How Vet Cost Index collects and presents veterinary price data

What we publish

The CMA Vet Services price-transparency order, ordered in the regulator’s 2025 final report and phased in from 2026 onwards, requires every regulated UK vet practice to publish prices on its website for sixteen routine services covering consultations (in-hours and out-of-hours), vaccinations (dog and cat primary courses, boosters, kennel cough), microchipping, neutering, dental scale and polish, prescription dispensing fees, and pet cremation. Vet Cost Index captures each practice’s published disclosure, normalises it against the regulator-defined service schema, and aggregates the result into a national index.

We publish each captured row alongside the source URL on the practice’s own website, so any captured figure can be traced back to the practice’s own disclosure. We do not estimate, model, or accept industry-supplied figures.

What we deliberately do not do

We do not recommend specific practices for specific patients. The lowest published price is not necessarily the right choice. Clinical capability, continuity of care, your pet’s individual needs, the relationship with your vet, geography, and emergency-care arrangements all matter at least as much as price. Vet Cost Index publishes prices to enable an informed conversation between pet owner and practice, not to replace one.

We do not present a single “cheapest vet” ranking. Search results show median, typical range, and the cheapest captured price — but presented as a distribution with context, not as a leaderboard. Where we surface the cheapest publicly-disclosed price for a service, we do so alongside the median and the spread, so the price is read in context.

We do not compare across services that aren’t comparable. We compare what the regulator defines — the sixteen routine services in scope of the CMA disclosure requirement — and nothing else. Specialist surgery, referrals, complex internal-medicine cases, and any other non-routine clinical work are not in scope.

We do not accept commercial relationships from practices or corporate ownership groups. No paid placements, no sponsored listings, no referral fees, no advertising relationships. Coverage is determined by which practices have a published disclosure to capture — not by who pays.

What affects price — and why a benchmark is indicative, not a quote

A vet’s published price is the headline figure for the routine version of a service. The actual cost a pet owner pays varies by:

• Species and weight. Anaesthetic dose and surgical time scale with body weight; bird, exotic and small-mammal species commonly fall outside the published-price headline.
• Clinical complexity. A routine spay in a healthy young animal is one number; the same procedure in an older animal with co-morbidities is another.
• Medicines and dispensing. The cost of the medication itself plus the practice’s dispensing fee. The CMA’s order requires both to be disclosed.
• Anaesthesia and pre-anaesthetic checks. Sometimes included in the published price, sometimes charged separately for older animals or those at higher anaesthetic risk.
• Diagnostics found during the procedure. Intra-operative discoveries (e.g. a fractured tooth identified during a dental clean) commonly add to the total.
• Follow-up care. Post-operative checks, removal of stitches, and any complications.
• Emergency and out-of-hours provision. Whether the practice provides OOH care in-house or refers to a third-party provider; the latter typically has its own pricing.
• Geography. Premises, wages, and local market structure all flow into the published figure.

For all these reasons, Vet Cost Index publishes benchmarks, not quotes. The figures on this site are an indicative starting point for an informed conversation with your vet — not a binding commitment from any specific practice.

Pet owners should always confirm current prices directly with the practice.

How we collect the data

1. We seed the index from the RCVS Find a Vet directory (the regulator’s register of UK practices) and the CMA Vet Services compliance register where published.
2. For each indexed practice we crawl the practice website looking for a CMA Vet Services price-transparency disclosure page, in compliance with robots.txt and at respectful request rates.
3. Where a disclosure is found, we extract the regulator- defined line items via HTML parsing or PDF text extraction. We do not OCR low-confidence images and never insert values manually beyond the corrections process described below.
4. Each captured row records the source URL, the capture timestamp, and the extraction method, so any figure can be traced back to its source on the practice’s own website.
5. Captured rows are reviewed in batch for plausibility (e.g. flagged if a published figure falls implausibly far below industry-typical bands, which usually indicates a mis-extraction). Mis-extractions are corrected against the practice’s published page or nulled where uncertain.
6. Practices can request corrections, clarifications, or additional context via the route below; these are actioned manually and the change reflected on the next dataset publish.

Stakeholder input

Before launch we invited input from relevant veterinary bodies and regulators on the principles set out above and on the comparison framework Vet Cost Index commits to. The framework is published in detail at the responsible vet comparison framework guide. Feedback that materially affects this methodology page is acknowledged in the changelog at the foot of the page, with the date the change took effect.