What to Look for When Hiring a Relief Veterinarian
A relief veterinarian isn't a seat you fill — it's coverage you book for a gap you can name: an associate's leave, a resignation with weeks still on the schedule, a surgery day the regular team can't absorb.
That changes the sourcing question.
You're not competing with the practice hiring a full-time associate; you're looking for licensed DVMs who book defined shifts — the work you'll also see described as locum tenens.
If you're still weighing whether relief is the right tool at all, covering shifts with relief takes up that decision — this page is about finding, pricing and booking one.
Start with the channel that costs nothing: your own network.
Associates who left on good terms, vets who have reliefed for you before, and the practices around you are the first places to ask.
Cover between neighboring practices is a long-standing arrangement in this profession — so long-standing that when the FTC finalized its Mars/VCA order in December 2017, it changed the order after public comment to let long-standing arrangements that permit veterinarians at different clinics to cover for each other temporarily continue.
The boundary AVMA's 2026 economic report draws is a different line: the report warns that discussing proposed fees or employee compensation with other veterinary practices can be seen as anticompetitive and expose your practice to antitrust risk.
Swap coverage, not price lists.
Relief marketplaces and staffing agencies are the second channel.
Roo, a relief platform, describes its hospital-side terms itself: hospitals pay nothing to join and no monthly fee, pay only for confirmed shifts, and aren't charged until 72 hours before the shift takes place.
The same page describes its relief professionals as independent contractors and says Roo is unable to require them to carry liability insurance — hospitals can make coverage a requirement themselves, which you should.
Before you compare a platform's shifts against a direct booking, ask what the platform's fee or markup is — the vendor pages we read don't publish their fees or markups.
The veterinarian-side comparison of Roo, Hound, RSVP and the rest is in our relief platform comparison.
Third, post the gap.
A relief veterinarian listing puts the shift in front of qualified veterinary professionals on a board built only for veterinary practices, and even after this gap is filled the posting keeps building a roster you can call on next time.
Browse how other practices describe relief shifts before you write yours.
Whoever the channel produces, screen for what a shift worker actually needs: clinical judgment that holds up without a second DVM down the hall, documentation habits that close a record before the shift ends, speed in unfamiliar software, and references from practices shaped like yours.
It helps to know the role from the vet's side before you write the booking — what a relief vet does covers it.
Looking to hire? Post your relief veterinarian role on VeterinaryHires and reach qualified candidates.
Post a Relief Veterinarian Job →Credential Verification Checklist
License first.
Verify an active license in your state against your state veterinary board's own record before you sign anything — a résumé line and a wall certificate aren't verification.
License verification covers what to check and how.
Then settle controlled substances before the shift, not during it.
The federal regulation that comes closest to covering relief work, 21 CFR 1301.22(b), lets an individual practitioner who is an agent or employee of another registered practitioner administer or dispense — but not prescribe — controlled substances under the employer's or principal's registration, if state law permits.
Read the phrasing carefully: it says agent or employee.
Whether an independently contracted relief veterinarian counts as an agent isn't settled by the regulation's text, and state controlled-substance rules can add requirements on top.
Neither comfortable shortcut — "they can always use our registration" or "they always need their own at our address" — is settled either.
Confirm the arrangement with DEA and your state veterinary board, then write what you confirmed into the booking.
Two edges to that question.
First, the state line: DEA bases an individual practitioner's registration on a state license to practice and prescribe controlled substances, so it cannot authorize dispensing outside that state.
Second, the exception you may hear quoted — transporting and dispensing controlled substances at a site other than the registered location without a second registration, where the site is in a state where the vet is licensed and is not itself a principal place of practice (21 CFR 1301.12(c)) — addresses the house-call fact pattern, work from a registered location at sites that aren't a principal place of practice.
Don't build a booked shift inside another hospital on it; build the booking on the confirmation you got from DEA and the board.
Insurance, last.
Whether a relief veterinarian is covered under your practice's professional liability policy, or needs their own, isn't something we could verify from carrier pages — treat it as a question to answer, not an assumption to make.
The practical rule: require a current certificate of the vet's own professional liability coverage, and ask your carrier in writing how your policy treats a non-employed DVM treating patients on your premises.
Roo, for its part, states it cannot require its relief professionals to carry liability insurance as independent contractors and leaves hospitals to set the requirement — so set it.
What to Pay: Relief Veterinarian Salary Benchmarks
Start with what this page can't tell you: a day rate.
VeterinaryHires doesn't publish relief day rates or agency bill rates, because no sourced benchmark exists to print.
The number is whatever you and the vet negotiate for that engagement, so get it, and its basis, in writing rather than anchoring to a figure whose origin you can't see.
What is sourced is annual income, and it frames the negotiation rather than settling it: relief and contract veterinarians in AVMA's census reported a mean professional income of $123,501 and a median of $120,000 (153 respondents) for income earned in 2023.
That is a year's professional income across respondents, not a rate you can divide by shifts; the census figure doesn't say how many shifts anyone worked, and it does not tell you what one shift at your practice costs.
Expect to negotiate: relief listings state pay less often than any other role tracked.
On VeterinaryHires (October 6, 2026), 59.4% of relief veterinarian listings stated pay — 155 of 261.
Check live relief listings in your market for what is being posted, and treat any single rate quoted online with its source's commercial interest in mind.
Set the number per engagement, and define its inputs in writing: shift length, species mix, whether the vet will be the only DVM in the building, and what happens when the day runs long.
The vet-side framework — what comes out of a relief rate before it's take-home — is in our relief veterinarian pay guide; reading it before you negotiate shows you what the rate has to cover on the vet's side.
Writing the Job Description
For relief work, the "job description" is the written booking.
Whether you post the gap publicly or settle it with a call and an email, the engagement letter is where the role gets defined, and the terms are the ones a posting would state: scope (wellness, sick visits, surgery, emergency coverage), the dates and hours of each shift, how the rate is calculated and on what inputs, cancellation notice in both directions, who covers controlled substances, whose insurance responds, and what happens to records and callbacks after the shift.
Put every one of those in writing even for a single day.
The clause-by-clause detail, including the clauses that keep a contractor relationship looking like one, is in our relief agreements guide.
One term deserves attention before you sign anything: the 1099 label.
Classification isn't decided by the contract — the IRS sorts the evidence of control and independence into three categories (behavioral, financial, and type of relationship), looks at the entire relationship rather than any single factor, and advises documenting the factors you relied on.
Federal rulemaking is in motion too: on February 26, 2026 the Department of Labor proposed rescinding its 2024 independent-contractor rule in favor of an economic-reality test built on two core factors — control, and opportunity for profit or loss — with the comment period closing April 28, 2026 and no final rule shown on the DOL page as of its October 2026 reading.
Treat it as proposed, not in force.
The proposal puts the point directly: the parties' actual practices are more relevant than what may be contractually or theoretically possible.
Schedule from the vet's availability, pay by invoice, skip employee-type benefits — the state-level tests are on the practice-manager guide to classifying relief staff.
If you do post the shift, describe the day itself.
Species mix, surgery days, whether the vet will be the only DVM in the building, which emergencies they'll take, and the support they'll have — technicians, systems, protocols.
Write it so a stranger could picture the day — that's what tells both sides whether the shift fits before anyone commits.
Onboarding Your New Relief Veterinarian
Most of onboarding a relief DVM happens before the shift.
By the day before, you should hold: a signed agreement with scope and schedule; a license verified with your state board; the controlled-substance arrangement confirmed with DEA and your state board and written into the booking; a current certificate of insurance on file; and working system access in your practice-management software.
A relief vet who spends the first hour of a booked shift waiting on a login is a shift you've already partly wasted.
Spend the start of the shift on the walk-through: the drug shelf and its logs, where emergency drugs and equipment are, the quirks of your surgery and imaging setup, and who escalates to when the schedule runs behind.
Introduce the team by name and role, and hand over the day's schedule with your expectations for pacing.
During the shift, hold up your side of the written arrangement: controlled-substance counts and logs run the way you confirmed with DEA and the board, documentation completed in your system before the shift ends rather than days later, and a named staff DVM who owns callbacks and pending results from the cases they saw.
That last one is the easiest to leave unowned — a client calls about the spay the relief vet performed, and nobody owns the recheck.
After the shift, close the loop: confirm records are complete, debrief on anything that surprised them — the surprise is usually a protocol gap worth fixing — and say plainly whether you want to rebook.
A practice that treats every relief shift as a one-off keeps paying search costs; a practice that keeps a small roster of vets who already know its systems covers the next gap with a phone call.
Relief can also double as an audition for a permanent seat — when that's the goal, covering shifts with relief takes up the strategy.