Veterinary wellness plans are monthly memberships your practice sells directly to clients: a defined bundle of preventive care billed in installments, usually at a modest discount to your regular fees.
Brakke Consulting and Vetsource data reported by AVMA News put practice revenue up about 2.5% in 2025 while visits fell about 3%, the fourth straight year of price-driven growth.
Clients feel the squeeze: BLS CPI data shows veterinarian service prices rose 5.7% in the year to August 2026, after roughly 49% since August 2020.
Wellness plans answer with recurrence: one of the levers of veterinary practice growth, turning unpredictable fee-for-service visits into a subscription that renews every month.
For the owner deciding whether to offer one, this page covers what goes in it, pricing, enrollment, and the compliance lines.
What a veterinary practice wellness plan is (and is not)
A veterinary practice wellness plan is a subscription: a fixed monthly amount buys a defined set of preventive services, such as exams, vaccines, and diagnostic screening.
It is not pet insurance: the NAIC's Pet Insurance Model Act defines a wellness program as a subscription, separate from an insurance policy, that promotes the animal's general health, and bars insurers and producers from marketing wellness programs as insurance.
A wellness plan
- Sold by you, and the relationship stays in your practice.
- Covers routine and preventive care: exams, vaccines, screening tests.
- Revenue arrives monthly, whether or not the client comes in.
- A subscription, never marketed as insurance or coverage.
Pet insurance
- Sold by an insurer; the client pays the insurer, not you.
- Reimburses accidents and illness, not routine care.
- Average 2025 accident-and-illness premiums: $836 a year for dogs, $435 for cats (NAPHIA, year-end 2025).
- Still rare: only about 4% of US dogs and cats carry a policy.
The upshot: with only about 4% of US dogs and cats insured, your plan competes with the client's credit card and procrastination, not with an insurance premium.
The problem a plan solves, in numbers
AVMA's 2024 pet-owner data shows 86.8% of dog owners and 77.1% of cat owners say they have a regular veterinarian, but only 74.2% of dog owners and 57.3% of cat owners actually visited in the past year (AVMA).
Self-persuasion plays a part: between 2023 and 2024, owners saying their pet "did not need a checkup" rose from 12.3% to 22.8% for dogs and 17.4% to 31.1% for cats, in the same data.
Cost does the rest: in a PetSmart Charities and Gallup survey of about 2,500 dog and cat owners, 52% skipped a visit or declined recommended care in the past year, and 71% of them cited finances (Gallup).
The follow-up that matters: 64% of owners said a payment plan could have roughly doubled what they could spend, but only 23% were offered one.
A wellness plan works like a payment plan for scheduled preventive care: twelve smaller charges instead of one big invoice, and something concrete to offer a client hesitating over an estimate.
There is drift too: across about 6,000 Vetsource-client practices, the average gap between visits grew to 85.8 days in the year to August 2024, up from 57.6 in 2020 and 2021 (reported by AVMA News).
Pricing logic: build the fee from your own fee schedule
No industry price list says what a wellness plan should cost, and you should not want one: the right number falls out of your own fee schedule.
Start from what clients already spend: AVMA's 2025 survey estimates dog-owning households spend an average of $598 a year on veterinary care and cat-owning households $529, and those are household totals, not per-animal figures (AVMA).
Say an adult-dog tier includes two exams, core vaccines, a heartworm test, and a fecal test, totaling $600 at your regular fees.
Price the plan at $45 a month: $540 a year, a 10% discount to the a-la-carte total, and twelve billing dates instead of one uncertain visit decision.
What enrollment is worth
Some enrollees will use more care than they pay for, especially in a puppy tier that includes a spay or neuter: the discount is the marketing cost of the program, so budget it rather than pretend it away.
What goes in a tier, and what stays out
Most practices structure plans by life stage.
Puppy and kitten
The vaccine series, fecal tests, and a spay or neuter: the highest-usage tier, and your best shot at a lifelong client.
Adult
The annual exam, core vaccines, heartworm testing, and fecal screening: the steady state most plans are priced around.
Senior
Twice-yearly exams plus bloodwork, with a capped dental allowance if you offer one: caps keep both sides predictable.
The service list should read like your ideal preventive year for a healthy patient, from your own charges rather than a template.
Three rules keep tiers profitable: define each list exactly, including counts; cap or exclude condition-driven items, such as dental work beyond a stated allowance, because a plan that pays for sickness starts behaving like insurance; and size the member discount to matter at checkout without making discounted work unprofitable.
How to create a pet wellness plan for your clinic
- List the preventive charges that recur for a healthy patient at each life stage, from twelve months of invoices.
- Group them into two to four tiers, and write the exact included list with counts and caps.
- Price each tier from your fee schedule using the math above.
- Paper it: a short agreement covering billing, missed payments, cancellation, refunds, and what happens if the animal moves or dies.
- Decide the operations: who fields billing questions, whether plans auto-renew, and how members book included visits.
- Train the team on one enrollment script before launch day.
Most practice-management platforms have membership or recurring-billing modules, so the mechanics are rarely the hard part; the service list and the script are.
Enrollment: where plans are actually sold
A plan sells at specific moments, from your team, not from a page on your website.
AAHA's 2002 compliance study found much noncompliance starts with no recommendation at all: of pets needing dental work, only 34% of clients received a recommendation (dvm360's report of the study).
If the front desk waits for clients to ask about the plan, enrollment will be a rounding error.
Four moments reliably deserve the offer.
- The first puppy or kitten visit, where a vaccine-series plan is easiest to justify; point your new puppy and kitten marketing at the front desk where the plan gets offered.
- New-client exams, where the client has not yet formed habits with any practice.
- Checkout on any estimate the client hesitates over: in the PetSmart Charities and Gallup survey, 73% of cost-declining owners said no alternative was offered.
- Reminder calls, where "your plan already includes the exam" reframes a nag into a benefit.
The script principle is simple: offer every eligible client the plan once, plainly, and let them decline it.
Wellness plans and client retention
The retention case rests on mechanics, not published veterinary statistics.
A monthly autopay relationship is a switching cost: leaving means actively cancelling, not drifting away.
Prepaid visits are appointments with a reason attached: the client has already paid for the exam, so the exam gets scheduled.
Business research has long found that keeping a client is cheaper than winning one: a 2014 Harvard Business Review roundup puts acquiring a new customer at anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining one (HBR).
No published veterinary study quantifies the lift, so treat any vendor's percentage claim as marketing until you see the method.
Track three numbers from launch instead: member share of active clients, visit frequency for members versus non-members, and twelve-month member survival.
These are the measures in veterinary client retention, with the plan as the instrument.
Compliance: the lines to respect before launch
First, never market the plan as insurance or coverage: the NAIC model act draws that line for insurers and producers, and a product marketed like insurance can attract insurance regulation (NAIC model act).
Structurally, that means the plan pays for scheduled preventive care, not surprises: illness-and-accident reimbursement is where a plan starts functioning like insurance.
Second, states are active in this area: 17 jurisdictions had adopted the NAIC's model as of its Summer 2026 chart, one of them not effective until January 1, 2027.
The model's disclosure rules bind insurers and producers, not an in-house plan, but state insurance law and your practice act both deserve a look: confirm structure with your state veterinary board, and billing with an attorney.
Do wellness plans fit every practice?
One honest caveat: a plan accelerates demand for routine appointments.
Usually that is a feature, since the same Brakke and Vetsource data found nearly all practices could book routine appointments within a week; if your books are full for weeks, fix capacity first, and where demand is the problem, a plan helps the client's budget and your calendar at the same time.
Frequently asked questions
What is a veterinary wellness plan?
A membership the practice sells directly: the client pays a fixed monthly fee and receives a defined bundle of preventive care over the year, usually at a modest discount to your regular fees.
Is a wellness plan the same as pet insurance?
No. A wellness plan is a prepaid subscription for routine care sold by the practice, while pet insurance is a policy from an insurer that reimburses accidents and illness. The NAIC's model act treats the two as distinct products.
Is it worth adding a wellness plan to pet insurance?
They cover different costs, so they can coexist: insurance is for accidents and illness, a plan is for routine preventive care. Only about 4% of US dogs and cats carry an insurance policy per NAPHIA, so most of your clients have neither.
How much should I charge for a veterinary wellness plan?
Build the price from your own fee schedule: total the included services at your regular fees, then set a monthly fee that is a modest discount to that annual number. The worked example on this page uses a 10% discount.
Do wellness plans improve client retention?
The mechanics favor it: autopay creates a switching cost and prepaid visits create a reason to return. No published veterinary study quantifies the lift, so measure member visit frequency and twelve-month member survival in your own PIMS.