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Australia has 3,793 veterinary businesses right now.
The industry is valued at $5.7 billion AUD. Pet ownership sits at a generational high, with 69% of Australian households owning at least one animal. Australians spend over $22 billion a year on their pets. The average household allocates A$826 annually to veterinary services alone. Gen Z pet owners spend $1,184.
On paper, this should be a golden era for Practice owners.
For most, it isn’t.
There’s a significant gap between what this industry looks like from the outside and what it actually feels like to run one of those 3,793 businesses. The numbers worth understanding are the ones behind the headline figures. That’s where the real story sits.
The Australian veterinary services sector has grown at 4% annually since 2020. The broader market reached USD 2.1 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach USD 4.9 billion by 2034, a CAGR of nearly 10%. The post-pandemic pet ownership surge has normalised, but the attachment Australians have to their animals has not. Demand is structural and it isn’t reversing.
The problem is what happens to that revenue inside most practices.
The industry average net profit margin sits between 6 and 8%. On a practice turning over $800,000, that’s $48,000 to $64,000 in net profit. Owners working 55 to 60 hours a week and bringing home what a senior employee earns. The revenue is flowing through. The reward isn’t staying.
Well-run practices achieve net margins between 10 and 20%. Some reach 25%. The difference between a 7% margin and a 20% margin on a $1 million practice is $130,000 a year. Same Practice. Same town. Same clinical workload. Completely different financial outcome.
That gap is not a clinical problem. It’s a business problem. And business problems have known solutions.
Australia has approximately 15,042 registered veterinarians. The staffing shortage that defined the profession through 2023 and 2024 has not resolved in 2026.
In 36.8% of open vacancies nationally, practices are taking more than 12 months to fill a position. In regional areas, that figure climbs to 43%. For Practice Owners without robust systems or culture, every staffing event becomes an existential crisis.
AVA research found that 66.7% of veterinarians have experienced a mental health condition at some stage of their career, compared to 61.8% in the general population. Burnout is not a fringe issue. It is the dominant occupational reality for a significant portion of this profession.
What aggregate figures don’t capture is the experience of the Practice Owner specifically. The one absorbing the clinical gap when a Vet resigns. The one answering messages at 10pm because the team doesn’t have enough context to act independently. The one who hasn’t taken a full uninterrupted week off in years because the business runs entirely through them.
That is not just a staffing problem. That is a structural dependency problem.
Practices that held their teams through this shortage did it deliberately. They built cultures people chose to stay in. They built remuneration structures that rewarded contribution. They reduced single-person dependencies across the business. These are learnable, known skills. They aren’t taught in Vet school, but they exist and they work.
Private Equity (PE) consolidation is not a distant trend. It’s happening now. Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortisation (EBITDA) multiples for veterinary practice acquisitions currently range from 8 to 13 times, with larger and more systemised practices attracting the upper end of that range. A practice generating $300,000 in EBITDA at a 10x multiple is worth $3 million on exit.
Here’s what’s worth understanding: PE groups don’t pay premium multiples for the busiest clinic. They pay them for the most systemised one. Repeatable revenue. Strong team retention. Clean financials. An owner who isn’t the single point of failure. That’s the asset they’re buying.
Whether a Practice Owner intends to sell in five years or never, the business they need to build is the same. Better margins. Stable team. Systems that run without the owner present. Two owners with identical revenue but different systems will get completely different offers, and live completely different daily lives in the meantime.
Practices achieving 20%+ net margins in 2026 share identifiable characteristics.
Fee avoidance is the largest voluntary profit leak in most practices. Regular, incremental pricing reviews consistently outperform sporadic large increases. Client relationships survive appropriate fee increases far better than most Practice Owners expect.
Average transaction value, consultation utilisation rate, labour to revenue ratio. Revenue alone is not a performance indicator. A practice can grow revenue while declining in profitability, and not see it until the year-end P&L lands. By then, the damage is done.
Every hour a Practice Owner spends doing work a well-trained employee could do is an hour the business isn’t developing. At some point, owner-centricity stops being dedication and becomes the ceiling.
Team retention data is consistent: people stay in businesses where expectations are clear, communication is honest, and they feel like they’re growing. That’s a leadership function. It’s also the most underinvested skill set across this profession.
$22 billion a year. A market projected to nearly double over the next decade. A profession still working out how to capture the financial return that scale of demand should generate.
For Practice Owners willing to treat their business as a business, the opportunity in 2026 is as large as it has ever been. The market is there. The clients are there. The willingness to spend is there.
The structural knowledge to capture it is what most Practices are missing. That’s the fixable part.
The data points to the opportunity clearly. Whether you use it is the only open question.
IBISWorld Australia 2026, Dogster/Hepper pet industry statistics, AVA Workforce Survey, Covetrus Practice Profitability Report, Grand View Research, Leading Market Research 2026 Workforce Crisis Report, DVMElite EBITDA Multiples 2026.
Sam Bowden has spent 15 years as a practising vet. He has owned two practices during this time, each of them achieving phenomenal results in growth and profitability. He has devoted his last 12 years to helping practice owners increase their happiness, work-life balance and profitability. He is the founder of United Vets Group | The Ultimate Veterinary Practice | Complete Vet Systems | More Vet Clients Websites | Accelerate Mastermind Group | Vet Business Manager Program | The Dental Academy His skill set is combining long-lasting mindset changes together with proven practical strategies to allow practice owners and teams to reach their full potential. He is considered a leading educator on how to increase profitability, work-life balance and happiness in the veterinary industry.
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