The short answer: Veterinary groups can significantly reduce locum agency costs by building a private relief network, using a dedicated relief management platform, and shifting from reactive to proactive coverage planning. For a 10-hospital group spending $500,000 annually with agencies, moving even 60 percent of shifts to direct relief relationships can save $75,000 to $150,000 per year.
Locum agencies serve a real purpose, but for practices using them routinely, they're one of the most expensive line items in the labor budget. Here's how to change that.
Why Locum Agencies Are So Expensive
Locum agencies act as intermediaries between practices and relief vets. They handle the sourcing, credentialing, scheduling, and paperwork, and they charge for it.
The typical agency model adds a markup on top of the relief vet's base day rate, with industry estimates generally ranging from 25 to 40 percent. Some agencies charge additional placement fees if you want to hire a relief vet full-time after working with them. Travel, lodging, and per diems for out-of-area placements are often passed through as additional costs.
For a single shift at a market day rate of $1,000 for a DVM, an agency might bill $1,250 to $1,400 for the same coverage. Across 200 relief shifts per year for a mid-size group, that markup represents $50,000 to $80,000 in additional spend beyond what you'd pay a direct relief relationship.
Managing your own relief network changes that math significantly.
5 Strategies to Reduce Your Locum Dependence
1. Build a Private Relief Network
The most effective long-term strategy is cultivating direct relationships with relief vets and techs who already know your practice. These are professionals you've worked with before, who understand your protocols, your culture, and your clients, and who would prefer to work with you directly rather than through an agency.
Most relief professionals are happy to work directly with practices they trust. The agency relationship benefits them mainly when they need the sourcing function, finding new practices to work with. Once that relationship exists, the agency adds little value and takes a significant cut.
Start by identifying every relief vet or tech who has worked at your practice in the last two years. Reach out directly with a simple proposition: you'd like to build a direct working relationship for future coverage, at a rate that's fair to them and eliminates the agency markup.
2. Use a Relief Management Platform
Spreadsheets, text threads, and shared calendars are how most practices try to manage their relief networks, which is part of why practices default back to agencies when things get complicated.
A dedicated relief management platform gives you the infrastructure to operate your own program reliably at scale. Groove is built specifically for this: practices use it to schedule shifts, manage payments, send automated timesheets, and communicate with their relief network, all without shift booking fees or placement fees.
With a platform handling the administrative overhead, managing 10 or 20 direct relief relationships becomes manageable. Without one, it tends to collapse into chaos and agency calls.
3. Shift from Reactive to Proactive Scheduling
Most agency calls happen because a need arose that nobody anticipated. A doctor takes PTO. A tech calls out sick. A role goes unfilled for three weeks and the existing team starts burning out.
The fix is visibility, not more agency relationships. When you can see your coverage schedule four to eight weeks out, you can post shifts to your relief network before the gaps become emergencies. Relief vets book out quickly, especially in competitive markets: the practices that reach their network early get the coverage; the ones that wait get stuck calling agencies at premium rates.
Groove's scheduling dashboard gives practice managers and regional directors a clear view of upcoming coverage across all locations, so proactive outreach becomes the default rather than the exception.
4. Standardize Your Relief Onboarding
One reason practices rely on agencies is that onboarding a new relief vet feels complicated. Credentialing, DEA verification, W9s, invoicing preferences: the administrative burden discourages practices from managing it directly.
Build a simple onboarding packet that covers everything a new relief vet needs to start working with you: your protocols, your EMR, invoicing requirements, and emergency contacts. When it's documented and templated, onboarding a new direct relationship takes an hour, not a week.
5. Expand Your Network Proactively
Your existing direct relationships are your most valuable coverage asset, but they have limits on availability. When you need to expand the network, Scout gives you access to Hound's 40,000+ veterinary professional network to find relief vets who are actively looking for work in your area, without agency intermediaries.
Once a relief vet from Scout works at your practice and the relationship is established, you can manage ongoing scheduling directly through Groove. The sourcing cost is a one-time investment; the agency markup goes away permanently.
When Locum Agencies Still Make Sense
Agencies aren't going away entirely, and they serve genuine purposes in certain situations:
- Emergency coverage with very short lead times, where your existing network is booked and you need someone in 24 to 48 hours
- Highly specialized roles (e.g., board-certified specialists) where the sourcing challenge is real and the agency has a specialized network
- New markets or locations where you don't yet have established relief relationships
The goal isn't zero agency usage. The goal is having agency spend represent a small percentage of your total relief spend, reserved for edge cases rather than routine coverage.
What the Cost Reduction Looks Like in Practice
Consider a veterinary group with 8 hospitals running approximately 300 relief shifts per year through locum agencies, at an average billed rate of $1,200 per shift (including agency markup). Total annual agency spend: $360,000.
After building a direct relief network and using a platform to manage it:
- 70 percent of shifts move to direct relationships at an average day rate of $900
- Remaining 30 percent stay with agencies for edge cases
- Platform cost (Groove): roughly $3,000 to $5,000 per year depending on network size and configuration
Net annual savings: approximately $63,000 to $90,000, after platform costs.
That's a conservative estimate. Groups with higher agency dependency or higher-cost markets tend to see larger returns.
Getting Started
The shift from agency-dependent to relief-network-operated doesn't happen overnight, but it doesn't have to be a multi-year project either.
A realistic 90-day path:
- Audit your last 12 months of agency spend and identify which roles and locations drove the most cost
- Reach out to relief vets you've worked with directly and formalize those relationships
- Stand up a relief management platform to handle scheduling and payments
- Post upcoming open shifts to your direct network before going to agencies
- Track the shift in spend monthly and reinvest savings into growing the network
The practices that have made this transition consistently describe it the same way: getting started is harder than sustaining it. Once the network is built and the systems are in place, it runs itself.