A relief veterinarian agreement sets the written terms for a licensed vet covering shifts at your practice as an independent contractor: scope of practice, schedule, how the rate is calculated, cancellation notice, who covers controlled substances and liability insurance, medical-records duties, and the boundaries that keep a contractor from drifting into employee territory.
Put every one of those in writing even for a single day — this page walks through the clauses a relief veterinarian contract should settle.
Rules vary by state and change
This guide explains federal rules and the state rules it names, as of the date above.
Employment law and veterinary practice rules differ by state and are revised often, so confirm current requirements with your state veterinary board, labor agency or employment counsel before you act on them.
It is general information, not legal advice.
Why a written agreement matters even for one shift
A relief veterinarian — sometimes listed as a locum tenens vet — steps into your building, your client records, your drug shelf and your team, often while you are stretched thin.
That is when the loose arrangement fails: an adverse drug event on a Saturday, a controlled-substance count that doesn't reconcile, a cancellation the night before, a client complaint that surfaces two weeks after the vet has gone.
With a signed agreement, each has a documented answer; from memory, each becomes an argument.
The document does two jobs.
First, it settles the deal: what the vet does, when, on what rate basis, and who cancels under what notice.
Second, it creates a record you may need later: the controlled-substance arrangement confirmed with the regulators, the insurance certificates exchanged, the working pattern both sides agreed to.
That record matters because a signature block reading "independent contractor" does not, by itself, decide tax status: the IRS looks at the entire relationship — what actually happens in the hospital, not only what the paper says.
One scope note before the clauses: this page is about the contract itself.
Whether to use relief at all, and where to find relief vets, is a different decision — covering gaps with relief vets walks through it.
Whether a particular relief vet belongs on a 1099 or your payroll is taken up below.
Scope, schedule, rate basis and cancellation terms
These four terms are the deal, and vagueness in any one of them is where relief relationships sour.
Scope.
Name what the relief vet will do — wellness appointments, sick visits, surgery, emergencies, euthanasias, house calls — and what they will not.
If they will work up hospitalized patients or be the only DVM in the building, say so; those details change supervision, staffing and drug access.
Confirm the vet holds an active license in your state before signing, not after — run it through license verification against the state board's record.
Schedule.
Put the dates and hours of each shift in the agreement or an attached schedule, and define how extra shifts get added — an email or text confirmation works, as long as the agreement says it counts.
Rate basis.
The agreement should state how pay is calculated — per day, per hour, per shift, or as a percentage of production — and every input to that calculation: which time counts (charting after close? on-call hours? travel between sites?), when payment runs, whether emergency or after-hours work prices differently, and who pays if a staffing agency sits in the middle.
We don't publish relief day rates or agency bill rates on this site, because no sourced benchmark exists to print — the rate itself is whatever the two of you negotiate, so get the number and its basis in writing, not in a phone call.
Cancellation.
Set the notice period in both directions, and the consequence on each side of it: what the practice owes if it cancels inside the window, what happens if the vet cancels or doesn't arrive, and whether a partial fee applies to a shortened shift.
If the vet is traveling to you, settle who books and pays travel and lodging, and what happens to those costs on a cancellation.
None of this is adversarial — it is what lets both sides keep working together.
Controlled substances: whose DEA registration covers the relief vet
Start with the registration rule itself: under 21 CFR 1301.12(a), a separate DEA registration is required for each principal place of business or professional practice where controlled substances are dispensed.
Your hospital holds the registration for your address; which registration a relief veterinarian dispenses under while working there is the question the regulation text does not settle on its own.
The federal regulation that comes closest is 21 CFR 1301.22(b): an individual practitioner who is an agent or employee of another registered practitioner — a practitioner other than a mid-level practitioner, in the regulation's words — may administer or dispense — but not prescribe — controlled substances under the employer's or principal's registration, when acting in the normal course of business or employment, if state law permits.
Read the phrasing carefully: it says agent or employee.
It does not say whether an independently contracted relief vet counts as an "agent" — the text alone does not settle the question either way.
State controlled-substance rules can add requirements on top of the federal rule.
So do not write a clause that assumes an answer you have not confirmed.
Don't lean on the mobile-practice exception, either.
21 CFR 1301.12(c) lets a registered veterinarian transport and dispense controlled substances at a site other than the registered location without a separate registration, if the site is in a state where the vet is licensed and is not a principal place of business or practice.
That provision comes from the federal mobile and house-call practice law (21 U.S.C. § 822(e)(2)) — it addresses transporting and dispensing at non-principal sites, not relief work inside another practice's hospital.
What to do instead: before the first shift, confirm the arrangement with DEA and with your state veterinary board, then write what you confirmed into the agreement — which registration covers drugs used on your patients, whether the relief vet may prescribe or only administer and dispense from hospital stock, who keeps the logs and runs the counts, and who reports a theft or loss.
Verify the vet's own credentials too; DEA registration checks covers what to check and how.
Professional liability: who insures what
Two policies can be in play when a claim arises from a relief vet's case: the practice's professional liability policy and the relief vet's own.
The agreement's job is to say, in writing, which one responds to what — before the shift, not after the claim.
Start with your own policy.
Ask your agent or carrier, in writing, what happens when a veterinarian who is not your employee treats patients on your premises: whether your policy extends to them, excludes them, or expects them to carry their own.
Then ask the relief vet for a certificate of insurance showing current professional liability coverage, and file it with the agreement.
If your policy expects the vet to carry their own, make that certificate a condition of working and record that the vet's policy responds to their own acts.
We can't print a carrier's rule for you here.
When we researched this guide, the published policy pages we tried to check — AVMA PLIT's among them — did not render for our researchers, so we have no verified statement of how any specific carrier treats relief work, either under the hospital's policy or through the vet's own.
Treat coverage as a question to answer with both carriers, and record the answer.
Our guide to professional liability insurance covers the policy types and the questions to bring to your agent.
Medical records and follow-up duties
The agreement should make the record a practice record: the relief vet documents every case in your practice-management system using your templates and your aftercare instructions, and completes the record before the shift ends — or by a stated deadline for overnight and emergency cases, so a Saturday's records don't arrive on Wednesday.
Then settle the follow-up path, because that is where relief coverage actually breaks: who takes the callback about the spay the relief vet performed, who reads the cytology that results two days later, and how those cases hand back to your staff DVMs.
A simple routing rule in the agreement — rechecks and complications from cases seen during a relief shift go to a named staff DVM by default — prevents the two-practice finger-pointing that clients remember.
Retention and signature rules are state law: who must sign, amend and retain the records for cases a relief vet sees is governed by state veterinary board rules, and those rules are state-specific.
We don't have a verified cross-state summary to point you to, so confirm the requirements with your state veterinary board and write the practice's policy into the agreement.
Either way, state in the agreement that records for cases seen at your hospital remain in your practice's system, under your retention policy.
Clauses that make a contractor look like an employee
The last cluster of clauses protects the 1099 relationship itself.
The IRS sorts the evidence of control and independence into three categories — behavioral control, financial control, and the type of relationship — and looks at the entire relationship rather than any single factor or contract label.
The behavioral question is whether you control, or have the right to control, what the worker does and how; the relationship question asks whether there are written contracts or employee-type benefits, whether the relationship will continue, and whether the work is a key aspect of the business.
No set number of factors decides it, and the agency's advice is to document the factors you relied on.
Federal rulemaking is in flux here, too.
On February 26, 2026, the Department of Labor proposed rescinding its 2024 independent-contractor rule — which it is no longer applying in its investigations — and replacing it with an economic-reality test built on two core factors: control, and opportunity for profit or loss.
The comment period closed April 28, 2026, and no final rule had been issued as of October 7, 2026.
Note the direction of the proposal: the parties' actual practices matter more than what is contractually or theoretically possible.
Proposed, not final — but the same lesson runs through the IRS factors anyway: what you actually do at the hospital is the evidence.
So draft the clauses to match contractor reality, and then run the practice that way:
- Schedule from availability, not assignments. The vet tells you when they're available; you book from that. A rota you impose shift by shift reads like employer scheduling.
- Clinical judgment stays with the vet. The scope clause sets what they cover; within it, the vet decides how a case is worked. Mandatory attendance at staff meetings, required treatment-plan pre-approval, or protocols prescribed to the suture pattern cut the other way.
- Pay by invoice, not payroll. The vet bills you on the agreed rate basis and handles their own taxes. No employee-type benefits — no health coverage, paid time off or retirement match — and think twice before paying the vet's CE or license fees, which read as employee perks.
- Tools follow the roles. The vet carries their own professional liability coverage — the certificate the insurance clause requires — and invoices you for the work; you provide the facility, the support team and the medical record system.
- A bounded non-solicit. A short clause barring the relief vet from soliciting your clients or recruiting your staff for a defined period after the engagement is a reasonable ask — but restrictive covenants are state law, and the states do not treat non-solicits alike, so keep it narrow and run the wording past employment counsel. Our non-solicitation agreements guide covers where state law voids or limits one and how to set duration and scope.
- Independence on both sides. Nothing stops the vet reliefing for other hospitals, and the agreement shouldn't pretend otherwise — exclusivity is an employment signal.
The detailed classification work — the tests, the state-level differences, the cost of getting it wrong — lives in the practice-manager guide to classifying relief staff as W-2 or 1099, and the vet's side of the trade-offs is in W-2 vs 1099 for vets.
Weighing relief coverage against a permanent hire instead?
Start from the veterinary hiring hub.
Settle these before the first shift
- Scope in both directions: the case types and duties the vet will cover, and what stays with your staff.
- Dates and hours for each shift, plus how extra shifts get confirmed in writing.
- The rate and its basis, every input that counts toward it, and when payment runs.
- Cancellation notice in both directions, and what each side owes inside the window.
- The controlled-substance arrangement confirmed with DEA and your state board, then written down: which registration, prescribing or only dispensing, logs and counts, theft reporting.
- A current certificate of the vet's professional liability insurance, and your carrier's written answer on non-employed DVMs.
- Records: documentation in your system before the shift ends, and the follow-up routing for callbacks and results.
- Contractor boundaries: availability-based scheduling, invoice payment, no employee benefits, a narrow non-solicit.