Veterinary Marketing Statistics That Matter in 2026

Veterinary marketing statistics fill every inbox and conference slide, and most roundups are written for investors rather than for the person who has to fill an appointment schedule.

This page collects the numbers that change what a practice owner should do next: the size of the demand pool, the trend in visits and new clients, how clients choose a practice, and the few benchmarks honest enough to be cited.

Each one names its source and year, because a statistic you cannot trace is not a fact you can plan against.

It sits under the veterinary marketing hub, which covers what to do with these numbers; this page stays on the numbers themselves.

Veterinary industry statistics: the market you market into

Start with the pool.

APPA's National Pet Owners Survey counted 95 million US households owning at least one pet in 2025.

The same association's spending tally puts total US pet spending at $158 billion in 2025, of which $41.0 billion went to veterinary care and products.

For 2026, APPA projects $165 billion in total spending and $42.4 billion on the vet line.

The AVMA's 2025 Pet Ownership and Demographics Sourcebook measures ownership more conservatively through a different method: 42.6% of US households own dogs (87.3 million dogs) and 32.6% own cats (76.3 million cats).

The two surveys disagree by design, so pick one per claim and never stitch an APPA count to an AVMA percentage.

Competition for that demand is local and crowded: the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns counted 34,296 veterinary services establishments in 2023, a count of physical locations that includes every branch of a chain and veterinary testing labs.

Prices shape the conversation too: BLS consumer price data shows veterinarian services up 5.7% from August 2025 to August 2026, and about 49% since August 2020, against roughly 29% for consumer prices overall.

Pet industry statistics for vets

This is the slice of the pet economy that runs through your front desk.

Within APPA's 2025 tally, pet food and treats were the largest category at $68.3 billion, veterinary care and product sales ranked second at $41.0 billion, and other services such as boarding and grooming added $14.3 billion.

Two readings matter for a practice.

First, the vet line includes products sold through veterinary practices, so it overstates what services alone collect, and APPA's own forecast only edges it to $42.4 billion in 2026.

Second, payment is mostly out of pocket: NAPHIA's 2026 State of the Industry Report puts pet insurance penetration at 4.27% of US dogs and cats, so how you communicate price is a marketing problem for nearly every client.

The statistics behind the appointment trend

A large demand pool is not the same as a full schedule.

Brakke Consulting and Vetsource data reported by AVMA News found that visits fell about 3% in 2025 while revenue still grew about 2.5%, continuing a multiyear pattern in which price increases, not volume, do the growing.

The revenue half of that story is covered in average veterinary practice revenue; the marketing half is who stops coming.

In the same reporting, 81% of veterinarians said clients were more cost-sensitive than the year before.

New-client numbers are where the trend bites: across about 6,000 practices from August 2023 to August 2024, Vetsource data reported by AVMA News shows new-client visits down 8.6% and the average gap between a patient's visits stretching to 85.8 days from 57.6 days in 2020–21.

A Vetsource executive attributes about 8% of total practice revenue to new clients, which makes a drop like that a revenue problem rather than a vanity one.

The pool of lapsed relationships is even larger than the visit data suggests.

AVMA survey data from 2024 found 86.8% of dog owners and 77.1% of cat owners say they have a regular veterinarian, but only 74.2% and 57.3% actually visited one in the previous year.

SAY they have a regular vet vs. actually visited one, 2024

Dog owners with a regular vet86.8%

Dog owners who visited74.2%

Cat owners with a regular vet77.1%

Cat owners who visited57.3%

That gap is millions of households with a veterinarian in mind and no visit on the books.

Reactivating even a slice is marketing to clients who already chose you, and business research has long found keeping a client costs less than winning a new one.

Cost, not indifference, drives much of the skipping: in the PetSmart Charities–Gallup State of Pet Care study of about 2,500 US dog and cat owners, 52% said they had skipped a visit or declined recommended care in the past year, and 71% of them cited finances.

How clients choose: reviews, booking and response

When a household does go looking, a few measurable behaviors decide the shortlist.

BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found 97% of US consumers read reviews for local businesses, and 68% said they will only use a business rated four stars or higher.

These are stated preferences from a survey of about 1,000 US adults rather than observed bookings, but the direction has been consistent for years.

Volume matters too: 47% said they would not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews.

Reviews are also a two-way channel, and 89% of consumers expect businesses to respond to them, per the same survey.

The request-and-reply tactics live in how to get more veterinary reviews.

Booking friction shows up on the practice side.

A 2025 PetDesk survey of 1,000 North American pet owners found 57% had experienced difficulty booking appointments at their vet clinic, and 42% said they receive no appointment or vaccine reminders at all.

PetDesk sells reminders and booking software, so treat those as the vendor's own numbers rather than an independent audit.

Practice-side readiness lags the expectation: AVMA economic data cited in a 2025 peer-reviewed paper puts online appointment scheduling at 38.6% of companion-animal-exclusive practices as of 2024.

That leaves most practices asking clients to call during business hours, and the case for changing that is made in veterinary online booking.

Search is what connects intent to a visit: in a 2016 Google diary study, 76% of people who searched for something nearby on a smartphone visited a related business within a day.

The study is dated and covers every category, not just veterinary ones, so treat it as directional rather than veterinary proof.

The few honest marketing benchmarks

Benchmarks deserve their own warning label.

There is no published conversion rate for veterinary websites: Unbounce's 2024 report of 41,000+ landing pages puts the median at 6.6% across all industries and 5.1% for health and wellness, and it has no veterinary row at all.

What that number can and cannot tell you about a practice site is covered in veterinary website conversion rate.

For paid social, WordStream's 2026 benchmarks put the median click-through rate for Animals & Pets traffic campaigns at 1.85% with a median cost per click of $0.51, a category that mixes pet stores and groomers with veterinary advertisers and draws on the vendor's own client base.

That is a sanity check, not a target or a promise.

How to use veterinary marketing statistics without getting burned

Four checks keep a statistic useful.

Then treat national numbers as context and your own numbers as truth.

The statistics that decide your revenue are the ones on your practice's dashboard, and veterinary practice KPIs lists the ones worth tracking monthly.

Use the figures above to size the opportunity and set expectations, and use your own trend line to decide what to fix first.

Frequently asked questions