If your gap is temporary — a leave, a busy season, a surgery backlog — a staffing agency or a relief app can put coverage on your schedule without a permanent hire, and which one fits depends on how much of the employment burden you want someone else to carry.
This guide explains how agencies and marketplaces differ, what each one bills you for, where classification and liability land, and when a temp arrangement is worth it versus posting the job yourself.
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.
Agencies vs relief marketplaces
Staffing agencies and relief marketplaces solve the same problem — covering shifts your own team can't cover — but they split the work differently.
An agency sells exactly that handling: it recruits the temporary professional and runs the employment side for the workers it places, and you get one bill for the arrangement.
Make it confirm in writing which pieces it actually carries — payroll, tax paperwork, insurance — because that allocation is what you're buying.
A relief marketplace is a matching layer: your practice posts the shift, relief professionals who have joined the platform book it, and the employment questions stay between you and the professional rather than moving to a middleman.
Relief apps such as Roo — with Evette competing in the same relief-marketplace space — put the recruiting and scheduling online.
Roo is the useful concrete example because it publishes its mechanics: hospitals join and post shifts, relief professionals book the ones that fit, and Roo describes the professionals on its platform as independent contractors, not employees.
That last point is the structural difference in one sentence: the platform takes the friction out of finding coverage and, by its own description, does not become the employer.
Which model fits depends on how much of the employment burden you want to keep.
The agency route bundles the handling into one bill — ask what that costs and what it includes; the marketplace route strips out the middleman but leaves classification, insurance and controlled-substance questions on your desk — which is the next section's subject.
The same decisions run through the whole team, not just DVMs: if you need relief and per-diem techs, that role has its own hiring guide.
One boundary worth drawing early: this page is about temporary veterinary staffing.
If the role you need is permanent, that is permanent placement — how veterinary recruiters work and charge is a different service with its own guide.
What they cost
We didn't find a clean published price list on the vendor pages we read, so this section explains the shape of each bill and what to get in writing rather than quoting numbers we couldn't source.
The agency bill.
You're quoted a rate for the worker's time, and what sits inside it — the professional's pay, payroll taxes, insurance, the agency's fee — is exactly what to nail down.
Ask for the components separately and in writing: how much of the rate reaches the worker, what insurance is included, and what the rate does if the assignment converts to a permanent hire later.
The marketplace bill.
Roo's own hospital FAQ says hospitals pay nothing to join, pay no monthly fee, and pay only for confirmed shifts — and Roo won't charge until 72 hours before the shift takes place.
That confirms the pricing model (per confirmed shift, not a subscription) but not the amount: Roo doesn't publish the fee inside a confirmed shift, and the other marketplaces we read don't publish theirs either.
Treat any figure that matters as something to request in writing for your actual shift, not something to read off a homepage.
The labor underneath.
One sourced anchor exists for the underlying labor market: in AVMA's census of the profession, relief or contract veterinarians reported mean professional income of $123,501 (median $120,000, 153 respondents) for 2023.
That is an annual professional income — not a day rate, not an hourly bill rate, and not a price for your shift — but it tells you the labor you're buying is professional-level work, and it's a reasonable reference point when a quote needs a sanity check.
Because the intermediaries' fees are opaque by default, the workable comparison is manual: price the same shift through an agency and through a marketplace, ask each exactly what the rate includes, and write the answers into the agreement before the first shift runs.
If your need is actually permanent, step out of this market entirely — the last section covers that route.
Classification and liability
Who carries the employer's obligations is the real difference between the two models, and it is the part you should never assume a platform or agency has settled for you.
Who employs the worker?
With an agency, part of what you're buying is the agency running payroll and withholding for the workers it places — confirm in the agreement who the employer is and whose insurance follows the worker onto your floor.
With a marketplace, the platform is explicit about its position: Roo describes its relief professionals as independent contractors, says it is unable to require them to carry liability insurance, and leaves it to hospitals to make insurance a requirement of a booking.
Engage a relief professional directly, and the classification question is entirely yours.
The IRS weighs evidence of control and independence in three categories — behavioral control, financial control and the type of relationship.
There is no set number of factors that makes a worker an employee or a contractor: the IRS says to look at the entire relationship and the extent of the right to direct and control the worker, and to document the factors you used.
Documentation is the step that's easy to skip.
Write down why you concluded what you concluded while you're making the decision, not after a question is raised.
The full walkthrough of the W-2 vs 1099 decision for relief staff — what each factor looks like inside a veterinary practice — is in our guide to classifying relief staff.
Federal rulemaking is in motion around this exact question.
On February 26, 2026, the Department of Labor announced a proposal to rescind its 2024 independent-contractor rule and adopt an economic-reality test with two core factors: control over the work, and opportunity for profit or loss.
The comment period closed April 28, 2026, and as of October 22, 2026, DOL's page showed the proposal, not a final rule.
Both agencies are circling the same question, and one line of DOL's proposal travels well regardless of where it lands: the parties' actual practices matter more than what is contractually or theoretically possible.
A 1099 form doesn't settle the question — the IRS weighs the entire relationship, not the form you issued.
Controlled substances
If a relief veterinarian will handle controlled substances at your practice, the federal regulation — 21 CFR 1301.22(b) — allows an individual practitioner who is an agent or employee of another registered practitioner to administer or dispense, but not prescribe, controlled substances under that practitioner's registration, when acting in the normal course of business or employment, and only if state law permits.
(The regulation's text also excludes mid-level practitioners from being that registering practitioner.)
Two further limits matter.
The regulation speaks of an "agent or employee," and whether an independent-contractor relief vet fits "agent" is not answered by the text.
And it excludes prescribing outright, while your state's controlled-substance rules can add requirements of their own.
Don't wave this through on a phone call: confirm the arrangement with DEA and your state veterinary board, and put it in writing before the first shift.
Insurance
Two moves cover most of the exposure.
First, require a certificate of professional liability insurance from every relief professional before their first shift — Roo itself recommends its vets carry their own professional liability and license defense coverage, and hospitals can make proof a requirement of booking.
Second, ask your own carrier or agent what your policy does when a relief vet works in your building: whether carriers cover relief work under the hospital's policy or expect the relief vet to hold their own is something our research could not confirm — the insurers' own pages weren't readable — so treat the certificate plus a direct answer from your carrier as the minimum.
Our veterinary professional liability insurance guide covers the hospital-side policy in depth.
When temp staffing makes sense
Temporary staffing fits when the need is real but not permanent.
The patterns where it works:
- The need is time-boxed. A medical leave, a departure you're backfilling, a family relocation gap — coverage with an end date you can plan around.
- Demand is unpredictable. A caseload that swings with the season doesn't justify a fixed salary, but it still has to be covered.
- The work exists before the hours do. A new service line or a growing caseload that hasn't yet earned a full-time position — a recurring relief day keeps the service alive until it does.
- You want a live audition. Working alongside someone for real cases tells you more than any hiring process, in both directions. The structured one-day version of that audition is the working interview, and our working interviews guide covers its pay and licensing rules.
The fit fails when the need is actually permanent.
A relief arrangement renews the search and the scheduling with every gap — and, wherever there's an intermediary, the fee — while a permanent hire concentrates that cost once and adds a colleague who knows your patients, your systems and your clients.
If you have been booking the same relief professional week after week for months on end, the honest question is why the role is still classified as temporary — the answer should be a decision, not an accident.
One more calibration: relief staffing is a labor-market answer, not a management fix.
If the underlying problem is that your full-time schedule burns people out, a rotating cast of temporary veterinary staffing won't repair it — the veterinary hiring process for a permanent hire is the longer route that actually addresses the cause.
Temp-to-perm and direct hiring
Temporary arrangements end one of two ways, and both deserve a decision made on purpose.
Converting a temp into a hire
If a temp works out, you'll want to hire them onto your own payroll — and the agreement should have told you what that costs before the assignment started.
Conversion terms vary by provider, so ask up front: whether a fee applies when you hire the worker directly, how it is calculated, whether it shrinks the longer the assignment runs, and what notice you owe.
Get the answers in writing.
The same discipline applies to permanent recruiters, whose fees are usually quoted as a percentage of first-year pay: get the percentage, what counts as pay, and the replacement guarantee in writing before you sign anything.
When you skip the middleman
If you already know the need is permanent, staffing intermediaries are the roundabout route to a hire you could have made directly.
Posting the role yourself puts it in front of veterinary professionals searching for their next practice — our guide to where to post vet jobs compares the options — and a structured process takes it from posting to offer.
If the temporary professional you've been using wants the job, better still: you have already run the trial, and you'll want the agreement's conversion terms in hand before you make the offer.
For the paper side of a relief arrangement itself, our relief veterinarian agreements guide covers what a written agreement should say.
Whichever route you take, the decisions compound in the same order: what the gap really is, who carries the employment obligations, what the arrangement costs in writing, and when it ends.
Get those four answers before the first shift and the channel you choose matters far less than the terms you signed.
Before you sign with an agency or an app
- Ask exactly what the rate includes: the professional's pay, payroll taxes, insurance, and the platform's or agency's fee.
- Ask who employs and payrolls the worker, and whose insurance follows them into your practice.
- Require a certificate of professional liability insurance from every relief professional before their first shift, and confirm with your carrier what your own policy covers.
- If controlled substances are involved, confirm the arrangement with DEA and your state veterinary board, and put it in writing.
- Get the cancellation terms in writing: when you are charged, and what happens if you cancel inside that window.
- Ask what it costs to hire the worker permanently — any conversion fee and how it is calculated.
- For any permanent recruiter, get the fee percentage, what counts as first-year pay, and the replacement guarantee in writing.