Private Equity Has Reshaped the Vet Visit, and the Bill Shows It
Corporate consolidators now control a growing share of America's veterinary practices, and a decade of roll-ups has coincided with a 60 percent rise in the cost of pet care.
NEW YORK, August 20, 2026. The veterinary clinic has become one of private equity's quieter consolidation stories, and one of its most scrutinized. Corporate owners, most of them backed by private equity capital, now control roughly a quarter to a third of general veterinary practices in the United States, up from single digits a decade ago. In specialty and emergency medicine, the shift has gone further still: corporate operators own an estimated three-quarters of those clinics.
The dollars behind that shift are large. Private equity firms deployed more than $51 billion into veterinary practices between 2017 and 2023, according to industry trackers, with billions more committed since. More than 20 active PE-backed platforms and upward of 35 total corporate consolidators now compete for the same pool of independent practices, following a well-worn playbook: buy standalone clinics at five to seven times earnings, bundle them into a regional or national network, then sell the platform at 12 to 15 times earnings to a larger buyer or take it to a bigger fund.
Mars Veterinary Health, the pet food conglomerate's veterinary arm, now oversees roughly 3,000 hospitals globally. JAB Holding Company, the European conglomerate behind Keurig Dr Pepper and Panera, built one of the sector's largest platforms through acquisitions of National Veterinary Associates and other chains. Ethos Veterinary Health, PetVet Care Centers, Thrive Pet Healthcare, and VetCor round out a list of buyers that has turned what was once a fragmented, owner-operator business into one increasingly run on private equity's timeline.
The price of a vet visit has moved with the ownership. Veterinary care costs have risen about 60 percent since 2014, comfortably outpacing general inflation, and a routine visit now commonly runs past $300. Matt Salois, an economist who studies veterinary markets, has attributed the increase to several overlapping forces: general inflation, advances in the medicine itself that cost more to deliver, a shortage of licensed veterinary labor, and ownership structure. "The problem here is one of size," Salois has said, pointing to how scale changes incentives inside a practice.
Independent veterinarians describe those incentive changes directly. Michele Forbes, who runs an independent practice in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has said she turned down an $8.5 million acquisition offer and argues the math behind corporate ownership is simple to see from the inside: "Corporate hospitals spend 30 cents for every dollar I spend," she has said, describing pressure inside consolidated practices to raise revenue per visit through additional testing and procedures. Veterinarians at some corporate-owned clinics have described quotas tying compensation to procedures performed, a structure critics argue can push care decisions in a direction that has little to do with a given animal's needs.
Regulators have taken notice, though enforcement has been narrow. The Federal Trade Commission has twice ordered JAB to divest clinics in markets where a single owner's acquisitions left pet owners with few alternative providers, both cases turning on local market concentration rather than the roll-up strategy itself. In 2024, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal sent JAB a letter demanding information about its acquisition and staffing practices, arguing that "private equity rollups of veterinary practices harm veterinarians and customers alike" and that rising costs are "making pet ownership unaffordable for too many Americans." They called on the FTC and Congress to expand enforcement against the practice, including passage of the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. Regulators in the United Kingdom, examining a similar wave of consolidation there, found that corporate ownership had added more than $1 billion in consumer costs over five years.
None of this has slowed the buying. More than two-thirds of American households own a pet, and the category has proven resistant to the same rate pressure that has stalled deal-making elsewhere in private equity's portfolio. For an industry sitting on a large backlog of aging, unsold holdings, a business with reliable, recurring, price-inelastic demand remains an attractive place to keep deploying capital, regulatory letters notwithstanding.