I’m going to say something that might be unusual coming from a software company founder based in India: I have enormous respect for British veterinary medicine. The RCVS has maintained professional standards for over 180 years. The UK’s veterinary training programmes are among the best in the world. James Herriot is the reason half the vets I’ve spoken to chose the profession in the first place.
But something has gone structurally wrong with the business side of UK veterinary care. And on 23 May 2024, the Competition and Markets Authority confirmed what many practice owners and pet owners already suspected—by launching a full market investigation into veterinary services for household pets.
Full market investigations are rare. The CMA uses them only when it believes there are features of a market that prevent, restrict, or distort competition. This is not a routine review. This is the most significant regulatory intervention in the history of UK veterinary services.
How we got here
The investigation didn’t come from nowhere. In September 2023, the CMA opened an initial review of the veterinary sector. What followed was extraordinary: over 56,000 responses from pet owners, making it one of the most-responded-to CMA consultations in recent memory. Pet owners were angry, and they had data to back it up.
The headline number: average veterinary prices in the UK have risen by approximately 63% since 2016. UK general inflation over the same period was roughly 30–35%. Vet prices didn’t just outpace inflation—they nearly doubled it.
The CMA’s initial review identified several concerns that warranted the full investigation:
- Lack of pricing transparency. Pet owners often cannot compare costs before committing to treatment, and pricing structures vary so widely between practices that meaningful comparison is nearly impossible.
- Limited local choice. In many areas, practices that appear to be independent competitors are actually owned by the same corporate group—and consumers have no way to know this.
- Incentives that may steer consumers. The CMA flagged concerns about referral pathways, in-house product recommendations, and structures that may prioritise revenue over the pet owner’s informed choice.
The consolidation behind the numbers
To understand why prices have risen so sharply, you have to understand what’s happened to the ownership structure of UK veterinary care. Approximately 60% of UK veterinary practices are now owned by six large corporate groups: CVS Group, IVC Evidensia, Linnaeus (owned by Mars, Inc.), Medivet, Pets at Home Vet Group, and VetPartners. Three of these are backed by private equity firms.
This consolidation happened fast. Fifteen years ago, the vast majority of UK practices were independently owned. The acquisition wave was driven by private equity capital seeking stable, recession-resistant revenue streams—people will always spend on their pets. The result is a market where what looks like a high street of competing practices may, in reality, be a collection of outlets owned by two or three corporate entities.
I want to be clear: I’m not making a moral judgement about corporatisation. Consolidation brought investment, standardised clinical protocols, and career pathways that some practices couldn’t offer alone. But the CMA’s concern is structural: when a small number of firms control a large share of a local market and consumers can’t tell, competition doesn’t work properly. Prices rise. Transparency falls. And the people who pay are pet owners and, arguably, the veterinary professionals working inside the system.
What the CMA is proposing
The CMA published its provisional decision in October 2025, with a final decision expected around February to March 2026. While the specifics may evolve, the proposed remedies fall into three broad categories:
1. Mandatory standardised price lists
Practices would be required to publish prices for common procedures in a standardised format—allowing pet owners to compare costs across providers. This is a direct response to the opacity that the CMA found: most pet owners currently have no meaningful way to compare veterinary prices before they’re already in the consultation room.
2. Maximum prescription fees and transparency around medicines
The CMA has flagged concerns about the gap between the cost of veterinary medicines dispensed in-practice and the prices available through online pharmacies. Proposed remedies may include caps on prescription fees to ensure pet owners can meaningfully exercise their legal right to take a prescription elsewhere.
3. Potential structural remedies
The most significant and uncertain category. Structural remedies could range from requiring corporate groups to clearly disclose common ownership to, in theory, mandating divestiture of practices in concentrated local markets. The final scope will depend on the CMA’s analysis of local competition dynamics.
Why this actually favours independents
Here’s the counterintuitive point that I think many independent practice owners are missing: this investigation is structurally better for you than it is for the corporate groups.
Think about what mandatory price transparency does. If you’re an independent practice owner who charges fair prices and provides personal, high-quality care, transparency makes your value proposition visible for the first time. Pet owners will be able to see, clearly, what you charge versus the corporate practice down the road. Many independents will look very good in that comparison.
The corporate model, by contrast, has relied partly on the absence of easy comparison. When pricing is opaque, the practice with the biggest brand and the most convenient location captures business by default. When pricing is transparent, the independent practice with competitive fees and a loyal client base has a genuine advantage.
Similarly, ownership disclosure requirements will make it clear to pet owners when the “local” practice is actually part of a large corporate chain. Some owners won’t care. But many—especially those who specifically chose a practice because they thought it was independent—will re-evaluate.
The workforce crisis underneath
The CMA investigation is happening against a backdrop that makes everything harder: the UK is running out of vets. Annual registrations of EU-qualified veterinarians fell by 68% post-Brexit—from 1,132 in 2019 to just 364 in 2021. Applications to UK veterinary courses dropped 10% from 2022 levels. The pipeline is narrowing at both ends.
The working conditions explain why. Full-time veterinarians in the UK work an estimated 57 hours per week. Practice owners average 71 hours. Nearly half—48% —of UK veterinarians have considered leaving the sector entirely. Three-quarters took time off in the past year due to work-related stress or mental health concerns.
The RCVS projects a 52% rise in registered vets to approximately 45,000 by 2035, but that projection relies on training and recruitment pipelines that are currently under severe strain. If the profession continues to lose people faster than it trains them, no amount of regulatory reform will fix pricing—because scarcity drives prices up regardless of market structure.
This is the deeper point that the CMA investigation alone cannot address: the veterinary sector doesn’t just have a competition problem. It has an operational efficiency problem. Vets are spending enormous hours on administration, documentation, and systems that weren’t built for the way modern practices work. Fixing that is as important as fixing market structure.
What practice owners should be doing now
Whether you’re an independent owner or a practice manager within a corporate group, the CMA’s final decision will change how you operate. Here is what I’d recommend doing before the ruling lands:
Get your pricing transparent before you’re required to
Don’t wait for the CMA to mandate a format. Start publishing your prices for the 20 most common procedures now—on your website, in your reception area, and available on request. If your prices are fair, this is a competitive advantage. If your prices look high compared to neighbouring practices, better to find out now and understand why than to be caught off guard when the standardised lists go live.
Audit your billing and prescription processes
If the CMA caps prescription fees, practices that currently generate significant margin from in-house dispensing will need to adjust their revenue model. Understand now what percentage of your revenue comes from medicine margins versus consultation and treatment fees. If that number is heavily skewed towards dispensing, start planning your transition.
Get your systems in order
Standardised reporting is almost certainly coming. Practices will need to produce pricing data in consistent formats, track and report on key metrics, and demonstrate compliance with new regulations. If you’re still running on paper records, a decade-old on-premise system, or a patchwork of spreadsheets, now is the time to modernise. Not because software solves everything—it doesn’t—but because you will need clean, accessible data to comply with whatever the CMA mandates.
Invest in operational efficiency
If pricing transparency compresses margins—and it very likely will—the practices that survive comfortably will be the ones that operate efficiently. That means reducing time spent on documentation, automating appointment reminders and follow-ups, eliminating revenue leakage from unbilled services, and giving your clinical staff more time to do clinical work instead of administration.
Communicate with your clients
Your existing clients are reading the same CMA headlines you are. They’re wondering if they’ve been overcharged. Get ahead of it. Send a straightforward message: here’s what we charge, here’s why, and here’s how we’re committed to transparency. The practices that communicate proactively will retain trust. The practices that stay silent will look like they have something to hide.
The bigger picture
I’m watching the CMA investigation from the outside—from India, where the veterinary sector faces entirely different structural challenges. But the underlying dynamics are universal. When markets become concentrated and opaque, regulators eventually intervene. When they do, the businesses that thrive are the ones that were already operating transparently and efficiently.
The CMA investigation is not a punishment for the veterinary profession. It’s a correction for a market that drifted away from the interests of both pet owners and veterinary professionals. Independent practice owners who see it as an opportunity—to differentiate on transparency, to modernise their operations, to demonstrate the value of genuine local care—will come out of this stronger than they went in.
The final decision is expected in the first quarter of 2026. Between now and then, every practice in the UK has a window to prepare. I’d strongly suggest using it.