ProSal pays you a guaranteed base that functions as a recoverable draw against an agreed percentage of your production — and you take home whichever is greater.
It is now the most common way associate veterinarians are paid, and most of the money in a veterinary contract turns on three details inside it: what the percentage is, what counts as production, and whether shortfalls follow you into next month.
What ProSal actually is
ProSal is a hybrid.
You are given a guaranteed base salary, and separately your production is tracked and multiplied by an agreed percentage.
At the end of each period you receive whichever of the two is greater.
The base is not a floor plus a bonus.
It is a draw — an advance against production that the practice expects your production to cover.
In a good month production exceeds the draw and you are paid the excess.
In a poor month the draw covers you, and what happens to that shortfall is the single most important thing in the agreement.
It is not a niche arrangement.
AVMA data indicate roughly 56% of associates were paid this way in 2024, which makes it the default rather than the alternative — and makes understanding it close to mandatory before signing anything.
The production percentage
Published industry commentary generally puts associate production percentages in the region of 18% to 25%.
Associates paid purely on production with no base are usually described in the 18–21% range, with 25% treated as an upper bound.
One structural detail worth knowing: the percentage applied to product sales is typically lower than the percentage applied to professional services.
A practice with heavy retail or food sales and a single blended rate is a different proposition from one that splits them, and the split can move your number meaningfully.
Treat any percentage you read — including these — as directional.
The right comparison is not against a national figure but against what the same practice pays its other associates and what the local market supports.
General information, not financial or legal advice
Production, or collections? Gross, or net?
This is where two contracts with the same headline percentage stop being comparable.
Production versus collections. Production is what you generated.
Collections is what the practice actually received.
If you are paid on collections, you absorb a share of the practice's bad debt and payment-plan risk — outcomes you do not control.
If you are paid on production, you do not.
Gross versus net. A percentage of gross production is a different number from a percentage after deductions.
What gets deducted — discounts, staff-pet services, write-offs, lab or pharmacy costs — should be named in the agreement rather than left to practice.
Attribution. Who gets credit when you begin a case another doctor finishes, when a technician performs the dental you supervised, or when a patient is referred internally?
Sensible agreements say.
Silent ones become disputes.
A 22% contract on collections after broad deductions can pay less than a 19% contract on gross production.
The percentage alone tells you very little.
Negative accrual — the clause that surprises people
Negative accrual is what happens when the draw exceeds production.
You have been paid more than you produced, and the shortfall becomes a balance you owe the practice — typically recovered by docking future paychecks.
Mechanically it is not unreasonable in isolation: the base was an advance.
What determines whether it is fair is how long the shortfall follows you.
Some agreements let negative balances roll forward indefinitely, so a slow first quarter — or a maternity leave, an injury, a practice's own scheduling failure — can sit against your earnings for a long time.
Others limit recovery to a fixed lookback period, after which the balance resets and the base becomes what it appeared to be.
The difference between those two is not a detail.
It is the difference between a guaranteed base and a loan.
Why new graduates are most exposed
What "no negative accrual" means
A growing share of practices now offer agreements with no negative accrual.
In those, the base is a genuine floor: if production falls short, the practice absorbs it and nothing carries forward.
Some industry commentators argue negative accrual should be avoided entirely, and the pattern they describe as fair is a market-aligned base, a transparent production percentage, no negative accrual, and benefits that are actually competitive.
Where a practice will not drop it, there are middle positions that get negotiated in practice: a cap on how much can be recouped, a reset period that clears the balance periodically, or conversion of the recoverable draw into a true guarantee once you pass a production threshold.
Knowing those exist matters, because "that's just how ProSal works" is a negotiating position, not a fact.
What to establish before you sign
Every one of these should have a clear answer in the document itself, not in a conversation you half-remember.
- What is the production percentage — and is it different for professional services versus product sales?
- Is it calculated on production or on collections?
- Gross or net — and exactly what is deducted before the percentage applies?
- How is production attributed on shared, referred and technician-performed work?
- Is there negative accrual at all?
- If so: does the balance roll forward indefinitely, or is there a lookback period or reset?
- Is there a cap on recoupment, or a threshold at which the draw becomes a true guarantee?
- How often is production reconciled — monthly, quarterly, annually?
- What happens to the balance if you leave, or during leave?
If the agreement is silent on any of them, that silence is itself the answer you need to negotiate against.
And if a practice is unwilling to put a verbal assurance into the document, treat the verbal assurance as not existing.
If you're the employer
The structural argument for ProSal is genuine: it shares risk, rewards productivity, and protects an associate through a slow patch in a way pure production does not.
Where it damages trust is when the mechanics are opaque.
An associate who cannot reconcile their own paycheck — because attribution is unclear, deductions are unstated, or the reconciliation period is not explained — will assume the worst, and will be right often enough that the assumption spreads.
The practices that do this well tend to share the same things: production reports the associate can actually read, attribution rules written down before a dispute arises, and either no negative accrual or a clearly bounded version of it.
That is also, not coincidentally, what makes an offer competitive when you are recruiting against a market where open veterinarian positions are plentiful and candidates compare terms carefully.