Why Associates Leave: Retention Beyond Pay

AAHA's 2023 "Stay, Please" survey is the source behind most of what's known about veterinary retention, and it's worth naming precisely: an online survey fielded March 10–30, 2023, sent to 133,259 people across the veterinary community, with 14,414 completed responses (a 10.8% response rate AAHA itself calls roughly double the typical 5%).

More than 12,000 respondents were currently in clinical practice.

It covers the whole veterinary workforce, not DVMs alone, so read every figure below with that scope in mind.

The finding that should change how a practice thinks about retention is an asymmetry.

Fair compensation ranks fourth among reasons people give for staying in their current job — 30.2% named it in their top three, behind staff working as a team (40.8%), practicing modern medicine (34.3%), and doing meaningful work (32.2%).

But among people already planning to leave, fair compensation is the single strongest factor that would change their mind — 52.5% named it, well ahead of anything else.

Compensation doesn't build loyalty the way it accelerates an exit.

A raise offered to someone already checked out often works; the same raise, alone, does little to stop the checking-out in the first place.

The overall numbers are worth sitting with. 30% of respondents currently in clinical practice said they planned to leave their current job within the next year.

Half of that group — 15% of the total surveyed workforce — planned to leave clinical veterinary practice altogether, and nine in ten of those said they'd never return.

AAHA's own persona breakdown groups associate veterinarians and credentialed technicians together as "Vet Med for Life": 24% plan to change jobs, but they're more likely than other roles to stay in veterinary medicine — which is exactly why losing one to another practice, rather than to the industry, is the problem worth solving here.

AAHA cites its own 2022 staffing survey finding that filling a full-time DVM, CVT, RVT, or LVT vacancy commonly takes over a year.

Reorder the retention conversation around what the data says works, not what's easiest to authorize in a budget meeting.

In descending order, the top reasons AAHA's respondents gave for staying: staff functioning as a team (40.8%), practicing modern and/or sound medicine (34.3%), doing meaningful work (32.2%), fair compensation (30.2%), flexibility in scheduling and duties (27.6%), and feeling appreciated for the work (25.0%).

"Practicing modern medicine" is the one hiring managers most often mistake for an equipment line item.

It shows up just as much in whether a credentialed technician is actually delegated the anesthesia, dental, and monitoring work their license allows — freeing the associate to work at the top of their own license instead of covering gaps a fully-utilized support team would close.

AAHA's own technician-utilization guidelines report that practices where veterinarians rarely perform tasks a credentialed technician could do see an average 36% revenue increase — a figure AAHA attributes to its own guidelines without a stated method or year, so treat it as directional, not as a number to build a proposal around.

The retention logic holds either way: an associate working below their license on tasks a well-utilized tech team could absorb is living the opposite of "modern medicine," regardless of what's in the treatment room.

"Staff functioning as a team" and "feeling appreciated" are culture measures, not perks — and they're cheaper to build than a raise, which is part of why they rank where they do.

Neither shows up on a job posting.

Both show up in exit interviews.

AAHA's 2023 Mentoring Guidelines put it plainly: a lack of high-quality mentorship "remains one of the most common reasons new graduates leave their first practice." That's a specific, actionable claim — and AAHA backs it with a specific definition of what mentorship is meant to look like: not an assigned "buddy," but a structured relationship with a defined delivery model, written expectations, a fixed cadence, and an end point.

The upside is measurable on the mentor's side too: AAHA reports that formal mentors are promoted roughly six times more often than non-mentors in the same guidelines.

A structured mentorship program isn't just a new-grad retention tool — it's also a stated career path for the associates you're trying to keep past year one.

For the full build — delivery models, the escalation path and evaluation form most practices skip, and what to do if you're too small to run one alone — see our mentorship program guide.

Two named analyses disagree about whether there's a companion-animal veterinarian shortage at all, and both are worth knowing because they point to the same operational conclusion.

AVMA, citing Brakke Consulting, projects the companion-animal veterinarian workforce growing more than 20% between 2022 and 2030 — enough, in its assessment, to meet demand through 2035.

Mars Veterinary Health's own commissioned analysis reaches the opposite conclusion: a shortfall of 14,000 to 24,000 companion-animal veterinarians by 2030, driven partly by the roughly one in five veterinarians who say every year they'd work fewer hours even for less pay.

Whichever forecast proves right, a practice that loses an associate today is competing for a replacement in a market that behaves tight either way.

New-grad debt raises what's at stake in every retention decision a practice makes.

The 2025 graduating class carried average DVM debt of $174,484 across all graduates ($212,499 among those with debt), against an average real starting salary of $129,000 — a debt-to-income ratio near 1.4:1.

An associate carrying that load is weighing every year at your practice against what it costs to leave one job for the next, which is exactly why the non-compensation factors above compound: a practice that's genuinely a good place to work is also, functionally, the practice that costs an indebted associate the least to stay at.

Burnout is trending in a direction worth watching rather than assuming has plateaued.

Merck's 2023 Veterinary Wellbeing Study found 20% of companion-animal veterinarians reporting high or very-high burnout.

AVMA's own Census of Veterinarians tracks burnout on the ProQOL scale (0–50) at an average of 26.4 in both 2023 and 2024 — down slightly from the 2020–2022 range, but AVMA separately notes that burnout specifically among relief veterinarians "dropped in 2021 and has been climbing since." Moving a burned-out associate to relief work isn't automatically the fix it looks like from the outside.

None of the above works as a one-time fix, and that's the point — retention is a practice, not a policy.

Four moves translate the data above into something a practice can actually run.

Run stay interviews, not just exit interviews. By the time someone resigns, you're negotiating with the 52.5% compensation figure — the number that moves people who've already decided to go.

A periodic, low-stakes conversation about workload, scheduling, and whether the caseload still matches what was promised catches problems while they're still in the quietly-resented stage AAHA's data describes, not after.

Build the mentorship program before you need it, not during a new grad's first bad week.

See our mentorship program guide for AAHA's full structure — delivery model, written expectations, escalation path, and a real end point — rather than an informal pairing that depends on two people's schedules lining up.

Audit technician utilization as a retention lever, not just an efficiency one. If your credentialed techs aren't doing the anesthesia, dental, and monitoring work their license covers, your associates are absorbing that gap — the opposite of the "practicing modern medicine" factor associates rank second only to teamwork.

Say the caseload and hours out loud, before the offer. A mismatch between what was promised and what the job actually is shows up directly in AAHA's data as a driver of exits, and it's the cheapest problem on this page to prevent — it just has to happen at the posting and interview stage, not after the associate has already signed.

Our hiring guide covers what to publish in the posting itself, including how to disclose the compensation structure.