Relief work was supposed to be the pressure valve for veterinary burnout: pick your shifts, skip the politics, and walk away from the parts of the job that wear people down. The newest data says that valve is sticking. Burnout among relief veterinarians rose 25% between 2022 and 2025, reaching its highest point on record and overtaking even the peak measured during the pandemic. Relief veterinarians feel that first, but every practice that leans on relief coverage to keep its schedule running feels it as a staffing risk not far behind.
Why Burnout Is Rising Fastest Among the Vets Practices Call First
Relief work has grown from a niche option into a mainstream career path. The share of veterinarians working relief or contract roles grew 60% between 2023 and 2026, and nearly 1 in 10 veterinarians in private practice now work relief rather than hold a single full time job. Growth that fast would strain any workforce segment, and the burnout numbers show it has.
A 2025 survey of 151 relief veterinarians found burnout climbing on every measure it tracked since 2022:
- Work exhaustion: up 22%
- Interpersonal disengagement: up 27%
- Professional fulfillment: up 34%
The survey used the Stanford-built Professional Fulfillment Index and was reviewed by a university institutional review board. Relief vets still find the work meaningful. They are simply more exhausted and more disconnected while they do it.
Respondents pointed to four main sources of stress:
Three of those four are structural, not personal. A relief vet can't fix an inconsistent booking calendar, a 1099 tax season, or a rotating cast of coworkers by working harder. Those are exactly the parts of the job a practice has the most control over.
What a Burned-Out Relief Bench Costs the Practice That Depends on It
Overcommitting to shifts is the single biggest driver of relief burnout, and it puts practices in an uncomfortable position: the schedule gaps that push a relief vet to overcommit are often the same gaps a practice created by calling in a scramble instead of building a steady relationship. Vets who found shifts through referrals or repeat clients reported more financial predictability, and that predictability tracked closely with lower burnout scores. What keeps a relief veterinarian coming back to the same practice turns out to double as what keeps that vet from burning out in the first place.
That gap shows up as turnover risk long before it shows up as a resignation letter. A relief vet who reports 74.8% control over their own schedule but only 58.9% satisfaction with their work-life balance may be one bad month away from dropping a practice from their rotation, not from leaving relief work altogether. For a practice, that is the quieter, more common version of a staffing crisis: not an open role, just a relief bench that stops answering the phone.
How Practices Can Keep Their Relief Coverage From Burning Out
Administrative burden was the third-biggest stressor relief vets named, and most relief veterinarians spend 2 to 4 hours per shift on medical records alone. Nearly a third said they would be more likely to accept a shift at a clinic that offers charting support to cut that load. That is a burden a practice can shrink directly.
A few concrete moves lower the odds that a practice's own relief bench shows up in next year's burnout numbers:
- Build repeat relationships instead of one-off asks. A relief vet who already knows your charting system, your team, and your patients spends less of the shift re-learning the practice and more of it actually seeing cases.
- Offer charting support on day one. An AI scribe or a short note on your electronic medical record (EMR) system's quirks addresses the documentation load directly, instead of asking a relief vet to absorb it unassisted.
- Protect against the overcommitment spiral. Booking further ahead gives a relief vet less reason to stack back-to-back shifts just to cover their own income gaps.
- Pay predictably, not just fairly. 72.2% of relief vets already call their compensation fair. The complaint is timing and certainty, not the number.
This isn't a hiring problem to solve once and forget. It's a workforce worth keeping, the same way a practice already keeps its staff team.
Relief work isn't a stopgap anymore. Nearly 1 in 10 veterinarians are already building a career around it, and that share is still growing. A practice that treats its relief bench as disposable is betting against the exact trend reshaping veterinary staffing. The practices keeping their best relief vets around are the ones managing that bench deliberately, with tools like Groove by Hound, instead of leaving it to whoever happens to pick up the phone.