How to Hire Veterinarians in a Shortage: A Multi-Doctor Owner’s Playbook for 2026

• The “shortage” is real where you’re standing, even if the national data argues. One major study projected a need for up to 55,000 more vets by 2030; another found no overall shortage. Hire for your practice, not the headline.
• Job boards fill the seat; relationships fill it with the right person. The owners who never struggle to hire run five or six pipelines at once, with referrals and externships at the top.
• You won’t out-bonus a PE-backed group, so stop trying. Price to market, then win on mentorship, autonomy, and schedule, which new graduates rank right alongside pay.
• Speed is the edge most owners give away. Strong candidates hold multiple offers. Go from first call to offer in days, not weeks, or you’ll keep losing your top choice.
• The owners who hire best rarely figured it out alone. They borrowed the offer, the interview loop, and the onboarding plan from other owners who’d already solved it, which above $3 million in revenue is exactly what OwnerExchange is built for.

I was sitting with an owner last spring who’d had a job posting up for nine months. Two doctors covering the work of three, a waitlist for new clients, and a wall calendar with a red circle around the date their senior associate was retiring.

He kept saying the same thing. “There just aren’t any vets out there.”

I’ve heard that sentence in a lot of practices. Sometimes it’s flat-out true. Far more often, the doctors are out there, and the practice simply isn’t built to find them, quick enough to catch them, or compelling enough to beat the three other offers sitting on a candidate’s phone.

So we quit talking about the shortage. We talked instead about his pipeline, his pitch, and how long he dithered before saying yes. He hired within a few months, not because the market shifted, but because he did.

The short version: hiring a veterinarian in 2026 is hard, but it’s a system you can run well or run badly. The owners who never seem short on doctors aren’t lucky. They’ve built pipelines, sharpened their offer, and learned to move fast, and any owner can do the same.

Is there actually a veterinarian shortage in 2026?

Here’s the honest answer most articles won’t give you: the data disagrees, and you should hold the word “shortage” loosely. A 2023 analysis for Mars Veterinary Health projected the U.S. could need up to 55,000 more veterinarians by 2030, with a companion-animal shortfall of roughly 14,000 to 24,000 doctors, about an 11 to 18 percent gap. A 2024 Brakke Consulting study for the AVMA reached the opposite conclusion: no overall excess or shortage of capacity by 2030 or 2035.

Both can’t be fully right, and that tension is the point. What isn’t in dispute is the ground-level reality. Hiring a strong associate is genuinely hard right now, rural practices are short for real (the USDA named 243 rural veterinary shortage areas across 46 states in 2025, the most ever), and demand is uneven by geography and practice type.

So treat the national numbers as weather, not a verdict on your hiring. Whether the profession is technically “short” matters far less than whether you can find, win, and keep the next doctor. That’s the part you control, and the rest of this is about doing it well.

Where to actually find veterinarians

Most owners run a single channel. They post the job, then wait. When nobody good turns up, they decide the profession is empty, when the truth is their pipeline is.

The ones who hire well flip that entirely. They cultivate several sources continuously, in quiet months and busy ones alike, so a resignation never leaves them scrambling from zero. Hiring is a pipeline, not an emergency.

Here’s the fuller map of where the candidates actually are, how to reach each one, and who each source fits best.

Candidate source	How to reach them	Best for
Your own team’s referrals	Ask your doctors and staff directly; pay a meaningful referral bonus; make it a standing program, not a one-off	The highest-trust, lowest-cost hire; people who already fit your culture
Student externships	Host third- and fourth-year students through nearby vet schools; treat every rotation as a months-long working interview	Building a new-graduate pipeline 1 to 2 years ahead of the opening
University career services + career fairs	Build a relationship with school career offices; attend fairs; offer shadow days to local DVM and pre-vet students	New graduates; getting in front of talent before competitors do
Locum-to-perm trials	Bring a doctor in as a locum first, then convert the ones who fit	A low-risk working trial; covering the gap while you evaluate
Specialist veterinary recruiters	Engage a reputable vet-specific recruiter for hard-to-fill or senior roles	Senior, specialized, or rural roles where the search is long and hard
Your personal + peer network	Tell other owners and your professional circle you’re hiring; ask for warm introductions	Passive candidates not on any job board; the best people, who rarely apply cold
Foreign-trained veterinarians	Recruit ECFVG-certified DVMs; sponsor a TN or H-1B visa; pair with relocation	Reaching a pipeline most local competitors ignore entirely

Notice what’s at the top. Referrals and externships beat job boards, because they come with trust and a track record attached. A doctor your team vouches for, or a student you’ve watched work for three weeks, is a known quantity in a way no résumé will ever be.

The externship pipeline is the one most independent owners underuse. Senior students treat a rotation as an audition for you, and you get an audition of them, months before they ever hit the open market. Build that program and you’re hiring from a pool your competitors never see.

Building an offer that actually wins

Once you’ve found a good candidate, you have to win them, and this is where most independent owners quietly lose. They assume the only lever is money, so they either overpay out of fear or get out-bid and give up.

Both are mistakes. Here’s the sequence I’d work in.

First, get pay to market, then quit competing there. Pull current compensation benchmarks for your region and the candidate’s experience, and be brutally honest about where you land. Below market, nothing else you put on the table will register. Yet you will not reliably out-bid a PE-backed group’s signing bonus, and chasing that fight just torches your margin for a battle you were never going to win. Pay fairly. Then change the game.

Second, lead with mentorship, because it’s what they’re actually buying. This is the most underrated card an independent owner holds. Senior veterinary students consistently rank mentorship as the single most important factor in choosing their first job. A structured program, real cases worked alongside an experienced doctor, scheduled check-ins, a clear plan to build skills, is worth more to a new graduate than a few thousand dollars they’ll barely notice.

Third, sell the things a big group can’t fake. Autonomy over the medicine. A schedule that respects a life, because flexible models like a four-day week are increasingly what candidates screen for first. A real say in how the practice runs. And the one a corporate role almost never offers credibly: a visible path to ownership or leadership. When a young vet can see themselves becoming a partner here, the conversation stops being about salary.

Most owners pitch the salary and bury the lead. The thing a great candidate actually wants, mentorship, autonomy, and a future, is the thing only an owner can promise. Comparing notes with owners who’ve nailed that pitch is half the battle. See who’s in the OwnerExchange room →

The pattern across every owner I’ve watched win a competitive hire is the same. They didn’t have the biggest number. They had the best answer to the question the candidate was really asking: will I become a better doctor here, and will I have a life?

Speed: the advantage most owners give away

Here’s a quiet truth about hiring veterinarians right now. A strong candidate is almost never weighing only your offer. They’re holding two or three, and the practice that moves fastest, cleanly and without making them chase you, often wins by default.

Most owners do the reverse. A résumé sits unopened for a week. The first interview gets wedged around a packed surgery day. Then comes a second round, then a pause while “the team discusses,” and by the time an offer finally goes out, the candidate has already signed somewhere that simply wanted them more obviously.

So compress it. A tight process looks like this:

• Reply within a day, not a week. A fast, warm first response tells a candidate you’re organized and that you actually want them, before a competitor’s slower one says the opposite.
• Run one focused interview, then a working shadow shift. You will learn more from watching a doctor steer a real, messy Tuesday morning than from a second round of behavioral questions across a conference table.
• Decide fast, with the offer drafted and ready. When you know, you know. Don’t let your own committee cost you the person.

None of this means dropping your bar. It means honoring the candidate’s time and your own urgency at once. Speed and rigor aren’t enemies. The owners who marry the two are the ones who almost never watch their first choice walk.

Mentorship and onboarding: how you make the hire stay

Hiring is only half the job. The most expensive mistake isn’t a hard search, it’s hiring a good doctor and losing them in eighteen months because the landing was rough.

The numbers are sobering. First-year turnover among veterinarians runs around 30 percent, and a lack of mentorship is one of the top reasons early-career vets leave their first job within one to two years. The same lever that wins the hire, a real mentorship program, is the one that keeps them.

So treat onboarding as a designed process, not an orientation packet and a shrug. The best practices I see do a handful of deliberate things:

They assign a real mentor, not a title. Someone whose actual job, with protected time, is to help the new doctor grow. Cases reviewed together, questions welcomed, a standing weekly check-in for the first months.

They ramp the caseload on purpose. A new graduate thrown into a fully booked day on week one drowns. Start lighter, build complexity as confidence grows, and protect their early wins.

They make the soft stuff explicit. Clinic protocols, the communication style, who to ask for what. The things “everybody knows” are exactly what a new hire doesn’t, and leaving them to guess is how good people quietly conclude they don’t fit.

Get the first ninety days right and you don’t just retain a doctor. You build the practice’s reputation as the place new vets actually want to work, and the next hire gets easier. (The full cost of getting this wrong is its own conversation, and a brutal one; we’ll leave the math for another day.)

A quick word on relocation and visas

Two pipelines most independent owners ignore entirely: candidates willing to relocate, and foreign-trained veterinarians.

If you’re in a tougher-to-staff or rural market, a relocation package widens your pool dramatically. The right doctor may be three states away and perfectly willing to move for the practice, the mentorship, and the life, if you make the move easy rather than their problem to solve.

The international pipeline is bigger than most owners realize. A foreign-trained veterinarian needs ECFVG certification (or a degree from an accredited school) to get licensed, then a work visa. Canadian and Mexican citizens can often use the TN visa, which is fast, frequently processed in about 30 days, while others go through the capped H-1B lottery that opens each March. It takes more paperwork, but it reaches strong candidates your local competitors never even consider.

Neither of these is the first place to look. Both are pipelines worth having open when the local market is thin.

What the best owners do differently

I spend a lot of my time in rooms full of the strongest independent owners in the country, people running multi-doctor practices at a level most of the profession never reaches. When hiring comes up, and it always does, what separates them isn’t a secret job board.

It’s that they treat hiring as a machine they keep running, not a blaze they fight whenever someone quits. Their pipelines stay open before a vacancy ever appears. They’ve honed a pitch that lands on mentorship and a real future, not the headline salary. They move quickly. And they’ve engineered an onboarding that makes the new doctor stick around.

Here’s the telling part. Almost none of them built that machine alone. They borrowed it. The precise interview loop, the externship program that actually converts, the mentorship structure, the relocation package that finally closed a stubborn rural hire, all of it passed hand to hand among owners who’d already cracked the problem and had no reason to hoard the answer.

That’s the quiet advantage. Not a clever trick, but access to other owners at your level who’ll hand you the playbook that took them years and a few painful misses to write.

What to do next

If hiring is the problem on your desk, don’t start by writing another job post. Start by building the pipeline, sharpening the offer, and tightening how fast you move, because the search is rarely the real bottleneck.

And know that you don’t have to figure it out from scratch. Most owner communities are built for the broad middle of the profession, which is exactly why a strong multi-doctor owner so often ends up as the most advanced person in the room.

OwnerExchange is built for the other end: owners of 3+ doctor practices doing $3 to $10 million and up, where the person across the table has usually already hired the doctor you’re trying to hire, in the same market, against the same competitors. Above $3 million in revenue, it’s the one community built for owners at exactly your level. We’re selective on purpose, because the room only works when everyone in it is operating that high.

Further reading

If hiring is the problem on your desk, these go deeper on the people systems around it.

• Veterinary human resources best practices — the staffing and people systems that turn a new hire into a long-term doctor.
• The challenges of veterinary practice ownership — the hiring, leadership, and decision load that comes with running a multi-doctor practice.
• The veterinary practice owner community — who’s in the OwnerExchange room and how the PODs work.

Frequently asked questions

Is there really a shortage of veterinarians in 2026?

It depends who you ask, and the honest answer is that the data disagrees. A 2023 Mars Veterinary Health analysis projected the U.S. could need up to 55,000 more veterinarians by 2030. A 2024 Brakke Consulting study for the AVMA found no overall capacity shortage by 2030 or 2035. What is not in dispute: hiring a good associate is hard right now, and rural areas are genuinely short, with the USDA naming 243 rural shortage areas in 2025.

Where do you actually find veterinarians to hire?

The best owners work several pipelines at once rather than relying on job boards. The highest-yield channels are your own team’s referrals, a student externship program that turns into an offer, locum-to-perm trials, university career services and career fairs, specialist recruiters, and your personal network. Job boards fill the role; relationships fill it with the right person.

How do you compete for a veterinarian against a PE-backed group’s pay package?

Price fairly to market first, because below market nothing else matters. Then compete where an independent practice genuinely wins: real mentorship, autonomy over the medicine, schedule flexibility, and a visible path to ownership or leadership. New graduates rank mentorship and culture alongside pay, so an owner who shows up beats a bigger signing bonus more often than you would think.

How long should it take to hire a veterinarian?

Faster than most practices move. Strong candidates often hold multiple offers, so a process that drags for weeks loses them. Aim to go from first conversation to offer in days, not weeks: a tight interview loop, a working shadow shift, and an offer ready to send the moment you know. Speed is a competitive advantage most owners give away.

Why does mentorship matter so much when hiring new graduates?

Because it is both a hiring magnet and a retention lever. Senior veterinary students consistently rank mentorship as the single most important factor in choosing a first job, and a lack of it is a top reason early-career vets leave within one to two years. A structured mentorship program wins the candidate and then keeps the hire, which is the whole point.

Can you hire a foreign-trained veterinarian to fill an open role?

Yes, and it is a real pipeline most owners overlook. Foreign-trained veterinarians need ECFVG certification (or an accredited degree) to be licensed, then a work visa. Canadian and Mexican citizens can use the fast TN visa, often processed in about 30 days, while others go through the capped H-1B lottery that opens each March. Pair a visa hire with a relocation package and you reach candidates your local competitors are not.

Sources

Veterinary workforce supply, demand, and shortage data

1. American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA). “No dire shortage of veterinarians anticipated in coming years” (Brakke Consulting study for the AVMA). avma.org
2. American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA). “Existing veterinary colleges adequate to meet US companion animal veterinary demand until at least 2035, major new study published in JAVMA finds.” avma.org
3. Mars Veterinary Health. “Tackling the Veterinary Professional Shortage” (2023 analysis by Dr. James Lloyd projecting up to 55,000 additional veterinarians needed by 2030). marsveterinary.com
4. Today’s Veterinary Business. “New Study Predicts No Shortage of Veterinarians.” todaysveterinarybusiness.com
5. American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges (AAVMC). “Demand for and Supply of Veterinarians in the U.S. to 2032.” aavmc.org
6. American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA). “USDA announces plan to address rural, federal veterinary shortages” (243 rural shortage areas, 2025). avma.org

New-graduate employment, compensation, and recruiting

7. American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA). “Gap shrinks between new graduate, overall veterinary salaries” (2024 employment and starting-compensation data). avma.org
8. American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA). “The best ways to recruit for your veterinary practice.” aaha.org
9. American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA). “Find veterinary student externships.” avma.org

Mentorship, retention, and onboarding

10. American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA). “View from the Board: Strengthening veterinary practice through mentorship and formal training” (first-year turnover and mentorship as a job-choice factor). aaha.org
11. American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA). “2023 AAHA Mentoring Guidelines.” aaha.org

Relocation and visa pathways for veterinarians

12. American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA). “Foreign veterinary graduates: Working as a veterinarian in the U.S.” (ECFVG certification and visa pathways). avma.org