Wages and benefits are the largest expense in veterinary medicine, and for a large share of practices they've crossed a threshold that distorts every other spending decision. When payroll takes 40% or more of revenue, equipment purchases get deferred by default. That feels like discipline. Run the numbers on what those deferrals cost in tech hours, and it looks more like paying full price for labor to do work a machine does for a fraction of the cost.
This blog covers the staffing and labor cost sections of our 2026 Veterinary IV Pump Survey, combined with AVMA benchmarking data. The full report includes findings on equipment spending, fluid therapy trends, and business sustainability across 114 companion animal practices.
Here's what our survey found
We asked 114 companion animal practices what percentage of revenue goes to staff wages and benefits.
Revenue spent on wages and benefits | % of practices |
Less than 20% | 3% |
20-30% | 18% |
31-40% | 39% |
41-50% | 30% |
More than 50% | 10% |
40% of practices spend more than 40% of revenue on labor. Another 39% sit just below that line.
The same practices are still short-handed. Only 14% report being fully staffed, which means 86% are operating with at least one open position. 82% rank licensed technicians as the hardest role to fill.
So the profession is paying record labor costs and still can't buy its way to a full team. That combination is the strongest equipment argument in the survey.
What labor costs at an average practice
AVMA data puts the average practice at $1.5 million in gross revenue for 2024, with 2.76 FTE veterinarians and 5.74 FTE technicians and assistants.
At the 40% labor threshold, that practice spends $600,000 a year on wages and benefits. Those 5.74 techs represent roughly 230 paid hours of technician time every week. Where those hours go determines whether that $600,000 buys clinical output or buys walking back and forth to check a drip rate.
Image courtesy of Envato
Where the hours go on manual fluid delivery
A patient on gravity fluids needs its rate set, verified, and rechecked repeatedly through treatment, because gravity rates drift with patient movement and line position. Based on our work with practices converting from manual monitoring, we estimate those checks consume roughly 76 minutes of tech time per patient, per day on fluids. Across a normal caseload, that adds up to 5-7 technician hours per week going to a task that requires no clinical judgment.
Put a wage on it.
Line item | Value |
Technician hourly wage | $20-25 |
Weekly hours on manual fluid monitoring | 5-7 |
Annual labor cost | $5,200 to $9,100 |
Now compare that to the cost of the equipment that eliminates the task. Take a pump's purchase price, divide it by its expected years of service, and add maintenance. A pump amortized over five years costs a fraction of a single year of the labor it replaces, and the labor bill repeats every year while the pump keeps working.
The $5,200 to $9,100 never appears on an invoice, so nobody scrutinizes it. The pump appears on one invoice and gets scrutinized for months. That's how practices end up rejecting the cheaper option.
The cycle, and which side breaks first
The survey data describes a loop. Practices can't fund equipment because labor consumes the budget, and labor consumes the budget partly because there's no equipment reducing per-patient labor demand. One of the two costs has to give, and they behave very differently.
Hiring another tech | Adding an automated pump | |
Cost | $40,000+ per year, rising with market wages | Fixed, one-time, known in advance |
Timeline | Months. Positions sit open five months or longer, and candidates ghost accepted offers | Days |
Retention risk | 51% of practices see turnover above 20% annually | Warrantied, repairable, doesn't resign |
What it takes to keep it | 61% of practices say only raises of 10%+ retained staff | A maintenance schedule |
None of that argues against hiring. Practices need people, and 86% are trying to find them. It argues about sequence. Recover the hours automation can recover first, and the team you already pay for goes further while you keep recruiting.
Image courtesy of Envato
The 95 clients lost
AVMA data shows the average practice has lost roughly 95 active clients per year since 2019, down to 3,351 in 2024. Over the same period, 42% of practices in our survey report turning away 10% or more of appointment requests because they don't have the staff to see them.
Losing clients while turning clients away is a capacity problem wearing a staffing costume. Every tech hour recovered from manual monitoring is an hour available for appointments, callbacks, and the service quality that keeps clients from drifting to the practice down the road.
Image courtesy of Envato
Breaking the cycle without growing the budget
This is where equipment strategy connects to the labor numbers directly.
The VetroCRI syringe pump removes manual drip monitoring from the workflow. It uses the standard syringes your practice already stocks, and practices implementing their first unit typically recover 5-7 staff hours per week. At $20-25 per hour, that's $5,200 to $9,100 per year in labor capacity back from a single pump.
For practices building out pump inventory more broadly, patient-ready refurbished IV pumps from the brands you already run (Baxter, Hospira, Medfusion, Heska) cost 30-50% less than new units, pass a detailed inspection, and carry a 1-year warranty. The lower acquisition cost means a practice at the 40% labor threshold can add automated capacity without waiting for a budget that never loosens.
The labor cost cycle doesn't break on its own. Equipment is the side of the loop with a fixed price and a payback you can calculate before you spend a dollar.
What does this mean for your practice?
Three things to do based on the data.
Find your labor percentage. Divide annual wages and benefits by gross revenue. If you're over 40%, every recovered tech hour matters more to you than to the average practice.
Count your gravity lines. Multiply the weekly hours your team spends on drip checks by your loaded tech wage, then by 52. That's the annual bill for not owning enough pumps.
Compare that bill to an annualized pump cost, not a sticker price. Purchase price divided by service years, plus maintenance. For most practices the pump wins in under a year.
Sources
AIV Vet 2026 Veterinary IV Pump Survey (large animal section, 49 practitioners).