Last Updated on August 20, 2026
UK veterinary practices will have to publish comprehensive price lists under CMA rules now being finalised. We checked 72 practice websites to see who already does, and found the problem is not the one the regulator measured.
The Competition and Markets Authority spent two years taking apart how UK pet owners buy veterinary care. It concluded on 24 March 2026, and its remedies are being put in place through a formal Order.
Among the CMA’s findings: fewer than 40% of practices had prices on their websites.
We tested that. We read 72 practice websites across England, Scotland and Wales in a single day and checked each one against what the remedies will require.
Our number came out very differently, and the reason turned out to be the actual story.
Executive summary
What the CMA actually requires, and when
The remedies are specific. The timetable is not as short as much of the commentary suggests, and it is worth getting right.
The CMA must make its Order by 23 September 2026. That is the deadline for the regulator, not for practices. The substantive Order was still in draft as this was written, with the consultation on it closing on 20 August 2026.
Practices then have until early 2027 to comply, according to the British Veterinary Association, and smaller practices are being given longer than large groups. The CMA has said pet owners using large chains should see changes before Christmas.
So there is time. There is not a lot of it, and the work below takes longer than most practice owners expect.
What the Order will require:
- Practices must publish comprehensive price lists for a standard set of common services
- Prescription fees are capped at £21 for the first medicine and £12.50 for each additional one
- Practices in large groups must display their common ownership
- Written estimates are required for any treatment of £500 or more
- The RCVS will operate a price comparison tool
Nothing in this article describes any practice breaking any rule. The Order has not been made and no compliance date has passed. Every practice publishing prices today is doing so voluntarily, and several are doing it very well. What follows is a dated snapshot of what public websites showed on one day, not an assessment of anyone’s compliance, conduct or clinical standards.
Finding one: most practices already publish prices
Of the 72 practices, we could reach every homepage. Four had pricing pages we could not read, because of firewalls or an unresponsive host, so we recorded those as undetermined rather than guessing.
Of the 68 we could assess, 49 publish actual pound figures against actual clinical services. That is 72%, against the CMA’s finding of fewer than 40%.
We are not claiming the CMA is wrong. Three things explain the gap, and they matter more than the number.
Our sample found practices through search. A practice with no website, or one too thin to surface, is invisible to our method and was captured by the CMA’s. That is a selection bias towards the digitally competent, and it is the largest single reason for the difference.
The CMA’s fieldwork predates its final report. Ours is five months after it. And the price lists themselves show the movement: we found lists explicitly dated December 2025, January 2026, February 2026 and 30 March 2026. Practices are visibly republishing ahead of the deadline.
Our sample skews urban. Rural single-site practices are underrepresented.
So the headline is not that vets are hiding their prices. Increasingly they are not. The problem has moved somewhere harder to fix.
Finding two: publishing a price is not the same as being comparable
This is the real finding. A price list can satisfy every box and still be useless to the person it is meant to help. We found eight distinct ways it happens.
1. The page that exists and contains no prices. One London practice has a page in its main navigation called Pricelist. It contains no prices. Another has a page called Fees which says only that the practice endeavours to keep prices at a reasonable level.
2. The price list published as an image. One Edinburgh practice publishes its entire price list as a single JPEG. A human visitor can read it. A screen reader cannot. Nor can a search engine, nor the price comparison tool the RCVS is about to build.
3. The price list published only as a PDF. One Birmingham practice’s pricing page carries no figures at all. Everything sits in two downloadable PDFs.
4. Prices buried where nobody looks. One Norfolk practice publishes its consultation and vaccination prices in its FAQ page, reachable only through a menu called Client Corner. Another files its full list under About Us as a Price Promise.
5. Everything is a “from” price. Several group-owned practices price every single line as “from”, with no ceiling anywhere. A spay from £350 tells you the floor and nothing else.
6. Prices as prose. One Glasgow practice writes its consultation price as typically between £55 and £60. Its own FAQ page, elsewhere on the same site, says in the region of £45.
7. Blank cells. One Birmingham practice publishes a price table where the consultation, booster and cat neutering rows are all empty, under a header stating the prices were correct as of April 2024.
8. No date at all. Most price lists we found carry no indication of when they were last updated, so a client cannot tell whether the figures still hold. One carries the phrase correct at the time of going to press, with no press date.
Finding three: the prescription cap will bite, and it is already becoming a target
The prescription fee is the one number the CMA is capping outright. It is also the one most often missing.
Only 38 of the 72 practices publish a prescription fee at all. Several publish a complete clinical price list and omit it.
Among those that do publish one, at least eleven are already above the incoming £21 cap. The range runs from £15 to £36. The highest is 71% above the cap as drafted.
Then there is the pattern underneath. A large cluster of practices publish a prescription fee of exactly £21, with exactly £12.50 for additional items.
Those figures are the caps. A practice landing precisely on both has not calculated its cost of dispensing. It has read the remedy and priced to the ceiling. For a practice previously charging £15, the cap is not a restriction. It is permission.
Two workarounds are already visible in published prices, neither of them hidden.
The dispensing fee. One Leeds practice charges £21 for a written prescription and a separate £10 dispensing fee. The cap covers the prescription fee. It does not cover dispensing.
Duration tiering. One Norfolk practice prices prescriptions by length: £17 for one month, £22 for three months, £27 for six to twelve. The one-month script sits under the cap. The others do not. Whether the cap accommodates that structure is not obvious from the remedy.
Finding four: one group, four practices, four pricing pages, no prices
Our sample included four practices owned by CVS Group, in Bristol, Hove, Manchester and Harrogate.
All four have a dedicated, well-built page at a pricing address. All four are headed as a price list. None of the four publishes a standard dog or cat consultation price. One renders a table of three exotics consultation fees. The rest contain only Healthy Pet Club membership prices and an explanation that some services cannot easily be priced without discussion.
This is the same template producing the same outcome four times in four different parts of the country, which makes it a policy rather than an oversight. It is also the clearest illustration of why counting pricing pages would miss the problem entirely. On a link count, CVS scores four out of four.
Finding five: the same owner, five different answers
Five practices in our sample carry the same footer: Inspiring Vet Care Limited, company number 07746795, the operating entity of IVC Evidensia.
What they publish could not be more different.
- One publishes a full weight-banded price list, and the highest prescription fee in our entire sample at £36
- One publishes a complete list dated January 2026
- One publishes nothing but its prescription charges
- One publishes no prices at all
- One publishes only promotional offers, including a dental offer whose stated end date had already passed
Same owner, same platform, five answers. Whatever is driving price publication in the UK, it is being decided practice by practice, not centrally.
Finding six: the health plan is always priced
Practices are markedly more willing to publish the price of a monthly plan than the price of a treatment.
Across the sample, a clear group publishes a monthly health plan price while publishing no clinical prices whatsoever. Several of those advertise percentage discounts, 25% off consultations, 10% off neutering, against base prices they never disclose.
The distinction is commercial, not technical. The plan price recruits a subscriber. The treatment price lets somebody compare you. Both are equally easy to put on a page.
What the prices actually are
Where practices do publish, the spread is wide enough to matter.
| Service | Lowest published | Highest published |
|---|---|---|
| Standard consultation | £48 | £98 |
| Cat spay | £102.85 | £225 |
| Cat castration | £66.55 | £165 |
| Annual booster, dog | £45.60 | £90 |
| Written prescription | £15 | £36 |
A cat spay is a routine, well-defined procedure. The published price for it varies by more than double across practices we checked on the same day.
That is exactly the variation the RCVS comparison tool will expose, and it is the reason some practices are nervous about publishing.
What good looks like
Several practices in the sample are already well past the September requirement, and they have things in common worth copying.
A Manchester cat clinic publishes a full clinical price list and states plainly in its footer that it is a trading name of a named company, wholly owned by two of the vets who work there. That is ownership disclosure done properly.
A practice near Bristol publishes consultation, vaccination, neutering by weight band, dental by grade, its prescription fee, its plan prices, a fees and payment policy and a separate cost estimation policy. Nothing in the incoming rules will trouble them.
A Brighton practice shows the standard price and the plan member price side by side on every line, so a client can see exactly what membership is worth before joining.
A Norfolk practice publishes neutering across five weight bands, plus separate prices for brachycephalic and cryptorchid variants. That is a practice that has decided comparability is an advantage rather than a risk.
The checklist, if you run a practice
In rough order of how quickly each can be done.
- Is your price list text on a web page? Not a JPEG, not a PDF. If a screen reader cannot read it, neither can the comparison tool.
- Is your prescription fee published, and is it at or under £21? Check any separate dispensing fee too, and be ready to explain it.
- Does the page carry a date? One line saying prices correct from a stated month costs nothing and answers the most common client doubt.
- Can a client find it in two clicks from the homepage? Not filed under About Us, not in an FAQ, not behind a menu called Client Corner.
- Are your “from” prices doing real work? A from price with no ceiling anywhere is not a price. Publish bands.
- Does your footer say who owns you? If you are independent, say so and name the company. If you are part of a group, that will be required anyway.
Where this sits in the Whito framework
Publishing your prices is a Start-stage job. It is positioning, not marketing.
A practice that will not say what a consultation costs cannot be compared, which sounds like protection and is actually the opposite. It means the only practices a pet owner can compare you against are the ones who did publish, and they will look like the confident ones.
The CMA found that 51% of pet owners considered only one practice before choosing. That is set to change, with a comparison tool operated by the RCVS. The practices that publish first will be the ones the tool has something to say about.
Methodology
We assembled 72 UK first-opinion veterinary practices across London, Bristol, Brighton and Hove, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Shrewsbury, Harrogate and Norfolk, weighted towards independents but including practices owned by CVS Group, IVC Evidensia, VetPartners, Linnaeus, Medivet and Vets4Pets. Every website URL was confirmed to belong to that practice before the audit began. Referral-only, emergency-only, mobile-only and charity practices were excluded, as were single-species clinics other than one cat clinic retained deliberately.
Each site was read on 19 August 2026. We looked for a pricing page through the main navigation, footer, client information sections, and by testing common paths directly. A practice was recorded as publishing clinical prices only where actual pound figures appeared against actual clinical services. A page listing only health plan membership prices was recorded as not publishing clinical prices, and that single decision accounts for most of the difference between our count and a simple count of pricing pages.
Four practices had pricing pages we could not read, three because of firewalls returning errors to us and one because the host stopped responding partway through. All four are recorded as undetermined and excluded from the percentage. Two of the four are known to have pricing pages, so treating them as failures would have been wrong.
This is not a representative sample of UK veterinary practices. It is a purposive sample of 72 practices with functioning websites, found through search, weighted to towns and cities. It cannot be used to estimate a national rate, and the difference between our 72% and the CMA’s sub-40% finding should be read as evidence of that selection effect and of five months of movement, not as a correction to the regulator.
Common questions
When do UK vets have to publish their prices?
Not as soon as much of the commentary suggests. The CMA must make its Order by 23 September 2026, but that is the regulator’s deadline. Practices then have until early 2027 to comply according to the British Veterinary Association, and smaller practices are being given longer than large groups. The substantive Order was still in draft when this was published.
What is the cap on vet prescription fees?
As drafted, £21 for the first medicine and £12.50 for each additional medicine. In our sample of 72 practices, only 38 published a prescription fee at all, and at least eleven of those were already above £21, the highest at £36. The cap is not yet in force.
How much does a vet consultation cost in the UK?
Among the practices in our sample that publish a figure, a standard consultation ranged from £48 to £98, checked on the same day. Most sat between £52 and £62. There is no national average, because most practices have not historically published the number.
Do vets have to say who owns them?
Practices in large groups will have to display their common ownership under the CMA remedies. The CMA found that fewer than half of people using a large veterinary group were aware their practice was part of a chain. In our sample most sites did disclose ownership, and the corporate groups were often the most explicit, giving company numbers and registered offices.
Will publishing prices lose a practice business?
There is no UK evidence either way, and anyone telling you otherwise is guessing. What is documented is that 51% of pet owners considered only one practice before choosing, and that a regulator-run comparison tool is coming. A practice that publishes nothing will not appear in a comparison as cheap or expensive. It will not appear as anything.
If you run a practice, we have written the practical companions to this research: what the CMA rules actually require and the timetable that really applies, how to build a price list that works, what the rules mean for your health plan, and how pet owners actually choose a practice.
How we have treated names, and how to correct us
Websites change. Every observation here describes what a public web page showed on 19 August 2026 and nothing else. A practice that has published prices since then will not be reflected above, and several may well have.
Individual practices are not named where the observation is critical. Where we describe a page that carries no prices, a price list published as an image or a table with blank cells, the practice is described by location only. Named criticism appears in this article in two places, and both concern large corporate groups where the same pattern repeats across multiple sites in different parts of the country, which makes it a matter of group policy rather than one practice’s oversight.
Practices are named in full only in the section on what good looks like.
Nothing here is a statement about any practice’s compliance with any legal obligation, its clinical standards, its value for money or its conduct. It is a record of what was published on a website on one day.
If we have got something wrong about your practice, tell us and we will correct it. Email hello@whito.co.uk with the page and what it should say. We will check, amend and note the correction with its date. We would rather be corrected than be wrong.
Sources
The regulation. CMA, market investigation into veterinary services, final outcome, 24 March 2026. CMA, How people purchase veterinary services, 6 February 2025. RCVS response to the CMA remedies.
Sector structure. RCVS Facts 2024, giving 6,522 registered veterinary practice premises in the UK at 31 March 2024. PDSA PAW Mini Report 2025, 5,387 pet owners surveyed.
The practice websites. All 72 were read directly on 19 August 2026. Practices are named in this article only where the observation concerns information they have chosen to publish on their own public website.
We also asked three AI engines which vets they recommend across six UK cities, and found the engines favour independent practices over chains. For the background to the investigation itself, see why UK vet prices rose 63% and the CMA stepped in. And for what marketing actually costs a practice, see UK vet practice marketing costs.
The structural checks behind this research run on any website in about twenty seconds. Enter yours and read the full result on the page. Free, and we do not ask for your email.
Check your business freeIf your business is named here and you think we have a fact wrong, email hello@whito.co.uk and we will check it and correct it. If you want to respond, send us a statement and we will publish it alongside. Full detail: Corrections, right of reply and removals.
