Two companies control 64% of UK emergency vet care

It’s 2am and your dog is vomiting blood. You call your vet’s number. A recorded message tells you to call a different practice. One you’ve never heard of, possibly in the next town. You have no idea who runs it, what it costs, or how far away it is.

This is how emergency vet care works for most pet owners in the UK. The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons requires every practice to provide access to 24-hour care, but it doesn’t require them to provide it themselves. Most don’t.

Rightvet checked the out-of-hours arrangements for every UK veterinary practice. The majority refer their patients to external emergency providers. Two companies handle most of that traffic.

The emergency vet market is highly concentrated

Most daytime practices don’t run their own overnight service. They contract with a dedicated out-of-hours provider, typically on a fixed arrangement that routes all after-hours calls to one company.

Two providers dominate this market:

Between them, these two providers handle the emergency care for roughly two thirds of UK practices. Pet owners rarely get to choose which one.

Your emergency vet is owned by the same companies as your daytime vet

This creates an unusual market structure. IVC Evidensia, the UK’s largest veterinary group with over 800 practices, also owns Vets Now, the UK’s largest emergency vet provider. CVS Vets, with over 400 practices, owns MiNightVet.

The same groups that dominate daytime veterinary care also control the emergency market. If your daytime vet is an IVC Evidensia practice, there’s a good chance your emergency vet is too, through Vets Now.

Rightvet’s research found that 63% of group practices trade under local names, making this ownership overlap invisible to most pet owners.

For the consumer, this means limited competition at the moment care is most urgent and least price-sensitive.

Emergency care means a longer drive

When a practice refers you to an external out-of-hours provider, the emergency clinic is almost never in the same location as your daytime vet. It’s often in a larger town or city, serving the overnight patients of dozens of local practices.

Rightvet analysis of distance between first-opinion practices and their designated emergency providers.

For practices in rural areas, the gap is wider. A pet owner registered with a village practice may need to drive 20 or 30 miles to the nearest Vets Now or MiNightVet clinic. At night, in an emergency, with a distressed animal.

Some practices do it themselves

Not every practice outsources emergency care. Some larger independent practices and certain group practices maintain their own overnight rota or operate 24-hour hospitals.

Medivet runs 27 dedicated 24-hour hospitals. Some independent practices keep a vet on call overnight, though the level of care available at 3am from a single on-call vet is very different to a fully staffed emergency hospital.

The CMA’s provisional decision in October 2025 proposed limiting the notice period for out-of-hours contracts to 12 months, making it easier for practices to switch emergency providers. The investigation found that long lock-in contracts with out-of-hours providers were restricting competition.