The veterinary staffing shortage is hitting clinics across the US harder than most owners expected. If you’re short-staffed right now, you already know what that looks like. Longer days for the vets who show up. Appointments pushed out further than you want. A team that’s running on fumes and starting to show it.
You’re not in a unique spot. Most clinics in the US are dealing with some version of this. Knowing it’s widespread doesn’t make it easier to manage on a Tuesday when you have three doctors scheduled and one calls in sick.
This post is for clinic owners and practice managers who need real options, not another recap of how the profession got here.
The projections vary depending on who commissioned the study and what they were measuring. What’s less contested is the ground-level picture. The AAHA’s 2024 staffing report put the national vacancy rate for veterinarians at 18%. Mars Veterinary Health found 65% of US vet clinics operating with fewer staff than they need. The AVMA found about 30% of companion animal vets want to work fewer hours than they currently do, which tells you a lot about the retention side of the problem.
Pet ownership shot up during the pandemic and stayed there. Around 94 million US households now own at least one pet. Vet schools graduate roughly 3,500 new DVMs per year. That number hasn’t changed much, but retirement and burnout exits have, and patient volume hasn’t come back down.
Rural clinics feel it harder. Emergency practices feel it harder. But suburban small animal clinics aren’t protected — 18% is a national average, not a worst-case figure.
The instinct when you’re short-staffed is to post a job and find someone permanent. That works sometimes. The problem is timeline. A full-time DVM hire typically takes three to six months from posting to start date, if you find a good fit. That doesn’t solve this week.
There’s also a structural question worth asking: does your practice need consistent full-time coverage, or does your patient volume fluctuate enough that a permanent associate creates a different kind of pressure? Neither answer makes full-time hiring wrong. It just means it shouldn’t be treated as the only option on the table.
Relief vets are DVMs who work shifts at multiple practices on a flexible basis. They’re licensed, experienced, and available without a long hiring process. The common hesitation is onboarding — it takes time to learn a new clinic’s flow. That’s fair. But a good relief vet has done this many times. Adapting quickly is part of the job.
At FlexVet, we match clinics with relief DVMs based on location, availability, and practice type. In most cases, coverage can be confirmed in under 48 hours. For a lot of clinics, this isn’t a workaround — it becomes a core part of how they staff.
Before adding headcount, it’s worth understanding how your existing DVMs are spending their hours. Administrative tasks, callbacks, paperwork — these eat clinical time. If a doctor is spending two hours a day on tasks that don’t require a DVM, that’s recoverable capacity. Practice management software, veterinary scribes, and better task delegation can each give time back without adding anyone to payroll.
Burnout is usually framed as something you fix with compensation reviews or team initiatives. Those matter. But the most direct driver is hours and caseload. If your full-time vets are consistently seeing more patients per day than they’re comfortable with, no amount of team-building addresses that. Relief coverage during peak periods keeps the people you already have from burning out and leaving.
The worst time to find a relief vet is the morning someone calls in sick. Clinics that handle coverage gaps well are the ones that already have relationships with relief providers before anything goes wrong. Sign up with a staffing platform now, even when you’re not actively short-staffed. When you do need someone, it’s a quick request instead of a scramble.
Some clinics are short-staffed because they genuinely don’t have enough providers. Others have enough providers but schedule them in ways that create gaps. Inconsistent day-off patterns, back-to-back appointment blocks with no buffer, single-doctor coverage on high-volume days — these make the problem feel worse than it is. A simple scheduling audit often surfaces fixes that reduce pressure without requiring new hires.
Waiting for the workforce pipeline to catch up is not a plan. The clinics that manage through this period well are the ones that stop treating understaffing as a temporary condition and start building systems to handle it as an ongoing reality.
For most clinics, that starts with a few reliable relief relationships and a more honest look at how shifts are being structured.
FlexVet Staffing connects veterinary clinics across the US with relief DVMs matched to your location and practice type. No long contracts. No weeks-long candidate process.
If you have a shift that needs covering, we’ll get back to you within 24 hours.
Several factors are hitting at the same time. Pet ownership surged during the pandemic and stayed elevated. An estimated 94 million US households now own at least one pet. Meanwhile, vet schools produce roughly 3,500 new DVMs per year, which hasn’t kept pace with retirements, burnout exits, and the growth in patient volume. The AVMA also found that about 30% of companion animal vets want to work fewer hours than they currently do, which compounds the available capacity problem.
Through FlexVet, most clinics can get coverage confirmed in under 48 hours. The key is having a relationship with a staffing platform before you need it. Clinics that sign up in advance — rather than scrambling during a gap — consistently get faster results because we already have their clinic profile and can match immediately.
On a per-shift basis, relief rates are higher than what a full-time associate earns per day. But the comparison isn’t apples to apples. A full-time hire comes with benefits, a guaranteed salary regardless of patient volume, and a multi-month hiring timeline. Relief staffing gives you coverage exactly when you need it, with no fixed overhead when you don’t. For practices with variable volume, the math often favors a hybrid approach.
FlexVet works with small animal clinics, general practice, and mixed practice across the US. We place relief DVMs only — not vet techs or assistants. That focus lets us match doctors to clinic environments more accurately, based on caseload, pace, and clinical focus rather than just location and availability.
FlexVet connects licensed DVMs with veterinary clinics across the US. Browse open relief shifts or learn more about how it works.
