US veterinary universe, mapped
There are 129,375 veterinarians in the US, across about 30,402 clinics.
For practice-management software, pet pharmacy, imaging, and tele-vet teams selling into veterinary medicine. The buyer is rarely the vet at the table. It is the owner of the independent practice down the street.
The market, in three numbers
An independent long tail, half rolled up, half still standing.
of clinics are still independent
Three in four US vet practices are still owned by the doctor or doctors who run them. The other quarter has been bought by corporate consolidators over the last decade.
corporate-owned and climbing
Mars Veterinary Health, NVA, Thrive, PetVet, and Southern Veterinary Partners together control roughly a quarter of US clinics, up from under 10 percent in 2015.
sites at the largest operator
Mars-owned Banfield, VCA, and BluePearl combined run more than 2,200 US locations under one parent. Even so, they account for under 8 percent of the universe.
Sources: AVMA 2024 economic report; Brakke Consulting and AVMA corporate-consolidation tracking; Orbital practice-by-practice map, April 2026.
Methodology
Why our veterinary count moves and the published estimates do not.
The headline figures you usually see, 129,375 licensed vets or 30,402 active clinics, come from once-a-year industry reports. They are accurate the day they ship and stale by month two. We work practice by practice, in the open, and refresh.
How the 129,375 vet and 30,402 clinic figures are built
- Start with every active US veterinary practice. Cross-referenced against the AVMA practice universe, US Census County Business Patterns NAICS 541940 (veterinary services), and state veterinary licensing board rosters.
- Resolve each location to a real operating business. An independent clinic is the LLC or PLLC that holds the licence. A corporate location rolls up to the parent group: Mars, NVA, Thrive, PetVet, SVP, VPP, and the rest. Both shapes matter, for different buyers.
- Find the owner or practice manager. About 75 percent of US clinics are independent, and many of those owners never built a LinkedIn profile. We find them by name, with a verified email and a direct dial, the same way we do for every other long-tail vertical.
- Drop the dead pins. Closures, relocations, doctor retirements, sites recently sold to a consolidator. The annual reports leave them on the map for a year. We do not.
- Refresh on a rolling schedule. Practice-level signals run continuously against the universe of US small businesses, so what you query in June is not what shipped in January.
If you want the source breakdown for a specific state or consolidator, ask. We do not hide the working.
By state
Where the vets actually are.
The five largest states carry close to a third of the universe. Per capita, the picture flips: thinly populated states with strong large-animal practice carry more vets per resident than the coastal markets.
| # | State | Licensed vets | Clinics |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | 12,800 | 3,100 |
| 2 | Texas | 9,500 | 2,400 |
| 3 | Florida | 8,200 | 2,000 |
| 4 | New York | 7,400 | 1,650 |
| 5 | Pennsylvania | 5,500 | 1,300 |
| 6 | Ohio | 5,300 | 1,250 |
| 7 | Illinois | 5,100 | 1,200 |
| 8 | North Carolina | 4,700 | 1,150 |
| 9 | Michigan | 4,200 | 1,050 |
| 10 | Georgia | 4,100 | 1,000 |
| 11 | Virginia | 3,800 | 950 |
| 12 | Washington | 3,600 | 900 |
| 13 | Colorado | 3,500 | 880 |
| 14 | Massachusetts | 3,300 | 780 |
| 15 | Arizona | 3,200 | 820 |
Vet counts rounded to the nearest hundred for display; clinic counts to the nearest fifty. The dataset itself is exact, down to the street address. Source: AVMA 2024 state licensure data, cross-checked against Orbital practice map, April 2026.
The top ten consolidators
The largest corporate groups, and how much of the market they actually hold.
The PE rollup gets the headlines. The math is quieter. The ten groups below together control roughly 22 percent of US vet clinics. The remaining 78 percent is independents, two-doctor partnerships, and small regional groups that nobody has bought yet.
| # | Group | US clinics | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mars Veterinary Health | ~2,200 | Banfield Pet Hospital, VCA Animal Hospitals, BluePearl emergency and specialty, and AniCura outside the US. Owned by Mars, the candy and pet-food conglomerate. Procurement is centralised. |
| 2 | National Veterinary Associates | ~1,400 | JAB Holding Company portfolio. Backed by the same Reimann family money behind Krispy Kreme and Pret. Acquires independent practices and largely leaves the brand on the door. |
| 3 | Thrive Pet Healthcare (Pathway) | ~400 | Backed by TSG Consumer Partners. Mix of general practice, specialty, and emergency. Rolled up dozens of regional groups under the Thrive brand. |
| 4 | PetVet Care Centers | ~470 | KKR portfolio. Buys multi-doctor general practices, mainly on the coasts and in the Sun Belt. Operates under acquired clinic brands. |
| 5 | Southern Veterinary Partners | ~430 | Birmingham-based, backed by Shore Capital and Silver Lake. Concentrated in the Southeast and South-Central US. Keeps the original clinic name and culture. |
| 6 | Veterinary Practice Partners | ~170 | Joint-venture model where the original doctor keeps an equity stake. Slower growth, higher retention of the selling vet. |
| 7 | Encore Vet Group | ~120 | East-coast focused. Acquires general practices and lets the founding owner stay clinical, not administrative. |
| 8 | Heart + Paw | ~30 | Mid-Atlantic urban concept clinics, smaller footprint, design-led waiting rooms, retail tie-ins. |
| 9 | Innovetive Petcare | ~90 | Austin-based. Buys multi-doctor practices across the South and Texas. Carries the original brand. |
| 10 | Compassion-First Pet Hospitals | ~50 | Specialty and emergency focus, now part of NVA after the 2020 merger. Listed separately here because the brand still operates. |
Counts marked "~" are approximate, drawn from each group's most recent investor or trade-press disclosures and cross-referenced with our practice map. Order above is by US footprint. The corporate share moves quarter to quarter as deals close, so treat these as a snapshot, not a fixture.
Our take
The long-tail 75 percent is the only piece left worth fighting for.
We believe
Veterinary medicine has spent a decade losing its independence to private equity. The 75 percent that has not been bought yet is where vendors should be spending their outbound budget.
The standard vendor motion in veterinary right now is to chase the consolidators. Sign one master agreement with Mars Veterinary Health, sign another with NVA, and call the territory done. We have watched a practice-management software team work that motion for two years, then look at the math: the top ten corporate groups together hold roughly 22 percent of US clinics. The other 78 percent, somewhere over 23,000 independent practices, sits with owner-doctors who never came up in their CRM because the CRM was indexed against parent companies.
One of those owners called us last quarter. She runs a three-doctor small-animal practice in suburban Ohio. She had three pitches in her inbox that month, all from corporate-side BD teams trying to buy her clinic, and zero from the software, pharmacy, and equipment vendors she actually needed to hear from. The PE pitches reached her because the buy-side databases index every independent practice. The vendor databases stopped at the corporate brand. That asymmetry is the gap. It is also the entire reason we built this.
Who buys this data
B2B vendors selling into 30,402 clinics.
This page is for the teams selling into vet practices, not the vets themselves. The buyer for this dataset usually falls into one of these categories.
Practice management software
ezyVet, Cornerstone, AVImark, IDEXX Neo, Provet Cloud, Shepherd, and the next cloud PIMS challenging the desktop incumbents. The buyer is the independent owner, not the consolidator's IT inbox.
Pet pharmacy and Rx supply
Covetrus, MWI Animal Health, Patterson Veterinary, and the home-delivery Rx platforms. Every clinic buys product weekly; switching distributors is a once-every-three-years conversation. The owner signs the contract.
Imaging and diagnostic equipment
IDEXX, Heska, Antech, Zoetis Reference Labs, plus the digital radiography and ultrasound vendors. Capital purchases, owner-signed, and the long tail of independents is where the next 20,000 units go.
Premium pet food and Rx diets
Hill's, Royal Canin, Purina Pro Plan Veterinary Diets, and the boutique fresh-food brands. The clinic recommendation is the channel. The owner decides what is on the retail shelf and in the discharge handout.
Tele-vet and remote consult
Vetster, Airvet, Dutch, FirstVet, and the specialist remote-consult platforms (radiology, cardiology, derm). Sold to clinics as a referral or after-hours layer. Owner-signed, doctor-used.
Staffing and relief vets
IndeVets, Stat Vet, Roo, and the regional relief platforms filling shifts at understaffed clinics. The vet shortage means demand is the easy part. Finding the practices that need shifts covered is the hard part.
Marketing and reputation management
Local SEO, review management, and patient-acquisition agencies aimed specifically at independent vets. Different motion than enterprise marketing software; the buyer wants Tuesday-morning answers, not a quarterly business review.
Adjacent universes built the same way: the veterinarian email list for outbound at the clinic-owner level, the broader by-industry email lists, and the full /data hub.
Plain-spoken
When the veterinary dataset is the wrong fit.
Do not buy this if any of the following are true.
You only sell into the corporate groups. If your motion is one master service agreement with Mars Veterinary Health and another with NVA, you do not need 30,402 records. You need two account executives and a calendar. Save your budget.
You sell to pet owners, not to clinics. DTC supplement brands, pet-insurance comparison sites, and consumer apps want a different data shape. This dataset is operator-side. The patient-facing side lives elsewhere.
You need clinical performance benchmarks. AAHA, VHMA, and the AVMA publish operational and financial benchmarks (case volume, average client transaction, staffing ratios) that we do not stand up here. Pair them with our owner map, do not replace either with the other.
The honest version
Why most veterinary vendor data is wrong.
If you Google "how many veterinarians in the US," the top result is usually an AVMA press release citing 129,375 licensed vets in the 2024 economic report. That is the right number, for individual practitioners. It is not the right number for vendors prospecting into the market, because vets do not buy practice management software, pharmacy contracts, or imaging hardware. Clinics do. The clinic count is closer to 30,402, and that is the unit a vendor's CRM should be indexed against.
The next problem is the brand. Enterprise data tools index by company, so "Mars Veterinary Health" looks like one customer with 2,200 locations. For a procurement-led sale, that is true. For everyone else, it is not. The Banfield clinic in suburban Atlanta makes its own decisions about local marketing, ancillary product, and shift-staffing partners. The independent two-doctor practice across town makes every decision, end to end. Both are buyers. Neither shows up correctly in a database that stops at the parent.
This is exactly the gap Orbital was built for. We map the universe of US small and mid-market businesses, find the owner of each one, and validate the contact before it reaches you. Nothing about that is veterinary-specific, which is why we can also map dentists, HVAC contractors, med spas, restaurants, and auto dealers the same way. What is specific to veterinary medicine is the layer on top: group affiliation, species focus (small animal, mixed, equine, exotics), AAHA accreditation, and whether the owner runs one site or twenty.
One more piece of context worth pricing in. AVMA, Brakke Consulting, IBISWorld, and Statista all publish on this market. They are excellent, and we cite them. They are also annual or semi-annual. AVMA economics ships its state of the profession once a year. Census CBP ships NAICS-level establishment counts annually with a two-year lag. Statista aggregates and lags further. For a vendor doing outbound this quarter, the question is which practices are open this Monday, who owns them now, and which ones changed hands last week. That is the gap a practice-by-practice, owner-by-owner map closes.
Questions
Before you ask sales about the veterinary dataset.
How many veterinarians are there in the US?
There are 129,375 licensed veterinarians in the United States, per the American Veterinary Medical Association's 2024 economic state of the profession report. They work out of roughly 30,402 active veterinary clinics, the number that usually matters more for vendors prospecting into the market, because the clinic is the buying unit, not the individual vet.
How many veterinary clinics are there in the US?
Around 30,402 active veterinary clinics. That figure tracks AVMA's count of US veterinary practice locations and lines up with US Census County Business Patterns data for NAICS 541940. About 75 percent are still independent, single-owner or two-doctor practices. The remaining 25 percent have been rolled up by corporate consolidators in the last decade.
Are most US vet clinics owned by big corporate groups?
No, not yet. Roughly 25 percent of US vet clinics are now corporate-owned by groups like Mars Veterinary Health, NVA, Thrive, and Southern Veterinary Partners. The other 75 percent are independent. The corporate share has roughly doubled in a decade, and the long-tail 75 percent is the part of the market most vendors should be prospecting hardest.
Which state has the most veterinarians?
California has the most, with around 12,800 licensed vets working out of roughly 3,100 clinics. Texas follows with about 9,500 vets, then Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania. Per capita, sparsely populated rural states with strong large-animal practice tend to have the highest vet-to-resident ratios.
How is your count different from AVMA, IBISWorld, or Statista?
AVMA publishes the canonical licensure count once a year. IBISWorld and Statista aggregate and lag by 12 to 18 months. None of them give you the practice owner's name, email, and direct dial. Orbital starts from the same universe data, then resolves each clinic to its operating entity and finds the owner or practice manager. The count is current to the month, and every record has a contact.
Who actually buys US veterinary practice data?
Vendors selling into vet clinics. Practice management software companies, pet pharmacy distributors, imaging and diagnostic equipment vendors, premium pet food and prescription diet sales teams, tele-vet and remote consult platforms, relief and staffing platforms, marketing and reputation management agencies for clinics, and PE buyer-side teams looking for acquisition targets. The common thread is that they need the owner of the independent practice, not the corporate group's procurement inbox.
Can I filter by state, group affiliation, or species focus?
Yes. State, metro, group affiliation (independent, Mars, NVA, Thrive, SVP, and the rest), species focus (small animal, mixed, large animal, equine, exotics), practice size by FTE, and AAHA accreditation. Tell us what you need and we filter before the sample goes out.
Can I get a sample of the veterinary practice owner data?
Yes. Tell us the states, group affiliations, or species focus you want and we send a sample of around 100 verified owner records so you can check them against your own pipeline before anything changes hands. There is no charge for the sample.
See the veterinary practice owner dataset before you pay for it.
Tell us the states, group affiliations, or species focus you want. We send a free sample of around 100 verified owner records you can check against your own pipeline, no commitment, no email-list back-and-forth.
Get the sample