Veterinarian Salary in South Dakota

South Dakota trails the national distribution at every published percentile, but the gap is not constant.

At the 10th percentile, South Dakota's $61,640 sits $12,280, or 17%, below the national $73,920 — the narrowest gap on the page.

The gap grows through the middle: the 25th percentile is $26,600, or 26%, below the national $101,460, and the median of $88,650 is $41,450, or 32%, below the national $130,100.

It is widest at the top: the South Dakota 90th percentile of $128,920 sits $86,780, or 40%, below the national $215,700.

A veterinarian benchmarking a South Dakota offer against a national percentile figure should expect the biggest shortfall near the ceiling, not the floor.

The middle half of South Dakota veterinarians — those between the 25th and 75th percentiles — earned between $74,860 and $114,400, a band $39,540 wide.

Nationally the same band runs from $101,460 to $166,120, a wider $64,660 span.

The full range runs further apart too: the South Dakota 10th percentile is $61,640 and the 90th is $128,920, a $67,280 span, against a national span of $141,780 from $73,920 to $215,700.

The South Dakota median of $88,650 sits closer to the floor of its own band than to the ceiling.

OEWS publishes the shape of the distribution, not what produces it, so this page does not attribute the narrower South Dakota range to any particular kind of practice or employer.

The hourly figures echo the annual ones.

South Dakota's hourly median of $42.62 sits $19.93, or 32%, below the national hourly median of $62.55 — the same 32% gap the annual median shows, since OEWS derives the hourly figure from the same underlying wage data.

A job posting quoting an hourly rate near $42.62 in South Dakota is quoting the state's middle, not the national middle; reading it against the $62.55 national hourly median without adjusting for the state's lower distribution will make a typical South Dakota rate look low by comparison, when it is simply typical for the state.

BLS estimates that 280 veterinarians were employed in South Dakota, ranked 45th of the 49 jurisdictions that publish a median, so the percentiles on this page summarise a comparatively small group of veterinarians.

The figure is a headcount of people in jobs during the survey period, not a count of open positions, and it says nothing about how quickly any one employer fills a role.

A workforce this size still means the state's percentiles describe real, employed veterinarians; it is a reason to read each percentile as resting on fewer individual salaries than in a state with a larger workforce, not a reason to discount the figures.

Practising veterinary medicine in South Dakota takes a license from the SD Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners.

Applicants clear the NAVLE at a state-set passing score of 425 — or the legacy NBE and CCT combination at a 70-point passing score — plus South Dakota's own online jurisprudence examination, passed at a 90-point standard and covering state law and AVMA ethics.

Foreign graduates qualify through an ECFVG certificate, a PAVE certificate, or a Canadian Veterinary Medical Association certificate of qualification, and a U.S. citizen or South Dakota resident already actively practising in another state can be licensed without examination under SDCL § 36-12-15. 16 hours of continuing education are required every year.

Those steps hold regardless of where a job sits on this page's wage distribution; the full South Dakota license requirements page walks through each one with its citation.