Veterinary hospitals and practice groups hiring veterinary assistants on VeterinaryHires post a median of $19.00 an hour, across 298 employers and 418 listings that state hourly pay (October 6, 2026).
The middle half of those listings offer $18.00 to $22.00.
This is advertised pay, not earnings: for what veterinary assistants take home, see our veterinary assistant salary guide.
Listings per pay band.
The highlighted band holds the employer median of $19.00/h.
Employer median of posted hourly pay for each role with at least 30 listings and 10 employers stating it.
States with at least 30 listings and 10 employers stating hourly pay.
Other states are too thin to report on their own.
| State | Employer median | Listing median | Listings | Employers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Texas | $19.25/h | $19.50/h | 51 | 42 |
| North Carolina | $18.00/h | $18.00/h | 31 | 25 |
Posted pay is what employers advertise to attract applicants.
It often runs above government wage estimates for the same occupation, because listings skew toward open, competitive roles and the ranges often include the top of a pay band.
Our veterinary assistant salary guide blends listing data with Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data to estimate what people in the role actually earn.
Use this page for what the market is offering today, and the guide for typical earnings.
All figures come from the 12,114 active job listings on VeterinaryHires on October 6, 2026, posted by 1,538 employers.
We removed 975 exact duplicates (same employer, title, city, state and pay range) first.
Posted pay is the midpoint of the range an employer advertises, or its single figure.
Hourly and annual postings are analyzed separately and never converted into each other.
Values below $5 or above $500 an hour, or below $15,000 or above $1,000,000 a year, are treated as data errors and dropped.
Employer medianis our headline: we take each employer’s own median, then the median across employers, so a group posting hundreds of openings counts once.
The plain listing median is shown alongside.
We suppress any figure built on fewer than 30 listings or 10 employers, and flag anything under 100 listings as a small sample.
Pay medians use only listings whose pay we can read as a number from a structured field; listings that give pay only in the description count toward the pay-transparency shares but not toward medians.
These are advertised rates, not earnings.
They exclude bonuses and production pay unless an employer folds them into the posted range, and listings on a job board are not a random sample of all veterinary jobs.
Figures are frozen for the Q4 2026 release and refreshed quarterly; earlier releases are not revised.
Corrected October 6, 2026: The first version of this release (October 6, 2026) reported that 78.2% of listings stated pay.
It missed wages written as “Pay: From $18.00 per hour Benefits: 401(k)”, because the benefits list right after the wage was read as bonus wording.
Fixing that, and no longer counting “$0.00” placeholder figures as pay, moves the overall share to 78.5% and the veterinarian share from 73.1% to 74%.
Pay medians are based on structured pay fields only and did not change.
VeterinaryHires, “Veterinary Assistant Pay in Job Listings: Q4 2026 Data,” Q4 2026 data release, listings snapshot of October 6, 2026. https://www.veterinaryhires.com/research/data/veterinary-assistant-pay/
More first-party data: Veterinarian Pay in Job Listings · Veterinary Technician Pay in Job Listings · Veterinary Receptionist Pay in Job Listings · Veterinary Pay Transparency.
All research: VeterinaryHires Research.
