Key Takeaways
- The veterinary shortage is being driven by a mix of rising demand and a training pipeline that is not expanding fast enough to remove the gap.
- Clinics feel the shortage through longer wait times and a higher risk of burnout and revenue leakage within already stretched teams.
- The best response is to redesign workflows, use data and systems to shift more routine work out of the consult room.
- Cloud practice management software can help short-staffed clinics reduce admin drag and give managers better visibility into where time and margin are being lost.
The vet shortage in 2026 is still a real operating problem for clinics across Australia and New Zealand (NZ).
In Australia, veterinarians have remained in national shortage, employment in the occupation has grown 32.1% over five years, and the average time to fill vacancies rose from eight weeks in 2014 to 25 weeks in 2023.
In New Zealand, the latest workforce report counted 3,139 practising veterinarians contributing 3,562.6 FTEs, with the workforce unevenly distributed across the country.
Before we break down the causes and clinic-level impact, here is the latest workforce snapshot.
The Latest Australia and New Zealand Snapshot
The snapshot below brings together the strongest recent Australia and New Zealand signals on veterinary workforce pressure.
| Signal |
Australia |
New Zealand |
| Current workforce signal |
Veterinarians remain in national shortage |
3,139 practising vets contributed 3,562.6 FTEs |
| Demand trend |
Employment up 32.1% over five years |
2,272 clinical vets were responsible for over 72 million owned animals |
| Recruitment pressure |
Average time to fill vacancies reached 25 weeks in 2023 |
Rural shortage remains serious enough for an ongoing government bonding scheme |
| Recent vacancy stress |
Almost 37% of recruitment vacancies took 12 months or longer to fill nationally |
50.5% of vets intending not to practise in 2025 said they planned to work overseas |
Why Are Practices Facing a Vet Shortage?
The shortage is coming from demand growth colliding with a workforce system that has been under pressure for years.
Demand Has Grown Faster Than Workforce Capacity
Australia’s pet population has grown. According to the Animal Medicines Australia, there are now 31.6 million pets across 73% of Australian households in 2025. Meanwhile, Companion Animals New Zealand reported that nearly two in three households have pets.
More pets means more consults, more preventive care, more diagnostics, and more client contact. But the number of vets currently in the workforce can’t keep up with the growing demand.
You can see the result in Australia’s labour data. Jobs and Skills Australia found that veterinarian employment surged 32.1% over five years, yet practices were still taking far longer to fill open roles.
Burnout and Attrition Are Still Pulling Capacity Out of the Market
The profession is not only struggling to recruit. It is also struggling to hold on to people. The Australian Veterinary Association’s workforce and advocacy material keeps pointing to burnout as a core part of the problem. In New Zealand, the Emergency Care Review highlighted the link between financial pressure and professional wellbeing.
Every experienced vet who cuts hours or moves overseas reduces real capacity for the clinics left behind. The New Zealand veterinary workforce report states that among respondents who said they did not intend to practise in the coming year, the most common reason was working overseas.
Rural and After-Hours Work Are Harder to Staff
Workforce stress is even sharper in regional, rural, and after-hours settings. The Australian Veterinary Association (AVA) has reported that almost 37% of veterinary recruitment vacancies took 12 months or longer to fill nationally, and in regional New South Wales (NSW), the figure reached 55%.
In New Zealand, the Ministry of Primary Industries’ Voluntary Bonding Scheme exists specifically to ease the shortage of rural veterinarians working with production animals and working dogs.
This is why emergency and after-hours access becomes the first thing to suffer. The problem is the mix of location and client demand.
The Pipeline Is Still Too Tight
The New Zealand Veterinary Association welcomed 95 new veterinarians graduating from Massey University in May 2025, while New Zealand also continues to rely heavily on overseas-qualified vets, who make up 33.1% of the practising workforce.
Australia’s policy debate is pushing on the same issue, with the AVA continuing to argue that workforce shortages remain critical and that student support and placement structures need work.
So even when graduate numbers improve, the lag is long. Clinics still need ways to operate better with the workforce they have now.
How Does Veterinarian Shortage Impact Clinics?
A shortage of veterinarian has four main consequences:
Longer Waits and Heavier Caseloads
When a clinic cannot replace a departing vet quickly, the remaining team absorbs the work.
- Appointment books get tighter
- Case loads rise
- Non-urgent care gets pushed back
- Emergency teams carry more pressure
The New Zealand Emergency Care Review explicitly linked after-hours care strain to broader issues around client expectations and professional wellbeing.
For pet owners, that can mean longer delays for routine appointments or a narrower window for same-day care.
For clinics, it means the day runs with less slack, which increases the risk of mistakes.
More Revenue Leakage Inside Busy Clinics
Short staffing reduces capacity, but it also makes clinics less efficient.
That impacts the bottom line, even when the diary looks full. This is one reason veterinary key performance indicators matter more during a staffing crunch. It is easy to assume you need another hire when the real issue is a workflow design problem if you are not tracking booking volume, average transaction charge, vet efficiency, etc.
Staff Retention Gets Harder
When teams stay overloaded for too long, morale falls and retention gets harder. Maintaining your team morale means managing wellbeing, workload, and sustainable careers because those issues are directly tied to whether clinics can keep experienced people in practice. This is also why managing expectations and setting boundaries at the veterinary clinic is a workforce issue.
Growth Becomes Harder to Manage
A short-staffed practice can still look busy on the surface while growth stalls underneath. Managers spend more time covering gaps and less time improving systems.
- Marketing slows down
- Service development gets delayed
- Training slips
- Reporting happens late
That makes it harder to act on the right levers.
If you want to grow without burning the team out, you need operational visibility.
You need to be able to understand your veterinary data and find ways to increase revenue at your veterinary practice, even when hiring is slow, because there are things you need to fix before adding more labour.
Pro tip: Before opening another full-time vacancy, review whether your vets are spending too much time on admin, callbacks, stock checks, or repetitive note-taking. A workflow problem can look like a hiring problem.
How Vet Clinics Can Address the Veterinary Shortage
There is no single fix for the veterinary shortage. There are, however, practical steps that make a clinic more resilient while the market stays tight.
Protect Veterinarian Time
The first move is to treat veterinarian time as the clinic’s scarcest resource. That means pushing more routine work to the right level of the team and standardizing common processes.
New Zealand’s equine technician guidance makes the principle clear: veterinary technicians can complement veterinarians in a team-based model, especially where rural shortages are biting hardest.
This is also where staff training matters. Better delegation only works when team members know the process, the boundaries, and the standard expected.
Remove Admin Drag With Better Systems
Reducing the amount of low-value work sitting inside the day with connected, cloud-based veterinary software can make a real difference. Covetrus case studies show the operational value clearly:
At Blue Water Veterinary Care in Queensland, Dr. Ashleigh Fisher said Ascend was “very intuitive to use and really easy to follow,” and the practice reported time savings through easier invoicing, mobile access, and streamlined workflows.
At Indooroopilly Vet Clinic in Brisbane, the clinic said overall time savings reached 16 hours per week after the switch, with gains coming from consult notes, SMS communication, and tighter integration with inventory processes.
That is why software should be part of a workforce strategy, not treated as a separate IT decision. Preparing for cloud-based veterinary software is really about freeing capacity inside the clinic.
Use Data to Find the Real Bottleneck
Short-staffed practices need to know where time and margin are leaking. This is why reporting matters. If a clinic is flat out but not seeing the expected output, the answer may sit in appointment mix, or weak rebooking, not only in headcount.
This is where Vetlytics (that is a part of Ascend) and the broader discipline of tracking veterinary KPIs can help you decide on the next step.
Build a More Sustainable Service Model
Some parts of the shortage need policy support, and other parts can be handled at the clinic level. The most resilient practices tend to do both local and structural work:
- Better onboarding
- Better mentoring
- Clearer team boundaries
- Stronger rostering
- Smarter triage
The Australian Veterinary Association has specifically pointed to telemedicine and tele-triage as ways to manage after-hours demand and make sure veterinarians are called out only to cases that truly need a veterinarian on site.
At the clinic level, long-term sustainability often depends on how well a practice is supported across three areas: systems, supplies, and services.
- On the systems side, Covetrus Ascend helps clinics run day-to-day operations more efficiently through cloud-based practice management, including appointments, records, billing, reporting, and workflows.
- On the supplies side, Provet helps clinics access and manage the products and inventory they need to keep care running smoothly.
- On the services side, Crampton Consulting Group provides consulting support to help practices improve performance and manage operational change.
Together, these parts of the wider Covetrus group give clinics a more connected practice solution across systems, supplies, and services, which can be especially valuable when staffing is tight and every hour counts.
Build a Plan to Deal With Challenging Clients
Consider taking steps to protect your staff from ‘veterinary bashing’.
You could document a plan which states how you and your team are going to respond to challenging circumstances with clients. Get staff buy-in to this plan and make them feel heard, it’ll increase the effectiveness when these scenarios arise.
Danny Chambers, Senior Vet and trustee of Vetlife says:
“Whether the animal lives or dies, the cost of treatment to the business is the same. But the mixture of grief, loss and the financial burden to the client can stir huge emotions leading to a complaint.”
Streamline Operations for Your Workforce With Covetrus Ascend
You may not be able to solve the regional workforce shortage from inside one clinic, but you can make your clinic easier to run.
That usually starts with reducing wasted admin and giving the team a system that supports the whole workflow from booking to consult to billing.
Covetrus Ascend is built for that kind of operational pressure, with cloud access, integrated workflows, and reporting tools that help practices do more with the team they already have.
FAQs
How bad is the vet shortage in 2026?
Yes, it is still serious. Australia continues to list veterinarians in a national shortage, and recent AVA data says almost 37% of recruitment vacancies took 12 months or longer to fill. New Zealand also continues to treat rural vet shortages as a live policy issue.
How does the vet shortage affect pet owners?
Yes, pet owners feel it. The most common effects are longer waits for routine care, less flexibility for same-day appointments, and more pressure on emergency and after-hours services.
Are emergency vet services affected by the shortage?
Yes. New Zealand’s Emergency Care Review linked after-hours care pressure to workforce, training, client expectations, and professional wellbeing. That same pattern shows up across the wider market.
What is being done to fix the vet shortage?
Yes, action is happening, though it is not fast enough yet. Australia is pushing workforce and student support measures through industry advocacy, while New Zealand continues to use tools such as the Voluntary Bonding Scheme for rural vets. Clinics are also using team redesign, better training, and software to lift capacity.
Can software really help when the problem is staffing?
Yes. Software does not create more veterinarians, but it can remove admin drag, improve charge capture, speed up note-taking, tighten communication, and give managers better visibility into where time is being lost. That can make a stretched team more sustainable.