Are Vet Techs in Demand? Job Outlook for Veterinary Technicians

Yes — and the projection behind the answer is unusually clear.

BLS projects employment of veterinary technologists and technicians to grow 9% from 2025 to 2035, which the agency describes as much faster than the 3% average projected for all occupations.

On top of that growth, BLS projects about 13,400 openings a year over the decade — and many of those openings are not new jobs at all.

They are seats that reopen as current technicians change occupations or leave the labor force entirely.

The occupation is small enough to feel all of that movement: about 131,400 veterinary technologists and technicians held jobs in 2025, so a five-figure number of annual openings cycles through a workforce of that size every year.

For a job seeker, the practical version of "yes, in demand" is this: the occupation is projected to grow faster than average and to keep refilling itself as people leave.

The frictions in this market are real, but they sit in pay, retention and the credential pipeline — not in a shortage of openings — and the rest of this page walks through each one.

New to the role itself?

The veterinary technician career guide covers what the job involves and how to become one.

This page stays on the market question.

BLS attributes the expected demand to two forces: rising pet ownership and pet spending, and advances in veterinary medicine for an aging pet population.

Both are demand-side forces: they describe more pets and more care, not more people trained to provide it.

The other half of the story is the pipeline that produces the people to do that work.

The supply side moves much slower than the demand side.

BLS says veterinary technicians usually hold a 2-year associate degree and veterinary technologists a 4-year bachelor's degree in veterinary technology, and AAVSB says most states and provinces require a passing VTNE score for a technician to be credentialed.

A practice that is short-handed today cannot conjure credentialed staff into the building — the pipeline takes years to run a person through.

In our reading, that gap between growing demand and a slow pipeline is what makes the outlook favorable for people already in the field or entering it.

Growth explains only part of the demand story.

The other part is churn: BLS notes that many of the projected 13,400 annual openings simply replace technicians who change occupations or leave the labor force.

AAHA's 2022 industry survey shows the practice side of the same market — a credentialed technician job stayed open for an average of 12.8 months after posting, longer than assistant or client-service roles.

Why do people leave?

AAHA's 'Stay, Please' retention work was built around the 30% of veterinary professionals it found considering leaving clinical practice, and it found fair compensation especially important for credentialed technicians, assistants and CSRs.

NAVTA's own survey tells the same story from inside the profession.

Its 2024 Demographic Survey drew 1,404 responses (1,293 complete, 111 partial) between November 26 and December 31, 2024, mainly from NAVTA members.

Among those respondents, 57% said they would likely choose to become a veterinary technician again and nearly 7% said they would not; 61% were satisfied with their current job, but the share who were 'extremely satisfied' fell from 25% in 2022 to 8% in 2024.

There is also a utilization problem, and it cuts against the shortage from the other side.

In the same survey, only 36% of respondents said they feel fully utilized, 44% said sometimes, and 19% said they are not used to their fullest potential; about 48% saw little difference between the duties of credentialed and uncredentialed staff.

Put that next to the 12.8-month vacancies and the picture is sharp: credentialed jobs sit open for over a year, while — by technicians' own reporting — the credentialed staff already in the building are not always working at the top of their training.

Both give technicians reasons to look elsewhere, and every departure reopens a seat.

One caveat on tenure: NAVTA's respondents had spent an average of 14.6 years in the veterinary field, but that is a member-heavy, experienced sample.

It describes who answered the survey, not a career-length statistic for all technicians.

Demand is broad, and the honest answer starts with where the jobs actually sit.

BLS counts 89% of veterinary technologists and technicians in veterinary services — the industry that covers the private clinics and animal hospitals where BLS says vet techs typically work — and another 4% in educational services (state, local and private).

Beyond those two categories, BLS notes that vet techs may also work in laboratories, colleges and universities, and humane societies.

What the federal numbers above don't give you is a ranking: nothing in them says which state or which setting has the "most" demand, so treat any list that claims otherwise with suspicion.

The clearest signal in the data we verified is credentialed-specific — the 12.8 months a credentialed technician job stayed open on average in AAHA's 2022 survey.

That is demand measured in empty seats, and it is an average across the survey — not a figure for any one city or region.

To read your own market, skip the projections and count what is actually posted.

Browse veterinary technician jobs in your city and look at how many openings are live, whether they ask for a credential, and what they publish for pay.

A market with steady credentialed-required postings is a market where the shortage is doing some of the negotiating for you.

Here is the tension every applicant should understand: demand is strong, and pay is simultaneously the profession's loudest complaint.

In NAVTA's 2024 survey, 39% of respondents named low pay as the most challenging aspect of the job, and 56% called it the most significant issue facing veterinary technicians.

The federal pay data shows the gap they are pointing at: the national median annual wage for veterinary technologists and technicians was $47,380 in the BLS OEWS May 2025 release — $22.78 an hour — for work that BLS lists among typical vet tech duties: administering medications, vaccines and treatments prescribed by a veterinarian.

The spread inside that table is the job-search lesson.

The middle of the occupation earns $47,380, but the distance from the 10th percentile ($35,710) to the 90th ($63,180) is wide, so the national median is a starting point for research, never a quote for your zip code.

NAVTA's survey — a member-recruited sample, not a representative one — reported an average annual gross income of $53,759 among its respondents.

That is a survey average of a different sample, measured differently from the federal median, so read it as what those respondents reported rather than as a competing government figure.

What it means practically: demand plus a slow credential pipeline is leverage, and the technicians who capture it are the ones who walk into negotiations knowing these numbers.

If you are weighing the career itself, start with the vet tech salary guide for the full pay picture, and the honest debt-versus-pay math in is being a vet tech worth it.

Reading this from the other side of the desk?

The employer-side guide to hiring a veterinary technician covers what practices are up against in this same market.