BLS publishes no wage series for emergency veterinarians — all veterinarians sit under one occupation code, and the agency does not break veterinarian pay out by specialty or setting.
The all-veterinarian national median was $130,100 (OEWS May 2025); AVMA's 2025 report averaged emergency-function veterinarians at $191,244 against $142,522 for general medicine.
VeterinaryHires ER listings stating pay showed a $145,000 employer median (October 6, 2026 snapshot).
This page works through each source, the hourly framing, state data and the ER-versus-GP gap.
What is the national pay range for emergency veterinarians?
Every federal figure on this page starts from one structural fact: BLS does not break veterinarian pay out by specialty or setting.
The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program publishes a single occupation code — SOC 29-1131, Veterinarians — for general practitioners, ER doctors, specialists and everyone else, so the OEWS tables carry no emergency-specific wage line to quote.
What the May 2025 OEWS release does give is the all-veterinarian distribution, emergency veterinarians inside it.
The median was $130,100 a year.
The mean was $142,680.
The percentiles ran from $73,920 at the 10th to $215,700 at the 90th, with the middle half earning between $101,460 and $166,120.
Within the Veterinary Services industry classification (NAICS 541940), 75,160 veterinarians were employed at a median of $129,990.
AVMA's member survey reads consistently from the other direction: average professional income reported in 2024 for 2023 was $149,856 across all veterinary positions, median $133,000 (n=2,217), from the 2025 AVMA Report on the Economic State of the Veterinary Profession.
Neither source isolates emergency practice in these tables — the one AVMA cut that does is the practice-function comparison in the ER-versus-GP section below.
If you're still mapping the role itself — the license, the shift structure, the optional ACVECC specialty path — the emergency veterinarian career guide covers it.
For the all-veterinarian distribution in full, all veterinarian pay unpacks the OEWS percentiles and what moves them.
Every figure above is the all-veterinarian number
What do emergency veterinarians earn per hour — and per shift?
BLS publishes the hourly series in its own right, and the all-veterinarian numbers read: median $62.55 an hour, with the 10th percentile at $35.54 and the 90th at $103.70.
The mean hourly wage was $68.60.
Emergency veterinarians are inside these numbers, unnamed — the same limitation as every federal figure on this page.
Per-shift pay is where the honest answer is that no sourced figure exists.
Neither BLS, nor AVMA, nor the Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care Society (VECCS) publishes a typical per-shift rate for veterinary ER work — so any specific shift rate you see quoted is one employer's number, not a market benchmark.
That is also why this page never converts the annual figures into shift pay: a conversion would bake in an hours assumption the sources don't make.
The components an ER offer actually builds on — shift differentials, on-call terms, emergency-case compensation — are broken down in how ER vets are paid.
Why no per-shift number appears on this page
Base salary or production pay in the ER?
The pay-structure data that exists is not emergency-specific.
Among the class of 2024 entering full-time employment, 67.4% were paid a base salary plus a production bonus, 31.7% a guaranteed salary only, and 1.0% 100% production, per AVMA's Graduating Senior Survey in the 2025 report.
A production bonus ties part of take-home pay to measured output — the cases handled and the charges they generate — rather than to hours alone.
That category is a structure, not a set of terms: whether a given 'base plus production' offer is a true floor or a recoverable draw is a contract question, not something the survey number tells you.
What no source sets is the emergency-specific arithmetic on top of these structures.
Neither AVMA, nor VECCS, nor BLS publishes an emergency production percentage, an overnight differential percentage or a typical per-shift rate for ER work — the numbers in a specific offer are the employer's.
Which makes the structural questions the ones worth asking: what the production percentage applies to, which shifts count as off-hours, and whether an off-hours uplift sits inside the production formula or on top of it.
Do emergency veterinarians make more than GP vets?
Among this page's sources, one makes a same-source, same-year emergency-versus-general-practice comparison: AVMA's Census of Veterinarians cut by practice function, published in the 2025 report.
Veterinarians whose practice function was emergency averaged $191,244 in compensation, against $142,522 for general medicine and $206,367 for specialty/referral.
The weekly hours behind those averages: 41.2 for emergency, 41.0 for general medicine and 46.8 for specialty/referral — so the emergency average was earned on essentially the same weekly hours as the general-practice figure.
Read it with three cautions.
These are means, not medians, so high earners pull them up.
Compensation is broader than base salary.
And the report does not show the sample size behind the function split, so the size of the emergency group can't be checked.
It is the only like-for-like emergency-versus-general-practice pay table among this page's sources — BLS has no setting split at all.
The gap shows up before the first job, too.
Among class-of-2024 graduates, those entering emergency and critical care expected $150,908 on average (n=289), against $129,037 for general medicine/surgery (n=1,417) and $101,573 for production medicine (n=82) — reported expectations, not verified offers.
How the two tracks compare beyond the paycheck — schedule ownership, pace, burnout — is the GP vs ER comparison.
Emergency veterinarian pay by state
State wage figures come from the same OEWS program, and the program has no emergency split — so the table below is the all-veterinarian median (BLS OEWS May 2025).
Use it as the market backdrop an ER offer is negotiated against — the emergency-specific components of pay sit on top of whatever a state's veterinarian market bears.
| Highest median (all veterinarians) | Lowest median (all veterinarians) |
|---|---|
| California — $163,920 | North Dakota — $102,180 |
| Maryland — $163,170 | Montana — $99,390 |
| Washington — $160,510 | Oklahoma — $98,090 |
| New Jersey — $160,140 | Wyoming — $97,240 |
| Arizona — $152,020 | South Dakota — $88,650 |
BLS OEWS May 2025, veterinarian median annual wage by state.
Alaska and Delaware have no published veterinarian median.
Regionally, AVMA's 2024 Census put average compensation between $135,539 in the East South Central region and $158,325 in the Middle Atlantic, with the Pacific region at $158,115.
VeterinaryHires' own listing data shows the same state spread in advertised pay: California veterinarian listings carried an employer median of $170,000 a year (33 listings), Florida $141,250, Texas $127,500 and Illinois $122,500 (October 6, 2026 snapshot; advertised pay on all veterinarian listings, not emergency-specific).
The full state-by-state read is in highest-paying states for veterinarians.
What emergency veterinarian job listings pay
The closest thing to live market data is advertised pay.
On VeterinaryHires, emergency veterinarian listings stating annual pay had an employer median of $145,000 a year (October 6, 2026 snapshot; 24 employers).
Across all veterinarian listings stating pay, the employer median was $135,000 (601 employers, 717 listings, middle half $125,000–$145,000).
Both are advertised figures — what employers post, not what anyone earns — and production is included only where an employer folds it into the posted range.
Attach the sample size before quoting either number.
Twenty-four employers is a thin slice of the emergency market, and only 63.1% of emergency veterinarian listings stated any pay at all, against 74% of veterinarian listings and 83.4% of vet tech listings; relief listings were lowest, at 59.4%.
Employers that post pay are a self-selected group, so a listing median describes the advertised market, not the whole market.
Browse emergency vet jobs to compare individual posted ranges — the only pay figure that reflects one hospital's shift structure rather than an aggregate.