UK cost surveys — vet

What does a vet consultation cost in the UK?

We read 22 UK vet websites, one business per city, and recorded what each publishes for a standard consultation, regular opening hours.

Every price, and where it was published

A “+” marks a price the business published as a “from” figure. Prices are quoted with the business's own label because the label is doing real work: a 30-minute session and a 60-minute session are not the same product, and an out-of-hours rate is not a consultation fee.

What is not in the figures

9 of the 22 businesses we read could not be included, and why is as interesting as the prices:

• Rushcliffe Veterinary Centre (Nottingham) — publishes no price.
• Vets4Pets Bristol (Bristol) — publishes a monthly health plan, no consultation fee.
• Animed Veterinary Centre (Southampton) — publishes a monthly health plan; the 'Standard pricing' tab renders no numbers.
• Westway Vets (Newcastle) — publishes a monthly health plan, no consultation fee.
• (no local practice found) (Belfast) — the search returned the Royal Veterinary College's London price list, which is neither local nor a general practice.
• (no local practice found) (Bradford) — same national page as Belfast; counting one price list as two cities would invent a sample.
• Colne Valley Vets (Colchester) — consultation fees sit behind a link the served page does not render.
• Preston Vets (Preston) — publishes no price.
• Riversbrook Veterinary Centre (Ipswich) — publishes no price.

How this was measured

One business per city, found the way an assistant finds one: a plain search for the service and the city, first usable result. Every price is quoted from the business's own published page on the measurement date, with the label they used; where a business published a range or a 'from' price, that is stated. Candidates are gathered by tooling/price-survey.mjs and then curated by hand, because the automated pass reads out-of-hours rates, care-plan monthly fees and multi-hour blocks as if they were standard prices. A business is excluded rather than guessed at, and every exclusion is published with its reason.

The finding underneath the prices

Of 46 UK service websites read across four verticals, 0 could accept a booking or quote request from a machine, and 2 published a price in structured data. Two, and one of them changed under us. A driving school publishes prices through a Wix Stores payload it did not author. Harley Private Dental was recorded on 31 July as marking up its catalogue with Offer/OfferCatalog and no price values; re-measured on 6 August it carries three populated Offer prices (£110, £105, £85). We cannot tell whether the site changed or the first reading was wrong, and we are not going to guess — the current state is what is stated here. The other 15 dental practices re-checked the same day publish no price in structured data, and 13 of the 17 publish JSON-LD at all. A further 4 publish a price that exists only inside a JavaScript payload, so an assistant fetching the page is served no price at all.

These prices are published for people and invisible to machines. That is the gap this survey exists to measure, and the full survey has the method and every row.