A single unfilled shift at a busy general practice can cost $1,500 to $4,000 in lost revenue. Across a year, chronic understaffing can erode 10 to 20 percent of a practice's top line, and that's before you account for burnout, turnover, and the locum fees you're paying to paper over the gaps.
Being short-staffed is one of the most expensive problems in veterinary medicine, and most practices are measuring only a fraction of the real cost.
How Much Revenue an Unfilled Role Actually Costs
Veterinary practices generate revenue when appointment slots are filled. When a DVM calls out, takes a vacation, or leaves for a new role and the position sits open, those appointments don't get seen, or they get squeezed into already-full schedules, lowering quality and increasing error risk.
A typical full-time veterinarian generates between $300,000 and $600,000 in annual revenue for a practice. That works out to roughly $1,200 to $2,400 per day. Leave a DVM role open for six weeks and you've lost $50,000 to $100,000 in production capacity, assuming you can't cover it at all.
Veterinary technicians matter just as much. A short-handed tech team slows down the flow rate for the entire clinic. Doctors can't move efficiently through appointments without competent tech support, which creates a multiplier effect on lost revenue that often goes uncalculated.
Where the Less Visible Costs Accumulate
The revenue loss is the visible part. These costs tend to stay invisible until they become a crisis:
Overtime and staff burnout. When you're short-staffed, your existing team carries the load. Overtime pay is an immediate budget hit. But the deeper cost is what sustained overwork does to your team: engagement drops, errors increase, and your best people start looking around. In veterinary medicine, where burnout and compassion fatigue are already significant, short-staffing accelerates the timeline to resignation.
Locum and relief agency fees. Most practices turn to locum agencies as a short-term fix. Agency fees typically add a significant markup on top of the relief vet's day rate, with industry estimates generally ranging from 25 to 40 percent, plus sometimes travel, lodging, and placement costs. For practices that rely on agencies routinely, this becomes one of the fastest-growing line items in their labor budget, without a corresponding increase in coverage reliability.
Recruiting costs. A prolonged vacancy means recruiting costs: job board fees, recruiter commissions (typically 15 to 25 percent of first-year salary for DVM roles), and the internal time your practice manager spends screening and interviewing. A single DVM hire through a recruiter on a $130,000 salary costs $20,000 to $32,000 in commission alone.
Client attrition. Extended wait times, rushed appointments, and rescheduled slots push clients away. Acquiring a new client costs five to 25 times more than retaining one, according to Harvard Business Review citing Bain & Company research.
Why Veterinary Practices Are So Hard to Staff Right Now
The staffing crisis in veterinary medicine is structural, not cyclical.
Demand for veterinary services has grown significantly since 2020, driven by a surge in pet ownership: the ASPCA estimates that close to one in five U.S. households acquired a cat or dog during the pandemic, adding roughly 23 million households to the pet-owning population. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects 10 percent employment growth for veterinarians through 2034, much faster than average, driven directly by that expanded pet population.
The pipeline of new veterinarians and technicians has not kept pace. Vet school enrollment is constrained by the cost of education and the number of accredited programs, and the technician workforce turns over fast: the BLS projects about 14,300 vet tech openings each year through 2034, most of them created by people transferring to other occupations or leaving the workforce rather than by newly added positions, against a 2024 median wage of $45,980. The American Animal Hospital Association's "Stay, Please" retention study points to why: for team members planning to leave for another practice, the three factors that would have to change were fair compensation, appreciation for work, and career development.
The result is a chronic supply-demand imbalance that affects every segment of the profession: general practice, emergency medicine, specialty hospitals, and corporate groups alike. The squeeze has loosened slightly from its peak, with the share of practices reporting open veterinarian positions down roughly 10 percent from 2024 to 2025, according to analyst John Volk's annual market assessment reported by AVMA News, though he still called the labor market tight.
None of that easing helps the practice that loses a doctor on a Tuesday. The real lesson buried in these numbers is that the best way to handle relief coverage during a sudden staff shortage is to have the network and the system already in place before the shortage arrives.
This isn't a problem that resolves on its own. Adapting the staffing model, building proactive relief networks, investing in retention, and using purpose-built tools, is how practices get the number in the previous section to stop growing.
How to Calculate Your Practice's Short-Staffing Cost
To get a clearer number for your own practice:
- Estimate lost production. Take your average daily revenue per doctor and multiply by the number of days each open role went uncovered in the last 12 months.
- Add overtime. Pull your payroll data and identify any overtime paid during periods of understaffing. Multiply hours by the blended overtime rate.
- Add relief and agency spend. Total what you paid to agencies and independent relief vets in the last year. Separate agency-facilitated spend (with markup) from direct relief relationships (without markup); the delta is what the agency relationship is costing you.
- Add recruiting costs. Total any recruiter fees, job board spend, and an estimate of internal time (manager hours times hourly rate) spent on unfilled roles.
- Estimate client attrition. This is harder to quantify, but if your wait times or reschedule rates increased during understaffed periods, survey data or retention rates can give you a rough signal.
For most practices, this exercise produces a number that's significantly larger than leadership expected, making the case clearly for investing in better staffing systems.
How Practices Are Rebuilding Their Staffing Model
The practices gaining ground on the staffing problem are doing a few things differently:
Building a private relief network. Instead of calling an agency every time there's a gap, they maintain relationships with a pool of relief vets and techs who know their practice, their culture, and their clients. This reduces per-shift costs and improves continuity of care, though most practices only find out how much that network is actually costing them once they start tracking it.
Using technology to manage relief relationships. Spreadsheets and text threads don't scale. Platforms like Groove give practices a dedicated system for scheduling, payments, communications, and reporting across their entire relief program: no shift booking fees, no agency markups.
Recruiting proactively, not reactively. Waiting until a role is open to start recruiting costs time and money. Platforms like Scout let practices maintain a presence with passive candidates and reach out before a vacancy becomes urgent.
Investing in retention before it's a crisis. Turnover is expensive. The practices with the lowest turnover are the ones investing in culture, engagement, and recognition before people start looking. Tools like Rally give leadership real-time insight into team wellness and satisfaction.
Short-staffing compounds every month it goes unaddressed. Treating it as a systems problem, better relief coverage, more proactive recruiting, and real investment in retention, is what keeps the number from growing further.
The cost of doing nothing is real. So is the ROI of getting it right.