The VIRMP match is the centralized system that places veterinarians into internship and residency training positions: applicants rank the programs they applied to, programs rank their applicants, and a matching process pairs the two lists.
In the 2026 cycle, 2,889 participating applicants competed for 2,098 positions — 56.2% matched to an internship, 34.8% to a residency.
Here is how the system actually works.
What the VIRMP match is
The Veterinary Internship & Residency Matching Program — VIRMP — is the centralized service that places veterinary applicants into internship and residency positions in a single annual cycle.
It is administered by Solution Innovations, Inc. and sponsored by the American Association of Veterinary Clinicians (AAVC).
One calendar, one set of rank lists, one match day covering both position types.
It is also the standard placement mechanism most colleges point candidates to.
ACVIM's own "Become a Candidate" page tells prospective residents to visit virmp.org for current openings and placement assistance — and in the 2026 cycle, 992 programs listed positions there.
This page is about the placement system, not the training itself.
What an internship is for, what a residency requires, and how the certifying exam turns a resident into a diplomate is covered in how veterinary specialization works — read that one for the pipeline and this one for the machinery that fills it.
Who's in the match: the 2026 cycle in numbers
The 2026 match drew 3,054 total applicants; 165 withdrew before the match ran, leaving 2,889 participants.
Of those, 1,484 applied to internships only, 639 applied to residencies only, and 766 applied to both — a reminder that the two tracks are one system, and many applicants play in both at once.
On the program side, 992 programs listed positions and 45 withdrew, leaving 947 in the match: 519 internship programs (191 institution-based, 328 private practice) and 428 residency programs (356 institution-based, 72 private practice).
Those programs offered 2,146 positions, of which 48 withdrew — leaving 2,098: 1,531 internship positions (527 institution-based, 1,004 private practice) and 567 residency positions (466 institution-based, 101 private practice).
Where the supply sits
How rank order lists decide placement
Both sides of the match submit rank order lists.
Applicants rank the programs they applied to, most preferred first.
Programs — the institutions and practices behind them — rank the applicants they are willing to accept, in order of preference.
The match then pairs the two lists.
The offer mechanics run from the programs' side.
A program with one position makes one initial offer, to the applicant it ranked first.
A program with multiple positions makes simultaneous offers to its top-ranked applicants, equal to the number of open slots.
As the process runs, an applicant's placement becomes final when an offer arrives from the highest-ranked program on their list that still has an open position.
Two rules give the list its force.
A program an applicant did not rank can never match to them, no matter how highly that program ranked them.
And a match, once made, is binding.
VIRMP describes this mechanism in its own materials; in structure it is a deferred-acceptance-style process, though VIRMP does not use that term itself.
Rank every program you would genuinely attend
The 2026 results: who matched, where
1,753 applicants matched: 1,264 to internships (466 to institution-based programs, 798 to private practice) and 489 to residencies (411 institution-based, 78 private practice).
The other 1,136 went unmatched.
VIRMP's overall applicant match rate was 47.96% — and the track split is the number that matters: 56.18% for internship applicants against 34.80% for residency applicants.
Residency is the harder cut, by a wide margin.
The positions themselves mostly filled.
Overall position fill was 83.56%: internship positions matched at 82.56% (88.43% institution-based, 79.48% private practice) and residency positions at 86.24% (88.20% institution-based, 77.23% private practice).
Read together, those rates locate the bottleneck: it is not a shortage of programs — more than four in five positions filled in both tracks — it is competition among applicants.
And within both tracks, institution-based positions filled at higher rates than private-practice ones, which matters when you are building a list that mixes the two.
The 2027 cycle calendar
VIRMP runs one cycle per year, and the 2027 cycle is open as of this page's update (September 2026).
The published calendar:
- Sept 1, 2026 — institutions begin entering program information
- Nov 1, 2026 — applications open; applicants register and build rank order lists
- Jan 4, 2027, 9:00pm ET — application deadline
- Feb 12, 2027, 9:00pm ET — applicant rank order lists due
- Feb 17, 2027, 11:59pm ET — program rank order lists due
- March 1, 2027, 8:00am ET — match results released
Dates are VIRMP's, and VIRMP owns the calendar
What the positions pay
Two sources put intern and resident pay in the same band.
The primary one is AVMA's survey of the class of 2024 — people who actually took these positions: internships averaged $56,705 (n=774) and residencies $54,847 (n=69).
The second source is VIRMP's own listing data.
VIRMP publishes position-level stipends in a raw salary workbook but no aggregate — so the figures below are our calculation on VIRMP's 2026 data, not a statistic VIRMP publishes.
Across 464 US-dollar internship postings, listed pay ran a mean of $58,943 and a median of $60,000 (range $30,000–$140,000).
Across 426 US-dollar residency postings: mean $53,663, median $51,862 (range $35,000–$120,000).
The caveats are load-bearing.
These are posted asking stipends pooled across every specialty, institution type and experience tier — a dermatology residency stipend and a shelter-medicine residency stipend sit in the same pool — so they are not a controlled comparison and say nothing about any specific program.
What they do provide is a cross-check: an independent posting-side sample landing in the same $52,000–$60,000 band as AVMA's survey.
The financial context is the point: these years pay roughly $52,000–$60,000 while educational debt is at its largest and interest keeps accruing.
How that trade flows through the ratio is covered in the debt-to-income guide, and what full-time associate work pays instead is broken out by practice type on the new-grad salary page.
Different samples, same story
If you don't match
1,136 of the 2,889 participating applicants matched nowhere in 2026.
The odds make that arithmetic unsurprising: residency applicants faced a 34.8% match rate, and 639 participants applied to residencies only.
The odd part is that unfilled positions exist in the same year.
Position fill of 82.56% for internships and 86.24% for residencies means — taking the complement — roughly 17.4% of internship positions and 13.8% of residency positions matched to no one.
Unmatched applicants and unfilled positions coexist because a match requires both sides to rank each other: an applicant and a position pair only where the lists meet.
VIRMP's published summary counts both sides; it does not track what unmatched applicants do next.
What the numbers support is preparation rather than prediction: work from the calendar (applications open November 1), rank every program you would genuinely attend, and enter match day with a plan that does not assume a match.
For residency-track applicants, it is also worth knowing that several colleges name certification routes that never run through a matched residency — ACT's six-year practice-first mentorship route, and the experiential routes at ACLAM and ACZM — covered in how veterinary specialization works.
And if the year after the DVM turns toward clinical practice instead, you can browse open veterinarian positions to see what is on the market.