The holidays aren’t the busiest stretch of the year in veterinary medicine, at least not by revenue. They are the hardest to staff.
Permanent teams take the PTO they’ve been holding onto all year, and they take it in the same three weeks as everyone else. People travel. Emergency caseloads spike on exactly the days a practice has fewest people rostered. The gap between what a hospital needs covered and who’s available to cover it opens wider between Thanksgiving and New Year than at any other point in the year, and the practices that handle it well have their cover confirmed by the end of October.
That’s what we see across the hospitals we work with, and it’s why the money decisions about this quarter are the ones you’re making now.
Why the gap opens
The leave is planned, but the caseload isn’t.
Nationwide, analyzing claims across more than a million insured pets, found chocolate-related claims rise 182% in the final two weeks of the year, with foreign body ingestion claims averaging $3,584 and pancreatitis $1,610. Those are claims rather than visits, but they map onto the same thing: a run of presentations that need seeing the same day, arriving while the schedule is already thin.
A practice that hasn’t booked cover by late fall is choosing between denying leave and running short.
What the season pays
Relief work is a real segment of the profession, not a stopgap. AVMA’s 2025 economic report put relief and contract veterinarians at 9.1% of veterinarians in US private practice, with a mean professional income of $123,501 for an average working week of 28.7 hours.
On rates, the honest position is that there’s no association-published benchmark. The best available numbers come from the relief platforms: Roo reported a national average of $144 an hour across its network in 2024, around $1,290 for a nine-hour shift, with the highest metro rates in New Jersey, New York City and Los Angeles. Treat that as platform data rather than a market rate, because that’s what it is.
What’s more consistent is the premium. Charging 1.5x to 2x your usual rate for holiday work and Sunday on-call is long-standing practice in the relief community rather than an opportunistic ask, and practices booking December cover expect to see it. A rate that doesn’t move for December is money left on the table.
What moves your number
Beyond the premium, the things that shift a rate are worth knowing before you quote:
- Emergency and overnight cover against general practice day shifts
- Multi-day blocks, which are worth more to a hospital than scattered single days
- Short-notice cover, which is the highest-value work in the calendar and the reason to keep some days unbooked
- Surgery days, where you’re carrying the schedule rather than working alongside it
- The specific dates nobody wants: Christmas Eve, New Year’s Day, the weekend between them
Decide your floor for those dates before a practice manager calls you, because the call always comes when you’re doing something else.
The year-end admin that catches first-year relief DVMs
The clinical side of relief work is often easier to plan than the contractor logistics.
Your fourth estimated tax payment. The quarterly payment due on January 15 covers income earned from September through December, so a strong holiday quarter lands in the payment you make right after it. The IRS sets the four due dates each year, and self-employment tax runs at 15.3% on 92.35% of net earnings, half of which you can deduct from adjusted gross income.
The 1099 threshold has changed. A practice now issues Form 1099-NEC only where it has paid you $2,000 or more in nonemployee compensation, up from $600. Pick up a few shifts at several hospitals and you may receive no 1099 at all from the smaller payers. You still owe tax on that income, and your own records are the only thing tracking it.
Mileage. The business standard mileage rate is 72.5 cents per mile for 2026. Relief work is a driving job. Log it.
License renewal and CE. Every jurisdiction requires continuing education to renew, but the hours and the cycle are set state by state, and several states run a December 31 expiry that lands in the busiest fortnight of your year. Check your board’s date now rather than in the last week of December.
Then plan for January
January is quiet. If you’re building your first full year, our guide to Relief DVM work in the US covers day rates, scheduling and the first 90 days, and why practices come to GVC for relief cover explains what we do on the hospital side of the same booking.
If you’d rather not spend October chasing shifts, GVC will map your availability against the hospitals we cover, tell you which dates are already tight in your area, and put your rate in front of practices that are budgeting for it now.
