The cheapest consultation isn’t the cheapest vet

A standard vet consultation is the 10 to 15 minute appointment where a vet examines your pet and decides what happens next. It’s the most common veterinary transaction in the UK. It’s also the one most people use to judge whether their vet is cheap or expensive.

That’s a mistake.

Rightvet collected published consultation prices from 2,940 UK practices. The national median is £59. But two practices charging the same for a consultation can have very different total costs once you add vaccinations, boosters, and routine treatments.

Consultation prices by chain

Across the eight major chains, median consultation prices range from £54 to £65.

Two things stand out. First, IVC Evidensia, the UK’s largest group with 841 practices, publishes prices at only 62% of them. Goddard, at 100%, shows what transparency looks like. Second, independents have the lowest median (£55) but the lowest publishing rate (32%). The practices that don’t publish tend to be the ones that charge more, which means the independent average is likely understated.

The consultation is the shop window

A consultation price is the vet equivalent of a supermarket loss leader. It gets you through the door. The real margin is on what follows.

Rightvet calculated the annual cost of basic care (two consultations plus a dog booster vaccination) for every practice that publishes both prices. When you look at annual cost instead of just the consultation, the rankings shift.

Independent practices overtake Medivet. IVC Evidensia drops below Goddard. The consultation league table and the annual cost league table tell different stories.

The bait-and-switch pattern

Some practices go further than just having cheap consultations. They deliberately price the consultation low, then charge well above the national average for everything else.

Rightvet database, February 2026. Based on published booster prices at 470 Pets at Home practices.

Pets at Home is the clearest example. Its consultation average of £54.48 is the cheapest of any chain. But its booster price of £108 is nearly double the national median. A pet owner choosing Pets at Home because the consultation is cheap will pay more over a year than at most independents.

Rightvet found one Pets at Home practice, Companion Care in Penny Lane, Liverpool, where the consultation ranks 633rd cheapest nationally but the annual cost ranks 2,293rd. A jump of 1,660 places.

The pattern isn’t limited to one chain. Rightvet flagged 50 practices across all groups showing strong bait-and-switch signals: consultation prices in the cheapest 25% nationally, but non-consultation prices averaging 15% or more above the national median.IVC Evidensia had 15 of those 50 flags. 29 were independents. Rightvet expanded on this finding in our vaccination and booster cost analysis.

The group gap widens beyond consultations

The CMA’s provisional decision found that group practices charge 16.6% more than independents on average, based on invoice data collected through the investigation. Rightvet’s published price data shows a smaller but revealing pattern.

The consultation gap is small at just 2.3%. But when boosters are included, the gap triples to 7.1%. The CMA’s larger 16.6% figure likely reflects the full range of procedures and treatments, not just the published prices that practices choose to show. The pattern is consistent: the group premium grows with the complexity and cost of the service.

The gap is even wider for surgical procedures. Rightvet’s neutering costs analysis found that the group premium on neutering exceeds the consultation gap by a wide margin.

Your postcode matters as much as your choice of vet

Vet pricing is heavily influenced by geography. The cheapest towns in the UK pay roughly half what the most expensive pay for the same appointment.

Rightvet analysis of consultation prices in towns with 5+ practices publishing pricing, February 2026.

Belfast averages £42 per consultation across 10 practices. Maidstone averages £83 across 6. Same appointment, same species, nearly double the price.

Within a single town, the spread is narrower but still notable. In most areas with several practices, the difference between the cheapest and most expensive is £15 to £25.

One in three practices still publish nothing

Perhaps the most striking finding isn’t about how much vets charge, but how many refuse to say.

Rightvet analysis of 4,851 first-opinion practices, February 2026.

Among independents, the transparency gap is much wider: 55.8% publish no prices at all, compared to just 15.9% of group practices. The CMA found that lack of published pricing was one of the primary barriers to pet owners comparing vets. Rightvet’s data shows that while larger chains have largely responded to the transparency push, most independents have not.

Among those that do publish, 63% of group practices hide their ownership, making it harder to know whether you’re comparing a local independent with a multinational chain.