Ask a practice owner why they haven't upgraded their fluid delivery setup and the answer is usually some version of "we can't afford it." Our 2026 survey data shows most practices are spending very little on equipment relative to revenue. That sounds like fiscal discipline until you compare it against what those equipment gaps cost in labor every week.
This blog covers data from our 2026 Veterinary IV Pump Survey. The full report includes findings on staffing challenges, equipment spending, fluid therapy trends, and business sustainability across 114 companion animal practices.
Most owners are cautious about technology, and cost is a top reason
The 2025 AVMA Report on the Economic State of the Veterinary Profession asked practice owners about their enthusiasm for new technology. Only 40.8% described themselves as enthusiastic adopters. The rest were hesitant or skeptical.
When asked how they're doing with technology in their own practice, 19.3% of owners said they're falling behind. Among that group, the top reasons were time constraints (31.3%) and cost (26.3%).
So roughly one in five owners knows they're behind, and a quarter of them point at the budget. Our survey data shows what that budget actually looks like.
Here's what our survey found about equipment spending
We asked 114 companion animal practices what percentage of total revenue goes to medical equipment annually.
Share of revenue spent on equipment | % of practices |
Less than 2% | 22% |
2-4% | 38% |
4-6% | 24% |
6-8% | 11% |
More than 8% | 5% |
60% of practices spend less than 4%. For a practice generating $1 million in annual revenue, that's $40,000 or less per year.
$40,000 sounds workable until you remember it covers every equipment category:
Diagnostics (imaging, lab analyzers, ultrasound).
Dental equipment.
Anesthesia and monitoring.
Surgical equipment.
Practice software and hardware.
Fluid delivery and infusion.
Split six ways, a sub-4% budget leaves each category a few thousand dollars per year. One analyzer repair or one software renewal can consume an entire category's allocation. Fluid delivery, which rarely feels urgent until a pump dies mid-procedure, usually gets whatever is left.
The cost of not buying the equipment
A small equipment budget doesn't eliminate the work the equipment would do. It moves that work onto your staff, where it shows up as labor cost instead of a line item anyone reviews.
Manual fluid monitoring is the clearest example. A tech running gravity drip has to set the rate, verify it, and recheck it repeatedly through the treatment. Our survey data on troubleshooting shows how this kind of invisible labor adds up: 76% of practices spend 2 or more hours per week on equipment troubleshooting alone, and at a $25/hour tech wage, a practice losing 5 hours a week is spending $6,500 a year on it.
Now run the same comparison for manual fluid delivery:
Manual/gravity monitoring | Automated CRI pump | |
Weekly tech time on drip checks | 5-7 hours | Minutes (setup and alarms only) |
Annual labor cost at $25/hour | $6,500 to $9,100 | Marginal |
Consistency of delivery rate | Varies with workload and interruptions | Constant |
Cost visibility | Hidden in payroll | Visible on an invoice |
The equipment purchase appears in the budget and gets scrutinized. The labor cost of doing the same job manually appears nowhere and gets paid every year, indefinitely. Practices comparing a pump's sticker price against zero are running the wrong comparison. The real comparison is pump cost against recurring labor cost, and the labor side loses.
This connects to a related finding from our survey. 40% of practices spend more than 40% of revenue on wages and benefits. When labor consumes that much revenue, there's little room left for equipment. But underinvesting in equipment is part of what keeps labor costs high. That cycle doesn't break on its own.
Image courtesy of Envato
Practices told us exactly what would change their minds
We asked what would justify a 20% increase in equipment spending.
Response | % |
Clear ROI within 12 months | 31% |
30% time savings per procedure | 22% |
Guaranteed 50% reduction in failures | 18% |
Significantly better patient outcomes | 14% |
Major improvement in staff satisfaction | 9% |
Nothing, we can't afford it regardless | 6% |
ROI and time savings account for 53% of responses. Practices aren't opposed to spending more. They want financial proof before they do.
A practice owner in Philadelphia: "Show me the ROI. I don't care about features or specs. Show me that spending $X will make me $X-plus-something within a year and I'll write the check today. That's all I need."
A practice owner in San Jose: "Time savings. If a piece of equipment saves my team 30 minutes a day, that's two and a half hours a week, ten hours a month. That's real. That's cases I can see, revenue I can capture. I can calculate exactly what that's worth."
Image courtesy of Envato
Run the calculation for your own practice
Here's the proof the 53% are asking for, in a form you can fill in yourself:
- Take your tech hourly rate (loaded, with benefits).
- Multiply by the hours your team spends per week on manual fluid monitoring and drip checks.
- Multiply by 52. That's your annual labor cost of manual fluid delivery.
- Compare it to the annualized cost of a pump (purchase price divided by expected service years, plus maintenance).
For most practices, the pump costs less than one year of the labor it replaces, which is why payback typically lands within 6 to 12 months.
Two things shorten that payback further. Patient-ready refurbished pumps cost 30-50% less than new units, which cuts the numerator of the calculation before you start. And a purpose-built CRI syringe pump like the VetroCRI removes the repeated manual checks entirely. Practices implementing their first VetroCRI typically get 5-7 staff hours per week back.
A sub-4% equipment budget can still fund this. That's the point of lower-cost acquisition paths: the budget doesn't need to grow for the investment to happen.
What does this mean for your practice?
Three things to do based on the data.
Calculate your manual monitoring labor cost before your next budget cycle. If you've never put a dollar figure on it, you've been comparing equipment prices against zero.
Treat your equipment budget as a percentage of revenue and know your number. If you're under 4%, you're in the majority, and the majority is deferring costs into payroll.
Hold vendors to the standard 53% of your peers set. Ask for the ROI timeline and the time savings per procedure in writing. If a vendor can't show the numbers, that tells you something too.
About this data
This data comes from the 2026 AIV-Vet Veterinary IV Pump Survey. Technology adoption data is from the 2025 AVMA Report on the Economic State of the Veterinary Profession.