Relief veterinarians reported a median income of $120,000 (mean $123,501) in the AVMA's 2025 Report on the Economic State of the Veterinary Profession — professional income earned in 2023, on an average workweek of 28.7 hours.
It's the only independent national figure for what relief veterinarians themselves earn: our research found no relief day rate or hourly rate published by a government agency or the AVMA, and every per-shift figure we could trace comes from relief staffing platforms.
Below is what the verified data covers, how annual income gets built from rates, and how to set and check a rate of your own.
What's a typical relief veterinarian day rate or hourly rate?
There isn't a verified one — no independent source we found publishes one.
In the government, AVMA and independent sources checked for this page, we found no relief veterinarian day rate or hourly rate, including GP, ER, shelter or last-minute premium figures.
Every per-shift figure we could trace comes from relief staffing platforms.
So this page won't quote a day rate, and you should treat any page that does — including a platform's own rate page — as marketing, not measurement.
What follows instead is what we did find: federal wage data for the profession, the AVMA's relief income figures, and what the job listings themselves show.
The closest federal number is a wage for all veterinarians — not a relief figure, and not a contract rate.
BLS OEWS May 2025 puts the median hourly wage for all veterinarians at $62.55, with the 10th percentile at $35.54 and the 90th at $103.70.
It can't isolate relief work at all, in fact: BLS publishes one occupation code (29-1131) for every veterinarian in the country, so there is no separate federal wage series for relief, emergency or shelter work.
The listings don't fill the gap either.
On VeterinaryHires, 155 of the 261 relief veterinarian listings stated any pay at all — 59.4%, behind 63.1% of emergency veterinarian listings, 74% of veterinarian listings and 83.4% of vet tech listings — and VeterinaryHires publishes no relief pay median as a result.
Browsing relief vet jobs shows what practices are posting; it doesn't yet give you a market rate card.
If you want the role itself before the economics, the relief veterinarian career guide covers what the work is and why practices use relief coverage.
Why this page won't quote a day rate
Do GP, ER and shelter relief shifts pay different rates?
The settings may well price differently — but we found no published source that documents the gap, so any per-setting ranking you read is unverified.
BLS has no separate wage series for relief, emergency or shelter veterinarians, and the AVMA income figure this page cites is a single "relief or contract veterinarian" category, so the verified data can't separate a GP day from an ER night or a shelter shift.
That matters practically.
When a platform or a colleague quotes a higher ER relief rate or a "last-minute premium," we found no independent dataset to check it against.
The gap may be real; it just isn't documented in any source we could find to cite in a negotiation.
What you can verify is what a specific shift includes.
Before comparing two offers on rate alone, ask each practice:
- Support. Are technicians and assistants scheduled onto the shift, or are you working solo?
- Supplies and equipment. What's in the building, and what are you expected to bring?
- Hours. What are the scheduled hours, and is there an on-call or after-hours expectation on top of them?
- Licensure. Is the shift in a state where you already hold a license, or one you'd need to add?
Two shifts with the same headline rate can be very different jobs once those are answered — which is exactly why a single published "ER rate" or "shelter rate" would mislead even if one existed.
Platform shifts vs independent contracting
Some relief veterinarians get their shifts through a staffing platform or agency; others contract directly with practices.
No verified data says one route pays more than the other — the pay-relevant difference is structural: what sits between the rate and your take-home, and who bears which cost.
The platforms matter to this page's numbers for one reason: they're where the circulating day-rate figures we could trace come from.
A platform publishing a "national average day rate" is describing its own marketplace — which is why this page treats those figures as marketing rather than measurement, and anchors on survey data instead.
Classification is the other fork.
Some arrangements pay you as a 1099 independent contractor; others make you a W-2 employee of the platform or practice.
The distinction reaches beyond the rate: under the National Labor Relations Act, the law's definition of "employee" excludes independent contractors, so a 1099 relief veterinarian is not covered by the NLRA's organizing protections.
Which side of the line you're on — and the full tax-and-benefits math of each — is its own topic: W-2 vs 1099 for veterinarians covers it in full.
The booking mechanics — what a shift arrangement looks like, what a day rate has to cover, and the W-2 relief option — are covered in getting started in relief.
This page stays on the money.
From day rate to annual income
Here is what the survey data actually shows.
In the 2025 AVMA report on the economic state of the profession (2023 income), relief or contract veterinarians reported a median professional income of $120,000 — mean $123,501, with the middle half between $75,000 and $150,000 (n=153).
Hours are a large part of that shape.
Relief veterinarians averaged 28.7 hours a week, against 40.9 for associates and 47.2 for practice owners in the same survey.
A relief income is the product of a rate times the days you actually book — so the annual figure moves with your calendar, not just your rate.
One deliberate omission: this page won't divide the $120,000 by those hours to manufacture an hourly figure.
Averages of self-reported annual income and self-reported hours don't produce a per-shift quote, and turning an annual figure into hourly or per-shift pay is exactly the kind of number none of the sources on this page publishes.
Run that math on your own booked days instead.
For scale, the same sources put the wider profession in context.
The 2025 AVMA report's all-positions average professional income was $149,856 (median $133,000) — so the relief median sits below the all-positions median in the same survey.
BLS OEWS May 2025 — the federal wage series for the whole occupation, one code (29-1131) with no relief breakout — shows a national median of $130,100, a mean of $142,680, and a wide spread from $73,920 at the 10th percentile to $215,700 at the 90th.
And on VeterinaryHires itself (snapshot October 6, 2026), veterinarian listings stating annual pay showed an employer median of $135,000, with the middle half at $125,000 to $145,000 — advertised pay, not earnings, and not relief-specific.
If the plan is to make relief your entire income rather than a side channel, full-time relief covers what that takes — licensure lead time, a consistently booked calendar, and the business setup.
Which year are these numbers from?
Costs a relief vet pays that an associate doesn't
Start with tax.
Self-employment tax is 15.3% — 12.4% for Social Security and 2.9% for Medicare — and it applies once net earnings from self-employment reach $400 or more.
For 2026, the maximum earnings subject to the 12.4% Social Security portion is $184,500.
Then come the categories an employment package would otherwise hold.
As an independent contractor, your health coverage, retirement contributions, CE budget, license renewals and professional dues all come out of the rate you charge — along with the unpaid admin time (invoicing, scheduling, bookkeeping) that comes with running yourself as a business.
Whether each of these actually applies to you depends on which side of the employee/contractor line a given arrangement puts you — that classification, and the full tax math on both sides, belongs to the W-2 vs 1099 page.
And the framework for pricing these costs into what you charge — what a relief rate has to cover — is in Relief Veterinary Work.
General information, not tax advice
How to set your own rate
Start from your floor, not anyone else's number.
Work out the annual income you need after the costs above — taxes, coverage, retirement, CE, licensing, unpaid admin — and divide it by the number of shift-days you can realistically book.
That result is the rate below which a shift loses you money.
The market data then tells you whether it's achievable.
For market context, BLS OEWS May 2025 shows how much veterinarian pay varies by state: the five highest state medians for all veterinarians were California $163,920, Maryland $163,170, Washington $160,510, New Jersey $160,140 and Arizona $152,020.
These are wage medians for the whole occupation, not relief rates — but they're the closest state-level read we have on how strongly each state's market pays.
Your licensure footprint decides which of those markets you can sell into at all.
Veterinarians must hold a license in each state or province where they practice — so every state you add widens your booking range and adds another license renewal to budget for.
Finally, negotiate the terms with the same energy as the number.
The employer-side guide to relief agreements (employers) advises practices to put scope, rate basis, cancellation terms, controlled-substance arrangements and liability coverage in writing before shift one — the same checklist worth arriving ready to discuss.
A rate you can't collect on schedule isn't a rate.
Then re-run the math on a rhythm.
Markets move, your licensure footprint grows, and your own booked-days average will tell you more than any published figure ever will.