Veterinarians Are Finally Working Less Than They Did During the Pandemic. The New Question Is What To Do With That.

New AVMA data shows work hours are nearly back to pre-2020 levels. That is good news and a signal that it is time to look at how practices are actually running.

For a few years there, veterinary medicine ran on fumes.

From 2020 through 2022, veterinarians averaged 44 to 46 hours per week which is up from the roughly 42 hours per week recorded between 2016 and 2019. Those numbers do not fully capture what those hours felt like: curbside care, skeleton staffing, team members out sick or isolating, demand that outpaced every practice’s capacity to absorb it, all running simultaneously and indefinitely. The pandemic did not create the veterinary workforce shortage. It accelerated it, exposed it, and turned it into a daily operational crisis for practices that had been managing on thin margins for years.

New data published in the 2026 AVMA Report on the Economic State of the Veterinary Profession suggests the acute phase of that crisis has passed. Work hours have been declining gradually since 2022 and are now approaching pre-pandemic levels. Veterinarians, on average, are working closer to what they were working in 2018.

That is meaningful. It is also, on its own, incomplete as a picture of where the profession is.

Why hours went up in the first place

The pandemic created a specific and unusual combination of pressures that converged on veterinary practices simultaneously.

On the demand side, stimulus payments and dramatically reduced spending options pushed household expenditures toward pets. People who had time at home got pets. People who already had pets had more time to notice things that needed veterinary attention. Demand for veterinary services surged in a way that had nothing to do with underlying population growth or disease prevalence — it was an artifact of a specific economic and social moment.

On the supply side, everything that normally allows a practice to run smoothly became harder. Physical distancing requirements changed workflows. Curbside care added time to every appointment. Team members got sick, needed to isolate, or were managing family caregiving responsibilities. The capacity to deliver care contracted at exactly the moment demand expanded.

The result was more hours worked per veterinarian — not because practices grew or because teams were suddenly less efficient, but because the system was absorbing stress from both ends at once.

What the decline in hours actually reflects

The gradual return to pre-pandemic work hours is happening alongside a downward trend in national veterinary visit numbers. Those two data points are related. As pandemic-era demand normalizes — as stimulus effects dissipate, as the cohort of pandemic pets ages into a steadier visit cadence, as some of the discretionary veterinary spending of 2020 and 2021 levels off — the extraordinary pressure that drove extended hours has eased.

This is not uniformly good news. Fewer visits means less revenue for practices that built capacity, hired staff, and made investments based on peak pandemic demand. The workforce and infrastructure decisions practices made between 2020 and 2022 now need to be evaluated against a different operating environment.

But for the veterinarians and their teams who were absorbing those hours — and for the profession’s long-term sustainability — the trend is a positive one. Chronic overwork is not a stable operating model. It produces burnout, turnover, and health consequences that compound over time. A return toward 42 hours per week is not an achievement to dismiss.

The operational question this data raises

Here is where it gets practical. The AVMA data includes a useful observation: adjustments made during the pandemic may no longer serve practices well and in some cases may now be limiting performance.

That is worth sitting with.

Practices that adopted curbside-only or hybrid care models may have kept elements of those workflows past their usefulness. Triage protocols, appointment structures, communication systems, and staffing ratios that were designed for peak pandemic demand may be creating friction in a lower-volume environment. Operational decisions that made sense in 2021 are running on inertia in 2026, and inertia has a cost — in team strain, in client experience, and in efficiency.

The return to more typical work hours is an opening. With some breathing room restored, this is a reasonable moment for practices to look at how they actually operate — not how they operated at the height of the crisis, and not how they operated in 2019 either. Something in between, informed by what worked, what did not, and what the current patient and client population actually needs.

Bottlenecks that were invisible during peak demand tend to become visible when volume normalizes. Identifying them now, before the next inflection point in the profession’s capacity challenges, is worth the investment of time.

The bigger context

Veterinary work hours returning to pre-pandemic levels is a data point in a longer story about workforce sustainability and professional wellbeing that the AVMA has been tracking for years. It does not mean the workforce challenges are resolved — the pipeline issues, the geographic distribution problems, the compensation and debt dynamics that predate the pandemic are all still present.

But a profession that is working slightly fewer hours per week than it was during the most stressful period most of its practitioners have ever experienced is a profession that has, at least in this one measurable dimension, come back from something. That matters.

The next question is what to build on it.

The full 2026 AVMA Report on the Economic State of the Veterinary Profession is available at avma.org.