of buyers financed at boom-era multiples, into a business with declining volumes, may find that neither refinancing nor sale clears their basis, and that when one of those loans does resolve badly, the recovery will be poor.

The labor inversion

Here is the part of this story the profession is reporting as a crisis and a practice owner should read as relief.

There are roughly 127,000 veterinarians in active US practice. For most of the past decade the binding constraint on a practice's revenue was finding one to hire. Salaries climbed, signing bonuses appeared, and associate compensation became the largest line on many profit and loss statements.

That is reversing, from both ends at once.

On the supply side, US veterinary school enrollment reached 16,143 in the 2024-25 academic year, up more than 30 percent since 2015. The expansion is structural rather than cyclical: Utah State enrolled its inaugural class of 42 in August 2025 and received provisional accreditation that October; Rowan opened New Jersey's first veterinary school the same month; Clemson and Arkansas State both seated inaugural classes in 2025; Lyon College in Arkansas and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore are targeting 2027. Roughly a dozen programs are in development nationally.

Against a historical baseline of about 4,000 graduates a year, that pipeline changes the labor market through the 2030s.

On the demand side, the shortage is already easing. Volk reported roughly a 10 percent drop in the share of practices with open veterinarian positions between 2024 and 2025, alongside rising "white space" on appointment schedules, unfilled slots, particularly for routine care. About 53 percent of surveyed practices now use AI tools such as clinical scribes and cytology assistance, which is a further productivity tailwind.

And then there is Colorado. Voters passed Proposition 129 in November 2024 by a bare margin, creating a new midlevel role, the Veterinary Professional Associate, a master's-credentialed provider working under veterinarian supervision. The enabling legislation took effect January 1, 2026, Colorado State University is standing up the degree program, and registration is targeted to open by January 2027. The AVMA and the state association opposed the measure on patient-safety grounds and lost.

For a practice owner, the economics are unambiguous. A credentialed provider who can perform routine surgery and preventive care at a fraction of a DVM's cost lowers labor expense per visit in the single largest cost category. That is margin support arriving precisely when the revenue line needs it.

The profession is framing all three of these developments as threats. From a lender's chair, they are the most favorable thing that has happened to practice economics in a decade.

The exit closed

The last piece of the squeeze is the one that determines whether an SBA-financed owner has a way out.

Corporate ownership grew from roughly 8 percent of US practices in 2011 to an estimated 25 to 30 percent of general practices today, with some counts approaching half of all sites when specialty is included, and roughly three-quarters of specialty practices corporate-owned. Mars Veterinary Health, VCA, Banfield and BluePearl, is the largest operator and the only major consolidator that is not private equity.

The consolidation wave that drove those numbers has stalled. Volk describes the market as being in a "holding pattern," with acquisition volumes and valuations both down as higher rates pressure debt-funded roll-ups.

The multiple history is the clearest evidence. Volk puts the 2021 high-water mark at "the equivalent of 18- to 20-times earnings," and adds: "That's not happening now." Current ranges run roughly 3.5 to 7 times adjusted EBITDA for solo and owner-dependent practices, 8 to 15 times for multi-doctor practices generating $1 million or more of EBITDA, and 11 to 15 times or better for genuine platforms.

Note who absorbed the compression. The single-doctor independent, the SBA borrower, sits at the bottom of that range, where the multiple contracted most and where the buyer pool has thinned fastest.

The platforms themselves are not uniformly healthy either. Southern Veterinary Partners and Mission Veterinary Partners, both Shore Capital vehicles, combined into Mission Pet Health with more than 840 locations across 41 states, a transaction press reports valued near $8.6 billion at roughly 17 to 18 times EBITDA. Ethos Veterinary Health acquired NVA on July 31, 2025. But Thrive Pet Healthcare carried an S&P rating of CCC+ as of April 2025, which is a distress signal in a sector that spent five years being described as recession-proof.

Regulatory attention has followed the capital. The Federal Trade Commission's 2022 consent order in the JAB and Ethos matter required divestitures in Richmond, Denver, San Francisco and the Washington area, and imposed statewide prior-approval requirements in five jurisdictions plus nationwide prior notice on future specialty and emergency acquisitions near existing clinics. That order remains the template, and more than fifteen states have since passed their own merger notification statutes to capture smaller deals that fall below federal thresholds.

Put the pieces together from the borrower's side. He bought a practice at a multiple set during the roll-up boom, financed with goodwill-heavy SBA debt, into a market where visits have declined four years running, and the buyers who would have taken him out at that multiple are in a holding pattern.

What cuts against this

Four things complicate the reading above, and one of them is a formal forecast.

The first is that the visit decline may be flattening rather than deepening. Vetsource's Sheri Gilmartin characterizes the trend as plateauing around a 2 to 2.5 percent annual decline, and 2026 comparisons get easier simply because the base is lower. Volk's own caution applies: that is different from real growth. But a stabilizing rate of decline is a materially better setup than an accelerating one.

The second is a published model that disagrees with the pessimistic reading. Cornell economists Clinton Neill and Matthew Salois, writing in Frontiers in Veterinary Science in October 2025, applied time-series modeling to BLS data and concluded that the veterinary economy entered a recession in late 2024 which could persist through mid-2026 before a potential recovery later that year. That is a real forecast from credentialed researchers using the same federal series cited above, and it says the trough is near.

The third is that the price increases are not purely margin extraction. Volk attributes part of the rise to genuine input-cost inflation and to the availability of newer, higher-cost products and diagnostics, service-mix upgrading rather than fee-gouging. A practice charging more because it now offers imaging it did not offer in 2019 is a different phenomenon than one simply raising fees.

The fourth is geographic. The national labor picture may be loosening while specific markets remain acutely short. One 2025 industry analysis found that 22 percent of US counties have effectively no veterinary capacity relative to household counts. In those places the shortage narrative is not a narrative.

And the SBA record itself remains the strongest argument for the bull case. People treat pets as family and defer that spending last. If that holds through a genuine downturn, the sector's loss experience will stay exceptional regardless of what happens to visit counts.

What we are watching

Five measurable things will settle which reading is right.

Visit volume is the first and most direct. Two consecutive quarters of positive year-over-year visits would end the divergence and validate the Cornell recovery timeline.

The SBA cohorts are the second and most consequential for lenders. If loans approved between 2020 and 2023 charge off at materially higher rates than the 2015 to 2019 cohorts did at the same loan age, the 4.1 percent figure is confirmed as a lagging indicator and the sector reprices.

Insurance penetration is third. It currently sits at 4.27 percent. Crossing 8 to 10 percent would make insurance a genuine factor in affordability rather than a rounding error.

The open-positions metric is fourth. If the share of practices with unfilled veterinarian roles turns back up, the labor inversion is not happening and the margin relief does not arrive.

The fifth is practice multiples at the small end. Solo practices currently transact at 3.5 to 7 times adjusted EBITDA. If that floor holds or improves, the independent owner has an exit. If it erodes further, a cohort of SBA borrowers who bought at boom-era valuations will be refinancing into a market that will not clear their basis.

Until those move, the accurate description of American veterinary medicine is a profession with excellent credit history, deteriorating unit volumes, a compounding affordability problem it did not create and cannot easily reverse, and, arriving at exactly the right moment, a labor cost structure that is finally getting easier.

The practices that survive the next three years will not be the ones that raised prices fastest. They will be the ones that figured out how to see more animals at a price their clients can still pay.

Methodology

Figures on SBA lending volume, lender concentration, default rates and program requirements relate to NAICS 541940 (Veterinary Services) and derive from the Small Business Administration's 7(a) and 504 loan-level FOIA datasets, published quarterly at data.sba.gov. Readers should note two limitations. The SBA does not publish default rates by industry code; the 4.1 percent figure cited here is a single commercial provider's computation of charge-offs as a share of resolved loans and is not independently corroborated by a free primary re-derivation. And resolved-loan default rates necessarily describe older approval cohorts; loans approved from 2020 onward have not seasoned into their default window, so the figure should be read as historical rather than predictive. Lender-level figures for 2025 are FOIA-derived third-party aggregations and should be reproduced from the underlying files before being relied upon.

Veterinary service price figures are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index for veterinarian services, with the 2026 index value marked preliminary. Visit volume and revenue-per-patient figures are from Vetsource transaction data covering more than 6,400 US practices and from Brakke Consulting's survey work presented at the Veterinary Meeting and Expo in January 2026 and reported subsequently by the AVMA. Practice-level client and revenue figures are from AVMA reporting. Pet insurance figures are from NAPHIA State of the Industry reporting. Enrollment and accreditation figures are from AAVMC and AVMA sources. Practice valuation ranges reflect published advisory estimates and vary substantially by practice profile.

Several underlying reports, including the full Brakke survey, Vetsource white papers, the AVMA economic state report and the complete NAPHIA industry report, are members-only or paid publications; figures here are drawn from free press coverage and public releases and are attributed accordingly. Corporate ownership share estimates range from roughly 25 percent to nearly 50 percent depending on whether the denominator is general practices or all sites and whether specialty is included; the range is stated rather than resolved.

Key figures for citation

Metric	Value
Practice revenue growth, 2025	~+2.5%
Patient visit change, 2025	~−3% (fourth consecutive annual decline)
Visit declines, 2023 / 2024 / 2025	−1.4% / −2.6% / −3.1%
Revenue per patient, 2024	$622 (+7%), $499 services, $203 product
Revenue per patient, 2022 / 2023	$543 / $580
Active clients per practice, 2024	3,351, down ~95/year since 2019
Veterinary services CPI, 2019 → 2025	267.2 → 393.2 (~+47%)
Veterinary CPI annual, 2022-2025	+8.83% / +9.44% / +7.40% / +6.46%
Headline CPI, same 2019-2025 window	~+26%
Pet owners declining care on cost	More than half (Gallup)
Vets reporting greater client price sensitivity	81% in 2025, up from 72%
US pet insurance penetration	4.27%, dogs 5.99%, cats 2.29%
US pet insurance gross written premium	$5.2bn (+20.8%)
SBA veterinary default rate (single-provider, resolved loans)	~4.1% vs ~15.8% all-industry
Total veterinary SBA lending, 2025	~$383m / 307 loans / 67 lenders
Largest lender share	~57% (Live Oak, ~$219m / 96 loans)
Practicing US veterinarians	~127,000
DVM enrollment, 2024-25	16,143, up over 30% since 2015
Drop in practices with open vet positions, 2024→2025	~10%
Practice multiples: solo / multi-doctor / platform	3.5-7x / 8-15x / 11-15x+ EBITDA
2021 peak multiple	18-20x earnings
Corporate share of general practices	~25-30% (from ~8% in 2011)

Frequently asked questions

Are US veterinary practice visits declining?

Yes, for four consecutive years. Transaction data covering more than 6,400 US practices recorded visit declines of 1.4 percent in 2023, 2.6 percent in 2024 and 3.1 percent in 2025. Over the same period practice revenue continued to grow, roughly 2.5 percent in 2025, meaning price increases rather than patient volume are carrying the entire growth line.

How much have veterinary prices risen?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index for veterinary services rose from 267.2 in 2019 to 393.2 in 2025, with a preliminary 2026 reading of 410.5. That is a cumulative increase of roughly 47 percent through 2025, against headline consumer inflation of approximately 26 percent over the same window. Annual increases ran 8.83 percent in 2022, 9.44 percent in 2023, 7.40 percent in 2024 and 6.46 percent in 2025.

What is the average revenue per patient at a veterinary practice?

Revenue per patient reached $622 in 2024, up about 7 percent year over year, split into roughly $499 of professional services and $203 of product. That compares with $580 in 2023 and $543 in 2022, a rise of roughly 15 percent in two years, achieved while practices treated measurably fewer animals.

What is the SBA default rate for veterinary practices?

Veterinary services carries one of the lowest default rates of any SBA 7(a) industry code, commonly cited at roughly 4.1 percent of resolved loans against an all-industry benchmark near 15.8 percent. Two caveats apply. The figure comes from a single commercial provider's computation on the public loan-level file rather than an official SBA publication, and a resolved-loan rate describes older approval cohorts. Loans approved from 2020 onward have not seasoned into their default window, so the figure is historical rather than predictive.

Who finances veterinary practice acquisitions?

The market is highly concentrated. Total veterinary SBA lending in 2025 ran roughly $383 million across 307 loans from 67 lenders. Live Oak Bank alone accounted for approximately $219 million across 96 loans, about 57 percent of all veterinary SBA dollars, followed by Fifth Third at $71.3 million and Huntington at $18.0 million. Live Oak was also the largest overall 7(a) lender in the country in fiscal 2025.

How did SBA SOP 50 10 8 change veterinary practice acquisition loans?

The standards effective June 1, 2025 restored a hard 10 percent equity injection on changes of ownership. Seller notes count toward that injection only if placed on full standby for the entire loan term, and are capped at half the required injection. Any retained seller equity triggers a full two-year personal guarantee, and partial buy-ins must be structured as stock rather than asset purchases. These provisions bear particularly hard on veterinary deals, which are goodwill purchases with little liquidation value. Separately, effective July 4, 2026 the SBA decoupled its 7(a) and 504 programs, allowing up to $10 million of combined exposure on a single project.

What are veterinary practices selling for in 2026?

Multiples have compressed substantially from the 2021 peak, which reached the equivalent of 18 to 20 times earnings. Current ranges run roughly 3.5 to 7 times adjusted EBITDA for solo and owner-dependent practices, 8 to 15 times for multi-doctor practices generating $1 million or more of EBITDA, and 11 to 15 times or better for platforms. The single-doctor independent absorbed the most compression and faces the thinnest buyer pool.

Is the veterinarian shortage over?

It is easing on both sides. US veterinary school enrollment reached 16,143 in 2024-25, up more than 30 percent since 2015, with new programs at Utah State, Rowan, Clemson and Arkansas State and roughly a dozen more in development against a historical baseline of about 4,000 graduates a year. Meanwhile the share of practices with open veterinarian positions fell roughly 10 percent between 2024 and 2025. Colorado has also created a midlevel Veterinary Professional Associate role, with registration targeted to open in January 2027. Regional shortages persist, but the national labor constraint is loosening.

Analytics.loan produces lender-grade feasibility and market analysis for SBA, USDA and conventional commercial real estate credit.

Sources:

• U.S. Small Business Administration, 7(a) and 504 loan-level FOIA datasets, NAICS 541940 (Veterinary Services)

• U.S. Small Business Administration, SOP 50 10 8, effective June 1, 2025, and the July 4, 2026 program decoupling

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index for veterinary services

• Vetsource, practice transaction data covering more than 6,400 US practices

• Brakke Consulting, survey work presented at the Veterinary Meeting and Expo, January 2026

• American Veterinary Medical Association, practice economics and workforce reporting

• North American Pet Health Insurance Association, State of the Industry data

• American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges, DVM enrollment and accreditation

• Colorado House Bill 25-1285, Veterinary Professional Associate provisions

• Gallup, pet owner cost sensitivity survey

• Neill and Salois, Frontiers in Veterinary Science, October 2025, veterinary economic modeling

• Published practice brokerage advisory estimates, valuation multiples