Veterinary Revenue Statistics: Managing the Cost of Staffing Your Veterinary Practice

As you consume information and statistics about the market for veterinary services, you are probably considering how this might affect your needs for staffing. Staffing costs often take the largest chunk of a veterinary practice’s budget. Managing your staffing costs effectively can often make the difference between the success and failure of the business.

However, deciding how much you can afford to pay depends on factors such as the current market conditions, your projected revenue, regional demand for veterinary services and even your choice of pay structure.

By making smart veterinary management choices, optimizing your staffing ratio, improving productivity and researching veterinary revenue statistics, you can use the available data to plan for the cost of staffing more effectively and foster optimal business growth.

Here are the key factors you need to take into consideration when planning your veterinary practice staffing costs.

Determine appropriate pay scales

Deciding how much to pay veterinary staff can be a significant challenge, especially in the early days when you don’t have previous revenue figures to base your decisions upon. For best results, you should take a two pronged approach when determining your pay scales for all veterinary staff.

First, refer to the national wage statistics by visiting the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to their figures, the median hourly pay for veterinary surgeons is $45.90. For veterinary technicians, the median is $16.07 and for receptionists, around $14.45 per hour. You can also check out other industry sources for benchmarks, for example the “The Well-Managed Practice Benchmarks Study” as reported in this article for additional data points.

However, numbers can also vary depending on the location of your practice and the skill set required for each role. For example, veterinary receptionists’ national average annual pay is just under $28K while the St. Louis area is $25.7k, according to Glassdoor.com.

Next, consider your business revenue projections for the coming year to determine how much you can afford to pay. In addition to basic wage costs, you’ll also need to consider other employee costs such as health insurance, 401k, bonuses and employer Social Security payments when calculating your figures.