There is no board called "veterinary orthopedic surgery."
A board-certified orthopedic surgeon is a diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Surgeons (ACVS) — certified in small or large animal surgery — whose caseload centers on bone and joint work.
The path after the DVM is a 12-month internship (or its equivalent) and an ACVS residency of at least three years, with fellowships beyond.
Here is the caseload, the training sequence, the GP question, the pay, and the settings.
What veterinary orthopedic surgeons do
A veterinary orthopedic surgeon is a veterinarian whose caseload centers on the skeleton — fracture repair, joint replacement, and procedures such as the tibial plateau leveling osteotomy (TPLO) — in the species their training track covers.
The title itself is not a credential.
There is no orthopedic surgery board: the AVMA-recognized certification in veterinary surgery belongs to the American College of Veterinary Surgeons, which certifies veterinarians in exactly two specialties, small animal surgery and large animal surgery.
So a board-certified veterinary orthopedic surgeon is an ACVS diplomate whose practice concentrates on bone and joint work — usually on the small animal side.
The population is small.
AVMA counted 2,588 active ACVS diplomates as of December 31, 2025; of those, 1,167 were reported in the small animal track and 530 in the large animal track.
The track figures don't add up to the total, and AVMA doesn't explain the gap — treat them as reported subsets, not a full split.
AVMA doesn't count "orthopedic surgeons" as a separate group, and our research found no headcount of the ortho focus from any source.
For the board itself — its two specialties, the examination structure and the credentialing requirements — see the veterinary surgery specialty page.
This page stays on the orthopedic track inside it: what the training runs, what it costs in years, what the alternatives are, and what the work pays.
Training: internship, ACVS residency, fellowships
ACVS's training sequence has a fixed shape, and it starts before the residency: a rotating internship of 12 months (or its equivalent, as judged by the program), then a residency of at least three years — 156 weeks — in either the large animal or the small animal surgery curriculum.
The DVM and a license
The veterinary degree itself generally takes four years — usually three of classroom, laboratory and clinical work, then a final year of clinical rotations. Practicing requires a license: all states require graduation from an accredited veterinary program and a qualifying exam, and most also require a state exam on state law.A 12-month internship, or the judged equivalent
ACVS builds the internship into its training standards as the prerequisite for entering a residency. AVMA's own framing: for some veterinarians the internship is the first step toward residency in a board specialty, and it recommends choosing one with a clear path to career advancement.The ACVS residency: 156 weeks minimum
A residency means 156 weeks of supervised training, of which 110 weeks are supervised surgical training, alongside emergency duty, specified case numbers across body systems, and research. There is an alternative track — for example, part-time or private-practice based — that stretches the same requirements over up to twice the typical time, with everything still completed within six years.Diplomate status, then an optional fellowship
Four post-residency fellowships exist: Joint Replacement Surgery, Minimally Invasive Surgery, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, and Surgical Oncology — the joint replacement one is the natural orthopedic deepening. Fellows must first complete the residency, hold ACVS diplomate status and have credentials approved by ACVS's Board of Regents; ACVS says fellowship expertise goes beyond what can be mastered in a three-year residency. The Joint Replacement fellowship carries a $1,000 training registration fee as of October 2026.
Orthopedics is not its own board — and neither is sports medicine, inside ACVS
GP vets who do ortho without board certification
Diplomate status is a specialty credential, not a second license.
Every veterinarian in the room holds the same state license; what a board-certified surgeon adds is the documented training — the internship-equivalent and the 156-week residency with logged case numbers and supervised surgical weeks behind the title.
Whether a general practice takes orthopedic cases in house — simple fracture repair, joint procedures — is a caseload and equipment decision each clinic makes.
Our research found no public count of how many general practice veterinarians do orthopedic work without board certification.
That makes the practical screen the same whether you're a pet owner weighing a referral or a veterinarian deciding how far to take ortho in a GP setting: ask what training the surgeon completed and how much of that caseload they operate.
Where board certification sits among the profession's credentials generally is laid out in how specialization works.
What veterinary orthopedic surgeons are paid
The direct answer: our research found no public source that publishes pay for veterinary orthopedic surgeons.
BLS does not break veterinarian wages out by specialty — not for orthopedics, not for the large-versus-small-animal split, not for associate versus owner — so its figures are the whole-profession benchmark.
In the May 2025 release, the median annual wage for veterinarians was $130,100 ($62.55 an hour), with the lowest 10 percent under $73,920 and the highest 10 percent above $215,700.
The training route has a documented starting-pay cost, though.
In AVMA's 2026 Senior Survey, graduates entering residencies averaged $54,988 in starting compensation and those entering internships $59,436 — against $133,056 for classmates going straight into full-time private practice.
Those are survey means, not medians, and they measure first-job starting pay only — not pay across the later years of the training sequence.
Where certified surgeons actually land inside that BLS distribution, the survey cannot say.
Sector-level context and the nearest honest figures are in how much a veterinary surgeon makes, and the discipline-by-discipline pay landscape is in pay by specialty.
No ortho pay figure in the sources we checked
Where veterinary orthopedic surgeons work
Set the diplomate count against the profession and the field's size comes into focus: AVMA estimates 133,475 U.S. veterinarians as of December 31, 2025, so active ACVS diplomates of every focus come to roughly one in fifty.
For scale, BLS put 83 percent of veterinarian jobs in veterinary services in 2025, with 7 percent self-employed, 2 percent in government, 2 percent in educational services and 1 percent in social advocacy organizations.
The two training tracks lead to different caseloads — large animal or small animal — and the caseload points at the employer.
When you search, look where a surgical caseload can support a dedicated surgeon: referral and specialty hospitals and university teaching hospitals are the settings the where specialists actually work deep-dive breaks down setting by setting.
Then search the open veterinarian jobs by role title rather than the phrase "orthopedic surgeon", and read the posting's caseload description for the ortho focus.
Reading this from the employer side?
Start from the guide to hiring a veterinarian.