Veterinary Staff Pay Benchmarks 2026: DVM, Tech, Front Desk

These veterinary staff pay benchmarks come from real job listings, not a survey.

Our sister job board, VeterinaryHires, collects veterinary openings from employer career sites and applicant tracking systems across the U.S.

On October 5, 2026, it had 13,087 live listings from 30 employers in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., and 72% of those listings stated pay.

Most of those employers are multi-location groups: 26 of the 30 hire in five or more cities.

That makes this a picture of what the groups you compete with for staff are posting, which is exactly what a candidate sees next to your own listing.

Posted pay by role

Here is the median posted hourly pay for the roles that are mostly paid by the hour.

Median posted hourly pay, support roles

Veterinary technician$27.00

Veterinary assistant$21.00

Veterinary receptionist$20.00

Kennel attendant$15.50

The median is only half the story, so here is the middle half of posted pay (the 25th to 75th percentile) for each role, with how many distinct ranges and employers it rests on.

Veterinarians and managers are mostly posted as annual salaries.

The relief veterinarian figure rests on the fewest employers in the table, six, so read it as a rough marker.

Veterinarians: base pay is only the start

The posted salary for a veterinarian is a base, and most employers describe a stack of extras on top of it.

Continuing education allowances are just as common, named by 21 of the 28 employers hiring veterinarians, and 15 of 28 mention some form of student loan support.

Emergency hiring leans even harder on production: 11 of the 18 employers hiring emergency veterinarians describe production pay.

So a veterinarian comparing your offer with a group's is weighing base, production, sign-on, relocation and CE together, not one salary number.

If your offer has a production component or a CE budget, put it in the listing with the structure, because most of the employers you compete with already describe at least one of those extras.

What employers offer technicians vs the front desk

The sign-on bonus is where the gap between clinical roles and the front desk shows most clearly.

Employers mentioning a sign-on bonus, by role

Veterinary technician81%

Veterinarian75%

Emergency veterinarian56%

Veterinary assistant42%

Practice manager18%

Veterinary receptionist12%

No employer hiring kennel attendants mentioned a sign-on bonus at all.

The median gap between the two roles is $7.00 an hour, or $14,560 a year on a full-time schedule of 2,080 hours.

Receptionists and assistants sit close together, at $20.00 and $21.00 an hour.

The front desk answers every new client

Your receptionists answer the calls, messages and booking requests that every new client starts with.

In the posted data they are among the lowest paid roles in the practice, nearly a third of their listings are part-time, and only 3 of the 24 employers hiring for the role mention a sign-on bonus.

That's worth a second look if you spend money on SEO, ads or a new website.

Every inquiry that marketing produces lands with this role, and how fast and how well it gets answered decides whether it turns into a booked appointment or a missed call that books somewhere else.

What this means for practice owners

Check your posted pay against the middle half for the role, not the median alone.

A technician listing at $23.50 an hour sits at the bottom quarter of what candidates see, and one at $31.00 sits at the top quarter.

If you pay production, a sign-on bonus or a CE allowance, say so in the listing, with the numbers.

For technicians and veterinarians, most of the employers you compete with already advertise at least one of them.

Post pay at all if you don't today, because nearly three quarters of the listings in this data state it.

And look at the front desk with the same eye you give your marketing, since payroll is one of the biggest lines in veterinary practice profitability and the front desk is where it meets every new client.

Pay data is one input to veterinary practice growth, next to the revenue side covered in average veterinary practice revenue.

If you want to see how well your calls and web inquiries turn into appointments today, a free audit is the place to start.

How we did it

Source. Listings come from VeterinaryHires, which collects veterinary openings from employer career sites and applicant tracking systems. We used every listing live on October 5, 2026: 13,087 listings from 30 employers in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

Employers. Some groups post jobs under each hospital's own name through a corporate career site, and we count all hospitals from one such site as a single employer, so a group's hospitals can't outvote everyone else. Of the 30 employers, 26 hire in five or more cities, which leaves too few independent practices to compare groups with independents.

Roles. Each listing is assigned a role from its title. We report eight roles; veterinarian covers general veterinarian listings, including medical director, chief of staff and some specialist roles, while emergency and relief veterinarians are reported separately.

Pay. We used the midpoint of each posted range. Where a listing's pay wasn't in a structured field, we read the first posted pay range in the listing text, skipping bonus, allowance and per-shift amounts; that covers 77% of the listings with pay. Each employer and range counts once per role. Hourly and annual pay are kept separate, annual figures exclude part-time listings, and ranges outside $7.25–$300 an hour or $20,000–$500,000 a year are dropped as parsing errors. A figure is shown only with at least 10 distinct ranges from at least 5 employers, and hidden if one employer supplies more than half of them, which ruled out an hourly figure for veterinarians. Medians are rounded to the nearest $0.25 an hour or $500 a year.

Listing text. Sign-on bonuses, production pay, CE allowances, student loan support, relocation help and pet care discounts are counted per employer: an employer counts if any of its listings for that role mention it.

What it can't see. Posted pay is what employers advertise, not what they end up paying, and it is base pay. Listings without pay (28%) aren't in the pay figures, and employers that post pay may differ from those that don't.

Data. The figures by role are available as a CSV download. We don't publish individual listings or any employer's pay.

For journalists

You're welcome to use these figures with a link to this page.

Gabe Meierotto, founder of More Booked Paws and VeterinaryHires and former Director of CRO at LaserAway (2018–2023), can talk about what the data means for veterinary practice owners.

Reach him at hello@morebookedpaws.com.

Frequently asked questions