Vet bills are outpacing inflation. Here’s what that’s doing to client decisions

If it feels like clients are pushing back on estimates more than they used to, the numbers back that up—and they point to something more specific than “the economy is tough right now.”

Using 29 years of Bureau of Labor Statistics price data (1997–2025),¹ plus visit-volume data from more than 6,000 Vetsource-connected practices² and two national PetSmart Charities–Gallup surveys,^3,6 I looked at what actually changed after 2021 and whether it’s still an isolated postpandemic blip or something more durable. The short answer: it’s durable, and it’s showing up in which visits clients are skipping.

The gap widened in 2023—and hasn’t closed

From 1998 through 2021, veterinary service prices ran about 2.3 percentage points above general inflation in an average year,¹ a gap practices and clients had lived with for two decades. Veterinary inflation then jumped to 8.83% in 2022 and 9.44% in 2023. General inflation ran nearly as high in 2022 (8.0%), so the gap widened sharply in 2023, when general inflation cooled to 4.1% and veterinary prices kept climbing.¹ By 2025, veterinary prices had climbed 47% since 2019, compared with 26% for general consumer prices—a 21-percentage-point divergence that has not reversed.¹

Statistically, 2022 marks a real break from the prior pattern, not just year-to-year noise. In plain terms, this isn’t the same kind of price growth clients adjusted to before. It’s a new, steeper baseline.

Visits are down in every measured year since

Companion animal visit volume declined in each year from 2022 through 2025 across the Vetsource practice sample.² Added up, that’s roughly 57 million fewer visits than the 2021 peak would have predicted.^2,4 Practice revenue in that period still looks fine on paper—nominal spending on veterinary services rose 55.6% from 2019 to 2024⁵—but once you adjust for the price increases themselves, real growth in services delivered was only 12.6%.^1,5 Most of the apparent revenue growth is the price increase, not more care being provided.

The part that should worry us: It’s preventive care taking the hit

The composition of what’s being skipped has shifted. In 2023, the decline was concentrated in elective services. Surgery and dental visits fell close to 4%, while wellness and sick visits barely moved. By 2025, wellness visit volume fell 3.8%, outpacing the 3.1% overall decline.² Clients appear to be protecting acute care and giving up preventive care first—vaccines, parasite prevention, wellness diagnostics—which is exactly the category with the biggest long-term payoff for the patient and the biggest blind spot for problems caught late.

The most fixable number in this whole data set

Here’s the finding I’d put in front of every associate and front-desk lead. In the national PetSmart Charities–Gallup survey, 52% of pet owners said they’d skipped or declined needed care in the past year, and 71% of them named cost as the reason.³ Among those who declined care because of cost, 73% said they were not offered a lower-cost alternative. Across all pet owners, fewer than one in four (23%) said they had ever been offered a payment plan.³ On the other side of the exam table, 94% of veterinarians surveyed said clients’ financial considerations sometimes or often prevent them from providing recommended treatment.⁶ A separate survey found that practitioners with 20 or more years in the field were less likely to offer spectrum-of-care options to clients with financial limitations.⁷

That’s a communication gap, not a pricing one. It’s the one piece of this that a practice can act on directly, without waiting for the Consumer Price Index to cooperate. In the pet owner survey, 64% said an interest-free, one-year payment plan for lifesaving care would let them at least double what they could afford to spend.³

What this means Monday morning

• Build the cost conversation into every estimate, not just the ones where the client flinches. If tiered options aren’t offered by default, the data say most clients won’t ask.
• Protect the wellness visit specifically. It’s among the categories eroding fastest, and it’s the one most amenable to a payment plan, bundled pricing or an insurance conversation at a wellness visit rather than in a crisis.
• Don’t assume experience equals comfort with spectrum-of-care conversations; the survey data suggest the opposite.⁷ If your longest-tenured clinicians are the least likely to raise alternatives, that’s a training conversation, not an awareness one.
• Track real, not nominal, revenue. A practice can post growing revenue while serving fewer real service units than it did in 2019. That matters for staffing and capacity decisions.

None of this proves that price alone is driving the visit decline. Workforce shortages and shrinking appointment capacity are almost certainly part of the picture too, and this analysis can’t cleanly separate the two.⁴ But the client-side and practice-side survey data point in the same direction: a lot of preventive care is being declined not because it isn’t valued, but because a cheaper path was never put on the table.

References

1. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: veterinarian services and all items, annual averages, 1997-2025. Accessed April 1, 2026. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/
2. Vetsource. Turning Trends Into Opportunities: Insights to Meet Client Expectations and Build Loyalty in 2026. Vetsource; 2026. Accessed March 1, 2026. https://assets.vetsource.com/m/792028a0a8071385/original/Turning-trends-into-opportunities-white-paper.pdf
3. Hrynowski Z, Lall J. 52% of U.S. pet owners skipped or declined veterinary care. Gallup. April 15, 2025. Accessed May 1, 2025. https://news.gallup.com/poll/659057/pet-owners-skipped-declined-veterinary-care.aspx
4. American Veterinary Medical Association. AVMA Report on the Economic State of the Veterinary Profession. American Veterinary Medical Association; 2020-2026. Accessed April 1, 2026. https://www.avma.org/resources-tools/reports-statistics/economics-veterinary-profession
5. US Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal consumption expenditures by function: NIPA table 2.5.5, 2019-2024. Accessed April 1, 2026. https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/
6. Kemp A. Veterinarians say cost is the main driver of declined care. Gallup. January 19, 2026. https://news.gallup.com/poll/700115/veterinarians-say-cost-main-driver-declined-care.aspx
7. Dolan ED, Slater MR. Veterinarians’ self-reported behaviors and attitudes toward spectrum of care practices. Animals (Basel). 2024;14(10):1416. doi:10.3390/ani14101416