A veterinary professional associate (VPA) is a new mid-level veterinary role — someone holding a master's degree in veterinary clinical care who practices veterinary medicine under a licensed veterinarian's supervision.
As of September 16, 2026, the role exists only in Colorado, which created it by ballot measure in November 2024.
No national VPA exam exists yet, board rulemaking is incomplete, and no one is registered as a VPA anywhere.
This page is a dated tracker, not an evergreen definition.
Where the role came from
The role's proper name is veterinary professional associate — Colorado's specific statutory creation. Mid-level practitioner (MLP) is the generic term the profession uses for the broader concept, and it is the term most position statements argue about.
Treat the two as synonyms only when the conversation is about Colorado.
The idea originated inside Colorado's 2021–2022 sunset review of its veterinary practice act.
The Colorado Veterinary Medical Association's task force for that review considered a mid-level role, and in the summer of 2022 state Representative Karen McCormick — a veterinarian — convened a working group of roughly 35 stakeholders that met biweekly in 90-minute sessions.
The working group did not produce the proposal.
After about six months, most previously-undecided participants had concluded against creating the role, and its proponents pivoted to a citizen ballot initiative to let voters decide (AVMA News, October 22, 2024).
That initiative was certified for the November 5, 2024 ballot as Proposition 129, "Establish Qualifications and Registration for Veterinary Professional Associate" (Colorado Secretary of State, September 9, 2024).
Colorado voters passed it 52.76% to 47.24% — roughly 1.57 million votes to 1.41 million.
Those totals are reported secondhand for this tracker: the Secretary of State's results system could not be read directly, so treat the split as secondary rather than a directly-read certification.
What Colorado's two statutes actually require
Proposition 129 wrote its framework directly into Colorado statute.
As enacted, a VPA is an individual who holds "a master's degree in veterinary clinical care, or the equivalent, as determined by the board" (C.R.S. 12-315-104(21.7), 12-315-203.7(2)).
Registration has been a legal requirement for anyone practicing as a VPA in Colorado since January 1, 2026, and from that date only a registered individual may use the title "veterinary professional associate," "registered veterinary professional associate," or the initials VPA or RVPA.
Practicing as a VPA without registration is a class 2 misdemeanor.
The operating mechanics came from a second statute, HB25-1285, signed May 30, 2025 and also effective January 1, 2026.
As of this tracker's September 16, 2026 verification, its rules are:
- Supervision defaults to immediate or direct by a licensed veterinarian who is responsible for the VPA's performance. Indirect supervision is earned, not default: a VPA may practice under it only after meeting clinical benchmarks, including a specified number of supervised hours the board has not yet set by rule.
- No telesupervision. The bill's own summary states that telesupervision of a VPA practicing veterinary medicine is not permitted.
- A maximum of three VPAs per supervising veterinarian at any one time, who must be located at the same veterinary premises unless indirect supervision has been earned.
- A written supervisory agreement kept on file at both parties' places of business, covering verified training and experience, the species the VPA is trained for, and the supervision start and end dates.
- The veterinarian-client-patient relationship is reserved to the veterinarian — a VPA cannot establish a VCPR, and delegated work depends on one existing first.
- VPAs are not "prescribers." Colorado's e-prescribing statute names licensed veterinarians, not VPAs (C.R.S. 12-30-109(4)) — the clearest statutory evidence that VPAs hold no independent prescribing authority.
- Client disclosure is mandatory. A VPA must clearly identify themself, visually and verbally, as a veterinary professional associate, and employers must disclose that a VPA rather than a veterinarian is providing the care.
- Supervision cannot be forced. A corporation, employer, director, or officer may not require a veterinarian to enter a supervisory agreement or supervise a VPA as a condition of continued employment (C.R.S. 12-315-121(3)(b)).
This is a dated tracker on a fast-moving target
What a VPA may do — and what stays with the veterinarian
The structural difference from every existing staff credential is the thing to understand.
A credentialed technician's boundary is a fixed statutory list: diagnose, prognose, prescribe, and perform surgery are reserved to the veterinarian, and everything below that line is state-dependent.
A VPA's boundary, by contrast, is case-by-case and delegation-defined — the statute authorizes a VPA to practice veterinary medicine that is "within the veterinary professional associate's advanced education and experience," performing only duties the supervising veterinarian has determined the VPA has the necessary training and experience for (C.R.S. 12-315-105(1)(r), 12-315-209.7).
That design means the same VPA could lawfully do more in one practice than in another, depending on each supervising veterinarian's judgment — which is precisely the ambiguity opponents cite.
The state's own voter guide framed the concern in its Argument Against: the measure's education and training requirements are "vague and do not differentiate veterinary professional associates from existing veterinary care professionals" (2023–2024 Colorado Legislative Blue Book).
Colorado's official voter guide also published this side-by-side, reproduced verbatim from its Table 1 (note the VPA column predates HB25-1285 — the supervision mechanics above are the 2025 additions):
| Veterinary technician | Veterinary technician specialist | Doctor of Veterinary Medicine | Veterinary professional associate | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Degree requirements | Either an associate's or bachelor's degree in veterinary technology. | Either an associate's or bachelor's degree in veterinary technology, and three to five years of clinical experience and training. | Advanced doctorate degree and clinical experience. | Master's degree in veterinary clinical care. Additional qualifications and training may be determined by the state board. |
| Scope of practice | Provides support to licensed veterinarians, including performing dental procedures, advanced nursing care, animal health education, and treating minor medical conditions. | Performs the same tasks as a veterinary technician, as well as specialized support including emergency medicine and surgical assistance. | Performs all levels of care including diagnosis, prognosis, prescribing medications, and conducting surgery. Responsible for the supervision of all veterinary care. | May perform tasks that are within the individual's advanced education and training. Full scope of practice may be determined by the state board. |
What the statutes do not do is grant the four reserved acts outright.
A VPA holds no independent authority to diagnose, prognose, prescribe, or operate: no VCPR origination, no listing as a prescriber, and supervision at all times.
Whether supervised, delegated practice should be allowed to reach acts no technician may perform is exactly the fight the rest of this page tracks — the veterinarian-side statement of that fixed boundary is in what only a veterinarian can do.
The only degree pathway: CSU's master's program
As of the September 16, 2026 verification, Colorado State University's Master of Science in Veterinary Clinical Care (MS-VCC) is the only announced pathway anywhere to the degree the Colorado statute requires — no second university program has been verified.
The program runs five semesters: the first three fully online and synchronous, the fourth 416 hours of in-person training on CSU's campus, and the fifth a 540-hour clinical internship with an approved community shelter or practice.
CSU opened applications for the program's first-ever cohort on February 3, 2026, with an April 1 priority deadline and a June 1 final deadline, and said it expects to admit 20–30 students (CSU CVMBS Source, February 3, 2026).
Admission does not require a veterinary technician credential.
The published requirements are a bachelor's degree from a CHEA-accredited institution, a 3.0 minimum GPA (2.5–2.99 considered with additional context), at least 150 hours of verifiable post-high-school veterinary work or volunteer experience, prerequisite coursework, two references, and three essays.
Training is explicitly small-animal — the program describes its scope as dogs and cats only, with no large-animal component.
CSU frames the job in supervised, front-line terms: delivering routine care under a licensed veterinarian's supervision, focusing on front-line assessments to free veterinarians for complex cases, and identifying abnormal findings on physical examinations and diagnostic tests.
Tuition is a documented gap. CSU's program pages published no tuition figure as of this verification.
The only concrete number in circulation is AVMA's own calculation — that 65 credit hours at CSU's 2024–25 graduate rates would cost about $34,430 in-state or $77,151 out-of-state — but that arithmetic rests on a pre-launch credit-hour figure CSU has not confirmed against the launched program's structure, so treat it as an informed estimate, not a sticker price.
The DVM route it sits beside is costed separately in what vet school actually costs.
One timeline caveat a tracker owes you: AVMA reported in May 2025 that CSU planned to enroll its first cohort that fall, while CSU's own February 2026 announcement opened applications for the first cohort.
This page does not resolve the difference — CSU's program page is the authority on current dates.
What matters for the tracker: as of September 16, 2026 the program had not graduated any cohort, which is also why no VPA can have been registered yet.
The exam, the registry, and the rulemaking clock
No national VPA credentialing exam exists yet — none has been named, vendored, or scheduled.
The organization building one is the AAVSB, the same body that owns the VTNE for technicians.
Its Board of Directors voted in June 2025 to fund the initial phases of creating a national VPA examination in consultation with the Colorado State Board of Veterinary Medicine, following a February 24, 2025 commitment from its then-president to help develop educational materials, standards, a national examination, and a credentialing program for VPAs (AVMA News, November 2025).
Colorado's statute also contains a fallback: if the board cannot approve a qualifying national credentialing organization, it must establish and administer a credentialing process itself by rule.
The regulator's own timeline, from Colorado DORA's Veterinary Licensing Guide (February 2025): VPA registrations "may not be obtained until sometime in late 2026" because the AAVSB examination is still in development, and the first registrations issued will carry an October 31, 2026 expiration on a two-year renewal cycle aligned with other veterinary licenses.
Two rulemaking tracks exist, and reading them separately is the trick.
The baseline Proposition 129 rules are done — the board completed them, effective January 1, 2026.
The HB25-1285 rules — the indirect-supervision hour benchmarks, credentialing-organization approval, and scope specifics — were described by DORA's own page as still to come, with a timeline to be provided.
State-board tracking coverage reported the board discussing a first draft of the HB25-1285 rules on February 12, 2026 and discussing re-opening the call for a credentialing organization on April 9, 2026 — reported secondhand, not yet confirmed from board minutes.
Bottom line, as of September 16, 2026: no one has been registered to practice as a VPA anywhere.
No source located states a registrant count or a first-registrant date, and with the only degree pathway not yet through a first cohort, zero is the figure to assume until a regulator says otherwise.
Who supports the VPA, who opposes it — in their own words
The proponents. The campaign committee behind Proposition 129 was "All Pets Deserve Vet Care," funded principally by the Dumb Friends League (roughly $1 million) and the ASPCA, with total contributions reported around $1.4 million by election time — funding figures from secondary campaign coverage, not the state's own finance database.
The official voter guide's Argument For is the closest primary statement of the case: "Many Coloradans struggle to get veterinary care for their animals, especially in rural and agricultural communities...
Veterinary professional associates could provide needed relief to overworked veterinarians, allowing them to delegate additional tasks and take better care of animals in Colorado" (2023–2024 Colorado Blue Book).
On workforce numbers, proponents lean on a Mars Veterinary Health report (August 2023, authored by Dr. Jim Lloyd) projecting the U.S. may need as many as 55,000 additional veterinarians by 2030.
Opponents counter with their own study — a Brakke Consulting workforce report covered by AVMA News in December 2024 finding no dire veterinarian shortage anticipated, and criticizing the Mars methodology for not modeling supply and demand.
The organized opposition is broad. AVMA's position page listed, at its September 16, 2026 retrieval: AVMA itself, all 50 state veterinary medical associations plus D.C. and Puerto Rico, SAVMA, species and specialty bodies including AAHA and the American Veterinary Dental College, several state veterinary technician associations, the American Kennel Club, and the American Humane Society, among others.
AVMA's core line: "Creating a veterinary midlevel position (MLP) is neither a sufficiently targeted nor practical approach to address existing workforce issues.
More expedient and sustainable solutions are available." Its stated reasons, each its own section on that page: the role is not needed (delegation already covers it), not safe (no accredited program, national test, or regulatory structure yet exists to do it safely), not comparable to a physician assistant or APRN, not practical or cheap (AVMA asserts a VPA cannot establish a VCPR under the federal definition and is federally barred from prescribing absent an act of Congress), creates liability for supervising veterinarians, and could worsen staffing shortages because VPAs also need technician support.
AVMA also cites its 2023 National Pet Owner Survey, in which 79% of pet owners wanted a licensed veterinarian — not a midlevel employee — overseeing their pet's care.
CVMA, the Colorado state association that watched the idea emerge in its own sunset review, "strongly opposes the mid-level veterinary practitioner as a new professional" (position statement adopted February 17, 2022, updated January 13, 2023) and supports increased utilization and education of veterinary technicians instead.
Its barriers list includes a pointed economics argument: the projected $80,000 VPA salary "does not fit the current reality" — noting AVMA reported only 43% of all 2021 veterinary graduates earned $80,000 or more.
NAVTA, the technicians' national association, formalized its position on March 12, 2026: "The National Association of Veterinary Technicians in America (NAVTA) does not support the current Veterinary Professional Associate (VPA)/Mid-Level Practitioner (MLP) model." It proposes instead a technician-centered pathway — structured education from accredited associate programs through bachelor's and master's-level programs plus specialty credentialing — as "an academically supported basis for future advanced scopes of practice." In NAVTA's own 2022–2023 member survey, creating a midlevel position ranked seventh of eight priorities.
AAVSB holds the tracker's strangest position — both halves at once. A 2025 resolution opposes the MLP concept as national policy, arguing shortage concerns were "overblown" and that spreading the VPA role "could erode the integrity and defined scope of practice of existing mid-level professionals, such as Certified, Licensed, and Registered Veterinary Technicians." The same organization is funding and building Colorado's actual VPA exam.
Its CEO frames the two as compatible — the resolution preserves a carve-out for assisting Colorado's implementation — but a fair citation has to carry both halves.
AAVMC, the veterinary colleges' association, is the closest thing to a fence-sitter with a paper trail: its March 2024 workforce statement calls to "initiate a profession-wide discussion to consider a new mid-level professional" — one action step among several, predating Proposition 129, endorsing no model.
No AAVMC statement on Colorado's VPA specifically has been located as of this verification.
This section records who stands where, with dates; the arguments themselves are weighed in full in the case for and against the mid-level practitioner.
Has it spread beyond Colorado?
No. Colorado is the only U.S. jurisdiction with an enacted VPA framework as of September 16, 2026 — and per AVMA's own reporting as of November 2025, "Colorado is the only state with plans for creating an MLP." AVMA's state legislative tracking reported only two states with mid-level-practitioner bills across the 2025 and 2026 sessions: Colorado and Florida (per secondary coverage of that tracking report; the underlying PDF was not publicly retrievable).
The dated state-by-state version of exactly this question — enacted where, dead where, filed nowhere — is the mid-level role state tracker's job.
Florida is the serious near-miss to know about.
Its 2026 "Veterinary Workforce and Innovation Act" (CS/SB 796 with House companion H 805) passed every Senate committee it faced before dying on the calendar when session ended on March 13, 2026 — a materially different trajectory than a bill failing in committee, and the reason it stands as the most legislatively advanced non-Colorado effort rather than a fringe proposal.
The full retelling — the committee vote tallies, the 2025 predecessor bills, and what the near-miss implies for the debate — lives on the argument page: see where the rest of the country stands there.
No litigation challenging Proposition 129 or HB25-1285 had been located as of this verification — an absence-of-evidence finding from multiple searches, not a certified negative.
And CSU's own note for out-of-state applicants doubles as the rule everywhere else: a Colorado master's degree confers no scope of practice outside Colorado, because outside Colorado there is no distinct VPA framework to practice under at all — though CSU notes many states' practice acts have shelter exemptions where a VPA could work in a shelter hospital.
What it would mean for technicians, veterinarians, and practice owners
For technicians, the live questions are pipeline and pay.
The statute's only technician bridge is narrow: Colorado's board may let a registered veterinary technician specialist's training count toward the VPA education requirement, but must still require that VTS to pass the same national credentialing exam — there is no automatic VTS-to-VPA conversion.
And the CSU program does not gate on a technician credential at all: a bachelor's degree plus 150 hours of experience qualifies, so as published it is not a technician upgrade path by default.
AAVSB's resolution names the concern directly — a spreading VPA role eroding the defined scope of existing credentialed technicians — and NAVTA's answer is to advance technicians through their own education ladder instead.
The economics of that ladder, including the current credentialing pay gap, are in credentialed vs non-credentialed vet tech pay.
For veterinarians, the statute prices supervision carefully.
Delegating duties beyond a VPA's training puts the supervising veterinarian in violation of the practice act, may make them liable for the VPA's negligence, and can mean professional discipline — the same one-way exposure structure as the delegation duty already owed for technicians and assistants.
The one explicit protection runs the other way: no employer can require you to supervise a VPA as a condition of your employment.
For practice owners, the 2026 operating constraints are concrete: a three-VPAs-per-veterinarian cap, same-premises supervision until indirect-supervision benchmarks exist in rule, written supervisory agreements on file at both businesses, mandatory client disclosure, and no telesupervision.
The corporate-practice clause — supervision decisions staying with the veterinarian rather than the employer — is the newest statutory data point in the long-running argument over who controls veterinary medicine inside corporate structures, covered in who can own a veterinary practice.
For job-seekers, the practical reality is that the role has no labor market yet — no exam, no registrants, no postings.
The first real VPA job listing will be the clearest signal this tracker has moved.
Until then, open veterinarian positions show how supervised clinical authority is actually described in live postings today.