The Global Veterinary Workforce Report 2026

The global veterinary workforce is growing, with vet numbers rising across all major English-speaking markets. With more graduates entering the profession and the strong demand for vet services during COVID-era pet ownership settling down, this is genuinely good news for the sector as a whole.

But practices are still struggling to find experienced vets to recruit and fill roles in rural areas and, while governments can’t always fill gaps in public-health posts. So what’s going on? As Dr Ed Taylor of The Vet Service says,

“The world doesn’t have one veterinary shortage. It has a series of very different veterinary workforce pressures – and where a vet lives, works, and specialises now matters as much as the overall number of veterinarians.”

The main issue is distribution – of skills, geography, working hours, and career stage – not just numbers.

Migration has already tested this. In the US, The Vet Service is seeing qualified vets consider interstate moves, along with opportunities in both Canada and Australia, mostly because of the current uncertain political climate. Similarly, in the UK, domestic immigration policy has made access to overseas vets more difficult, despite its continued reliance on international recruitment.

The veterinary profession might be growing, but is that growth reaching the areas of the workforce where it’s needed most?

Demographics: A younger, female, and more flexible workforce

The veterinary workforce is shifting, and comparing numbers can be misleading. But across the five key markets, females now make up a majority of practising vets, and the proportion is even higher among graduates. Women make up 65% of active vets in Europe, and around 70% in the US and Australia — while more than 80% of veterinary students in the US and UK are female. This looks like a long-term generational change rather than a one-off event, as older vets are still predominantly male. Among European vets aged 65 and over, 77% are men.

This matters because workforce growth doesn’t always translate into clinical capacity. A profession with more part-time workers and high demand for flexible work will need more vets to deliver the same number of working hours. In the UK, 27% of vets now work part-time — up from 19% a decade ago — and average working time per vet is modelled to fall from 0.85 to 0.79 FTE by 2035; in Australia, 30.5% of vets work part-time.

But the problem isn’t that the profession is becoming more flexible. More flexibility often improves staff retention, making a veterinary career more sustainable for employers and employees. The bigger challenge is that many employers are still adapting to this new workforce reality.

With more graduates entering the market, the question is changing from whether enough vets are being trained to whether the profession can turn these graduates into experienced vets who can deliver sustainable clinical capacity?

The pipeline is certainly growing: the UK now has 12 vet schools — four opened since 2019 – with graduate registrations up 16% in a year, and US graduate numbers are projected to rise from around 4,300 to 6,300 a year by 2032. So the real issue is one of experience, not licences. With more vets moving into part-time or non-clinical roles, there’s a genuine gap in the market for mid-experience level vets.

The signs are already visible: half of Australian vacancies are now open to new graduates – double the share of a decade ago — yet 53% of vacancies still take more than six months to fill, and in the UK only 52% of new graduates go straight into clinical practice, down from 83% in 2014.

Migration: Policy now decides pressure points

Veterinary recruitment has always been global and cross-border. But domestic immigration policies are influencing where workforce pressure is felt now more than ever. On this issue, it’s interesting to see the five markets covered in this report all taking a different approach.

For internationally trained veterinarians, the US has limited their intake, while New Zealand is actively pushing veterinary medicine as a priority occupation. On a decade average, just 282 foreign-trained vets pass the US licensing exam each year — roughly 0.2% of its 133,000-strong workforce.

Australia keeps vets and vet nurses on its Core Skills Occupation List and is the top destination for UK leavers, while the UK’s post-Brexit outlook has made international recruitment far more complicated, despite its reliance on overseas vets. New EU registrants to the UK fell 69% after Brexit, vets were dropped from the shortage occupation list in April 2024, and the skilled-visa salary threshold has since climbed to £49,500 — far above typical new-graduate pay of around £35,000. Australia keeps vets and vet nurses on its Core Skills Occupation List and is the top destination for UK leavers.

In Canada, the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association (CVMA) has also said federal immigration target cuts will intensify vet shortages.

With such an interconnected workforce, policy changes that aim to reduce immigration in one market don’t actually remove the demand for trained veterinarians. Instead, it just redirects both demand and talent to another market.

Immigration is an increasing consideration for employers. Practices aren’t just competing for talent with other local practices. They’re competing with practices in other states, regions, and countries.

However, even with little to no published data, in our work as global veterinary recruiters, The Vet Service has noticed an emerging shift in the US. It seems more US veterinarians are actively looking at opportunities in other states, including rural practices, as well as in Canada and Australia, influenced in part by the current domestic political climate.

While it’s too early to call this a ‘trend’, it does point to an important change. One that may see the US increasingly become not only a market which acts as a destination but also one where veterinarians are actively looking to leave.

Job types: Where the gaps really are

Workforce pressures become much clearer when we stop asking, “How many vets are there?” and ask instead, “Which vets are available, where are they, and what are they willing to do?”

Even with a growing veterinary workforce, rural and large animal practices in the US are still struggling to make the hires they need. Those pressures show in the US’s record 243 designated shortage areas across 46 states — only 3.4% of American vets work in food-animal practice – while in Australia 44% of regional vacancies take more than a year to fill, rising to 70% in solo practices, and two New Zealand districts have no clinical vets at all.

It’s the same story for government and public health roles. Specialisation gaps, location constraints, and an older workforce are making these roles harder to fill. UK government and public-health vet supply is the worst segment in the RCVS workforce model – stuck at around 78% of demand through 2035 – and New Zealand’s regulatory vets are its oldest cohort, with a mean age of 51.

The overall workforce pressures also goes beyond trained veterinarians. Vet nurse and technician roles, just as vital to clinical capacity, also face serious recruitment and retention pressures. The US alone is estimated to need 50,000+ more credentialed vet techs, with turnover running at 25% a year.

Through all these issues, The Vet Service sees challenges in the middle of the career ladder. While graduates are joining the profession in larger numbers, experienced veterinarians are reducing their hours, moving into non-clinical roles, or retiring. This is creating an increasing pressure  on the veterinarians with 3-10 years of experience who can work independently, mentor early-career vets, and move into more senior or leadership roles. US veterinarian turnover runs at roughly 16% a year – about twice the rate of physicians – with around 2,000 vets leaving the profession and a further 3,000 retiring annually.

Understanding the workforce of the future

While the sector isn’t running out of vets across these markets, the bigger challenge is making a growing workforce work more effectively.

That means understanding where vets are needed, the roles they’re willing to take, and where experience gaps are growing. It also means recognising that veterinary recruitment is a genuinely global market, where fast-moving immigration changes in one country can quickly affect another.

For many employers, this means doing more than just increasing recruitment activity. Retaining experienced vets, offering more flexibility with hybrid or job-share roles, and making those harder-to-fill roles more appealing are all becoming more important.

The veterinary workforce is now larger, younger, and more flexible than it used to be. The key challenge is to make sure workplace strategies evolve with it.

Here’s the closing section as written:

Finding your place in the global veterinary workforce

Whichever side of these workforce pressures you sit on, they are easier to navigate with a partner that works across all five markets every day. The Vet Service is a global veterinary recruitment agency placing vets in the UK, United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – which means it sees where the talent actually is, not just where the vacancies are.

For hospitals and practices, that global reach matters most where this report says the gaps are widest: experienced mid-career vets, rural and mixed-animal roles, and hard-to-fill emergency and specialist positions. , Register your practice with The Vet Service to reach an international pool of qualified, relocation-ready candidates.

Our job finding service for veterinarians is 100% free and includes support with relocation packages and visa support where applicable. Ready to find your next veterinary role? Register with The Vet Service to talk through where your skills are most in demand.