If you manage a practice, you have probably noticed that the national conversation about the vet shortage and the state of your own rota are telling slightly different stories.
The profession is growing. The Register is bigger than it has ever been, and the official projections are cautiously optimistic. And yet you have roles that have been open for months, a locum bill that keeps climbing, and a team absorbing the difference.
Here’s what the numbers actually show, and what the practices handling this best are doing about it.
What the numbers say
The RCVS workforce modelling published in December 2024 is the most useful dataset available, and it’s more encouraging than the general mood would suggest. Measured in full-time equivalents, supply met 90% of demand in 2023 and is projected to reach 96% by 2032. For vets in clinical practice specifically, it improves from 91% to close to 99% by 2035.
Two caveats matter, though.
The first is timing. That is a decade of projection, and across the profession as a whole the model never quite closes the gap: supply peaks at around 96% in 2032 and slips back slightly by 2035.
The second is what’s absorbing the growth. Over the same period, headcount rises 52% while full-time equivalents rise 42% – because the average FTE per vet falls from 0.85 to 0.79. The profession is adding people faster than it is adding clinical hours. That’s not a criticism of anyone’s working pattern – part-time working has risen to 27% from 19% in 2014, and a profession that lets people build sustainable careers keeps more of them. But it does mean headcount is a poor proxy for capacity.
Why your vacancy is harder than the national picture suggests
A national shortfall of four or five per cent doesn’t arrive as four or five per cent of everyone’s rota. It concentrates (by region, discipline, and practice type) and independent groups outside the major cities tend to absorb more of it than the average implies.
Retention is also a major factor. The same RCVS survey found 75% of vets intend to stay in the profession for 5+ years, down from 79% in 2019. Among those considering leaving, the leading reasons are poor work-life balance (56%), chronic stress (54%) and not feeling rewarded or valued in a non-financial sense (47%).
What the gap actually costs
The SPVS 2025 salary survey puts the median locum day rate at £500, up 11% year on year. The median total package for a full-time vet is £58,277, up 2.2%. Locum rates are rising several times faster than permanent salary.
Run that against a real vacancy. Covering one full-time-equivalent role with locums four days a week for six months is about 100 days, or roughly £50,000. Two roles for six months (precisely where a lot of independent groups find themselves) approaches the cost of two permanent salaries, for cover that carries no continuity, builds no client relationships and leaves the moment a better booking appears.
The comparison is not perfectly like-for-like, since a permanent hire also carries employer National Insurance and pension contributions that a package figure excludes – but the gap is wide enough to survive the adjustment.
None of this is an argument against locums. Locum cover is what keeps practices open, and used deliberately it is sound workforce planning. The issue is locum cover that has become permanent by default because nobody has re-run the maths since the vacancy opened.
What proactive practices are doing
They plan in FTE, not headcount.
If two of your five vets are part-time, you have five people and rather less than five vets’ worth of capacity. Practices that budget and rota in full-time equivalents see the gap coming a quarter earlier.
They treat the locum bill as a recruitment budget.
Six months of premium cover is a recruitment budget already being spent, on the least durable option available. Reframing it that way tends to move the conversation about fees along quickly.
They fix the leaks before widening the funnel.
Recruiting into a practice people leave is expensive, and the factors that matter most are largely within a practice’s control – we looked at what the retention data actually shows last month.
They widen the pool beyond the UK.
In 2023/24, 828 of the 2,140 new RCVS registrations came from EU, EEA, Swiss or EAEVE-accredited schools, and a further 133 from further afield – nearly half of all new registrants qualified outside the UK.
Request a workforce review
If you have roles that have been open longer than you would like, get in touch. We’ll llook at your vacancies, your locum spend and your realistic options – domestic and international – and give you a straight assessment of what’s achievable.
