What an Open DVM Position Actually Costs You Every Week

One of your three doctors gives notice. You post the job that week, you tell the team it’s temporary, and everyone agrees to pull a little harder until you find someone.

That’s the right instinct. For a few weeks it works, and a team that closes ranks through a gap is usually a good team. The complication is that the gap tends to run longer than anyone plans for, and the cost of carrying it accumulates the entire time it’s open.

So it’s worth having the number in front of you.

AVMA’s benchmarking data for 2024 puts average revenue per veterinarian hour at $288. An associate working four eight-hour days is 32 hours of clinical capacity. That’s roughly $9,200 a week of appointments the practice can no longer sell, or about $40,000 a month.

There’s a fair objection to that figure: you’re not paying an associate’s salary right now either. True, and worth running all the way through. Associate compensation tends to land somewhere around 20 to 25 percent of what that doctor produces, and AVMA puts average gross revenue per full-time-equivalent veterinarian at $554,982. So the exchange is roughly half a million dollars in annual production set against about a fifth of it in salary. It’s a reasonable exchange to make for a month. It’s a harder one to keep making through a fourth quarter.

Your own number won’t be $9,200. Some of that demand shifts to your remaining doctors, some of it waits, some of it goes elsewhere. How much lands in each of those three buckets is really the whole story, and it’s more within your control than it might feel right now.

The search usually runs longer than the plan

The most-quoted figure in veterinary hiring comes from a 2022 AAHA industry survey, which found it took an average of more than 15 months to fill a vacant associate DVM role, and just under 13 months for a credentialed technician. More recent data from VMG’s member practices found that among owners who had stopped searching for an associate, 92 percent had hired the person they needed, and fewer than one percent gave up because no suitable candidate existed.

That’s good news, and worth saying plainly. You will almost certainly fill the role. What the two numbers together suggest is that the thing to plan around is how long the middle lasts. Even at half the AAHA figure, you’re looking at a stretch measured in quarters rather than weeks, which is long enough to deserve a plan of its own.

Four places the gap shows up

Some of these land on a P&L where you can see them. The more expensive ones tend not to.

Lost production. The arithmetic above. Whatever share of those 32 hours nobody covers is revenue that doesn’t happen, and it doesn’t get recovered later, because next week arrives with its own appointments already in it.

Client attrition. This is the one that outlasts the vacancy. AVMA’s data shows average active clients per practice falling since 2019 by roughly 95 a year, down to 3,351 in 2024, with active clients per full-time-equivalent veterinarian down to 1,499. A vacancy tends to speed that up. When the next available wellness slot is three weeks out and the practice across town can see them Thursday, a share of those clients take Thursday. Most of them aren’t upset with you. They just needed an appointment. But a lost client is a relationship worth several hundred dollars a year, and it doesn’t come back on its own.

Compression on the doctors who stayed. This one is easy to miss, because it rarely appears as an empty slot. The book stays full and the pace picks up to keep it that way. Appointments run shorter, a diagnostic gets deferred because there wasn’t time for the conversation, records get finished at home. Appointment counts hold steady while average client transaction drifts down, and unless you’re watching that particular metric, the practice can look fine on the surface for months.

A second departure. The work doesn’t disappear when someone leaves. It redistributes, and it redistributes onto the people you can least afford to lose. Our 2025 burnout research found workload intensity and control over one’s schedule sitting close to the center of professional fulfillment. Those are exactly the two things a long vacancy puts pressure on.

If a second doctor leaves in month seven, it isn’t a longer version of the same problem. It’s a new one, with the clock back at zero and a thinner team to run it.

What most practices reach for first

There are three common responses to a long vacancy. All three make sense, all three work for a while, and all three are worth knowing the shelf life of.

Ask the remaining doctors to absorb it. The lightest option on the P&L, and often the fastest to arrange. It’s a real tool, and it holds up well over a few weeks. What it’s doing underneath is borrowing against the point above, and the repayment tends to come due at an inconvenient moment.

Trim hours or narrow what you offer. Dropping Saturdays, pausing new client intake, stepping back from a service line. This is sensible triage and it protects the team, which matters. The thing to watch is that demand you turn away has somewhere else to go, so a temporary staffing decision can quietly become a permanent capacity one.

Move faster on a candidate who’s close enough. Completely understandable after five months of interviewing. The risk is that it postpones the vacancy rather than ending it, and adds onboarding, ramp time, and team disruption to the tally. Gallup puts the cost of replacing an employee at one-half to two times annual salary, with specialized roles toward the upper end of that.

None of these is a mistake. They’re just short-term instruments being asked to cover a long-term gap.

Coverage and hiring are two different problems

Here’s the shift that tends to change the outcome. A vacancy looks like one problem, and it’s really two, running on completely different clocks.

Coverage is a purchasing decision. Solvable in days. It has a price you can compare against lost production. No cultural fit assessment, no compensation negotiation, no long-term commitment.

Hiring is a matching decision. It takes what it takes, and pushing on it is how you end up with the month-five compromise.

When they’re treated as one job, coverage inherits hiring’s timeline. It stays open as long as the search does, because it’s mentally filed as something that gets solved when you find the right person.

Pulled apart, both get easier. Relief coverage holds the schedule together while you search, which protects the revenue, the clients, and the doctors you still have. It also improves the search itself. With the book covered, you’re interviewing from a position of choice, and you can pass on someone who isn’t right without that decision costing you another two months. Candidates notice this too. Walking into a practice that’s running well is a different experience from walking into one that’s visibly stretched, and the strongest candidates are usually comparing more than one offer.

Clinics use the Serenity Vet to find relief coverage for exactly this stretch. Veterinarians on the platform set their own availability and rates, and a clinic can book a single contract shift or a recurring weekly pattern for as long as the search runs.

A few things worth doing this week

Work out your own number. Pull revenue per doctor hour from your PIMS for the last twelve months. The $288 average is a starting point, and your real figure is what makes every decision below it concrete.

Decide which days need covering most. Not all 32 hours carry equal weight. Look at where the book was tightest before the departure and where clients were already waiting longest, and start there.

Compare coverage to lost production, not to salary. This is the comparison that trips most people up, and it’s an easy one to get sideways. The instinct is to hold a relief rate against an associate’s hourly compensation, which makes coverage look expensive. But the alternative to covering a shift isn’t paying someone less that day, it’s not selling the day at all. Held against the revenue those hours produce, the math usually resolves quickly. Serenity’s shift profitability calculator will run it if you’d like it on paper.

Put a review date on the calendar. Sixty days out, look at coverage against where the search stands. Long vacancies do most of their damage through drift rather than through any single call.