Last Updated on August 20, 2026
What to put on it, how to lay it out, and the eight mistakes we found on real practice websites that make a price list useless.
Most advice about publishing your prices stops at “publish your prices”.
We read 72 UK vet practice websites in a single day. Plenty of practices had already published. A surprising number had published something a client could not actually use, and several had built a page that looked finished and contained no figures at all.
This is the practical version. What goes on the page, how to arrange it, and the specific mistakes worth avoiding because other practices have already made them.
This is practical guidance from a marketing company, not legal or regulatory advice. The CMA’s Order was still in draft when this was written. Check the current requirements with the CMA and your professional body before you rely on anything here. Our guide to the rules and the real timetable links the primary sources.
What goes on the list
The CMA describes a comprehensive price list for standard services, and names five things: consultations, common procedures, diagnostics, written prescriptions and cremation options.
In practice that means the lines below. The ones marked as commonly missed are the ones we found absent most often, even on otherwise complete lists.
| Group | Lines to include |
|---|---|
| Consultations | Standard appointment, follow-up or recheck, nurse consultation, extended appointment, out of hours. Commonly missed: nurse and out of hours. |
| Vaccination | Primary course and annual booster, dog and cat separately, kennel cough priced both as an add-on and standalone, rabbit. |
| Neutering | Cat castration and spay, dog castration and spay by weight band. Commonly missed: the weight bands, and any keyhole or brachycephalic variant priced differently. |
| Dentistry | Scale and polish, and extractions. Commonly missed entirely, even by practices that headline dentistry as a service. |
| Diagnostics | Pre-anaesthetic bloods, routine bloods, imaging. |
| Written prescriptions | First item and additional items, stated separately. Any dispensing fee stated separately again. Commonly missed: only about half the practices we checked published a prescription fee at all. |
| End of life | Euthanasia, and each cremation option you offer. |
| Health plan | The monthly price, what is in it, and what those components cost individually. |
The eight ways a price list fails
Every one of these is something we found on a real UK practice website. None of them is careless. Each one is a reasonable-seeming decision that produces an unusable result.
1. The page that exists and contains no prices
We found a practice with a page in its main navigation called Pricelist containing no figures. Another had a page called Fees which said only that it endeavours to keep prices at a reasonable level.
This is the worst outcome available, because it costs a client a click and a moment of hope to discover nothing is there. A page that says “we do not publish prices, ring us and we will tell you” is more honest and more useful.
2. The price list published as an image
One practice publishes its whole list as a single JPEG. A sighted visitor can read it perfectly.
A screen reader cannot. A search engine cannot. Nor can the price comparison service the RCVS is going to operate. If your prices are in a picture, you have published them for humans who already found you and nobody else.
3. The PDF-only list
Same problem, one step removed, plus a download most people on a phone will not open.
4. Prices somewhere nobody looks
We found a full price list filed under About Us as a Price Promise, and another sitting in an FAQ page reachable only through a menu called Client Corner.
If a new client cannot get to it in two clicks from your homepage, it may as well not be there.
5. Everything priced “from”
Several practices price every line as “from”, with no ceiling anywhere on the page. A spay from £350 tells a client the floor and nothing else, and the client with a large dog learns the real number at the point they are least able to shop around.
Weight bands solve this. The practices doing it best publish four or five bands and, in one case, separate prices for brachycephalic and cryptorchid variants.
6. Prices written as prose
One practice describes its consultation as typically between £55 and £60. Its own FAQ page, elsewhere on the same site, says in the region of £45.
Prose invites hedging, and hedging invites contradiction. A table does not.
7. Blank cells
One price table had empty cells for consultation, boosters and cat neutering, which are the three most searched items on it, under a header stating prices were correct as of April 2024.
A half-built table reads worse than no table, because it looks like the answer is being withheld rather than simply absent.
8. No date
Most lists we found carried no indication of when they were last updated. One said correct at the time of going to press, with no press date anywhere.
A client looking at an undated price list has no idea whether to trust it, which removes most of the benefit of publishing it.
Seven of these eight are formatting decisions, not commercial ones. That is the encouraging part. Most practices are not refusing to publish prices. They are publishing them badly, and that is a much easier problem to fix.
The layout that works
From the practices in our sample who have clearly thought about it.
A table, in text, on one page. Not split across service pages, not a download. One page a client can send to their partner.
Standard price and plan member price side by side. One Brighton practice does this on every line. It answers the “is the plan worth it” question before the client has to ask, and it makes the plan easier to sell rather than harder.
Weight bands as columns, not footnotes. Four or five bands covering the range you actually see.
A date at the top. “Prices correct from February 2026.” One line.
A short honest note about what cannot be priced. Not as an excuse covering the whole page, but attached to the specific things that genuinely vary. Nobody expects a fixed price for a complex soft tissue surgery. Everybody expects one for a booster.
A separate estimates policy. One practice near Bristol publishes a fees and payment policy and a cost estimation policy alongside its price list. That combination answers almost every question a nervous new client has.
What not to do to your prices
Two things worth resisting while you build the page.
Do not round everything up because it is now visible. The prescription fee is the live example. We found a cluster of practices publishing a fee of exactly £21 with exactly £12.50 for additional items, which are precisely the cap figures in the draft Order. A practice that previously charged £15 and has moved to £21 has read the cap as permission rather than a limit. That is legal. Whether it survives a comparison tool sitting next to a practice still charging £15 is another question.
Do not hide the increase in the plan. If the transparency requirement pushes you to reprice, do it openly and separately. Moving cost into a plan whose components you also have to publish just moves the problem.
Where this sits in the Whito framework
This is Start-stage work. Positioning, not marketing.
A price list is the cheapest trust-building asset a practice owns, and it is the one most likely to be treated as a compliance chore. The practices getting the most out of it are treating it as a sales page that happens to satisfy a regulator.
Common questions
Do I have to publish a price for everything?
The CMA describes a comprehensive price list for standard services, naming consultations, common procedures, diagnostics, written prescriptions and cremation options. It is not a requirement to price work that genuinely cannot be priced in advance. Say which things those are, rather than using them to justify publishing nothing.
Can I publish my price list as a PDF or an image?
You can, but it defeats much of the point. Search engines, screen readers and the price comparison service the RCVS will operate all need text on a page. We found practices publishing full and accurate lists in a form none of those can read.
Should I show plan member prices next to standard prices?
The practices we found doing this had the clearest pages in the sample. It also answers the value question about your plan directly, which is useful to you rather than merely required of you.
How often should I update it?
Whatever interval you choose, put the date on the page. Most lists we found were undated, which leaves a client unable to tell whether the figures still hold.
Will publishing prices make me look expensive?
Some of the fullest price lists we found belong to some of the dearer practices in the sample. Publishing does not make you cheap or expensive, it makes you legible. The alternative, once a comparison service exists, is not appearing at all.
Sources
The failure modes and layout observations come from Whito’s audit of 72 UK veterinary practice websites, all read on 19 August 2026. The description of what a price list must cover comes from the CMA’s final report on its veterinary market investigation, 24 March 2026. For the timetable and the wider set of requirements, see our guide to the CMA vet rules.
Correction policy. If anything here is wrong or out of date, email hello@whito.co.uk and we will check it, amend it and note the change with its date.
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 free