What Does a Relief Veterinarian Do?

A relief veterinarian is a licensed DVM or VMD who covers clinical shifts at practices on a contract or per-diem basis instead of holding a single staff position.

The arrangement is also called locum work — the two terms describe the same thing; "relief" is simply the term more commonly used in US veterinary medicine.

The clinical medicine itself is ordinary veterinary practice: examinations, surgery, diagnostics, client conversations, all governed by the same reserved scope every licensed veterinarian holds.

What makes the role distinct is the employment relationship and the logistics around it — how you're paid, whether you're even an employee, which state's license and insurance apply on a given day, and the fact that you rarely see the same patient twice.

It's a real and sizeable part of the profession, not a fringe arrangement.

Veterinarians who identified as working in a relief or contract position made up 9.1% of veterinarians in private practice, behind associate (57.4%) and owner (23.8%), in AVMA's Census of Veterinarians.

A relief shift starts cold.

You arrive at a practice, get a short orientation to its practice-management software, protocols and staff, and then work through the day's scheduled caseload — the same mix of wellness visits, sick patients and scheduled surgery any small-animal shift would carry.

What's absent is continuity.

You typically don't follow up on a case you saw last week, you aren't building a client relationship over years, and you usually aren't carrying the management layer a staff veterinarian gradually takes on — staff supervision, controlled-substance recordkeeping, a share of the practice's numbers.

For a lot of relief veterinarians that trade is the point: clinical work without the administrative layer, and control over which days you work at all.

Both do the same clinical work under the same scope reserved to any licensed veterinarian — diagnosis, prognosis, prescribing and surgery.

Almost everything else differs.

• Employment relationship. Most relief work is paid as 1099 contract labor; most staff veterinarians are W-2 employees. A W-2 relief option also exists — some staffing organizations directly employ relief veterinarians and place them into shifts.
• Compensation structure. A staff associate is typically paid a salary or a production formula like ProSal; relief is priced per shift rather than as a salary.
• Benefits. A staff role commonly comes with employer-provided health insurance, retirement contributions, CE funding and licensing/dues coverage; an independent 1099 relief veterinarian funds all of that themselves unless working through a W-2 staffing employer.
• Continuity and mentorship. Staff roles build long-term client relationships and, ideally, structured mentorship; relief work is built around variety and short engagements instead.

One thing that doesn't sort neatly by role: burnout. AVMA's own tracking shows staff-associate burnout climbing sharply at the pandemic's onset and easing since, while relief-vet burnout moved the opposite way — it dropped in 2021 and has been climbing since.

Relief is not automatically the lower-stress option.

The full financial comparison — 1099-vs-W-2 classification and what a day rate actually has to absorb before any of it is take-home income — is covered in Relief Veterinary Work: 1099, W-2, and What a Rate Has to Cover.

This page is about the role itself, not the economics behind it.

Practices book relief coverage to fill gaps a staff schedule can't absorb on its own — the full range of scenarios and what makes the commercial shape different from employment is covered in Relief Veterinary Work: 1099, W-2, and What a Rate Has to Cover.

Who takes relief work varies by career stage.

It functions as a deliberate lifestyle and income strategy for experienced veterinarians — including some easing out of ownership — who want clinical work without a single fixed employer or schedule.

It's also used by veterinarians relocating, traveling, easing toward retirement, or sampling different practices and settings before committing to a staff role.

The logistics of relief work are dominated by one fact: there is no national veterinary license. Every state issues its own, with its own application, fees, renewal cycle and often its own jurisprudence exam on top of the NAVLE.

A relief veterinarian working across state lines needs an active license in every state where they take a shift — not one portable credential.

Some states offer a temporary or short-term veterinary permit, but that category is narrower than it sounds.

These permits typically serve one of three different purposes — a bridge for new graduates awaiting exam results, a bridge for candidates completing a foreign-credential equivalence pathway, or a genuine short-term practice permit for an already-licensed out-of-state veterinarian.

That third type — the real relief/locum analogue — is the least common of the three, and it is not universal: California has no temporary or relief veterinarian license of any kind; a full biennial license is required to practice there, including for relief work, with no exception found in its statute.

Liability coverage has to follow the same state-by-state pattern — what a relief rate has to cover works through the insurance side, including why you shouldn't assume a hosting practice's policy covers you.

There's no separate credential or certification for relief work itself — the entry point is the same license every veterinarian needs.

Most relief veterinarians have already worked as a staff associate first — the move typically follows a few years of building clinical confidence and a network of practices to book with.

Nothing legally prevents going straight to relief work out of school, but it's the less common path.

Browse open relief veterinarian positions to see what practices are currently booking.

BLS doesn't track relief or locum veterinary work as its own occupational category, so there's no BLS wage percentile specific to relief work the way there is for veterinarians generally.

The most directly relevant figure instead comes from AVMA's own Census of Veterinarians.

Veterinarians who identified their position as "relief or contract veterinarian" reported a median annual income of $120,000 and a mean of $123,501 (lower quartile $75,000, upper quartile $150,000, n=153) — professional income earned in 2023, reported in AVMA's 2025 Report on the Economic State of the Veterinary Profession.