Buying a veterinary practice: what actually needs checking

Start with the four things that are specific to this sector

An accountant can read any set of accounts. What separates a veterinary practice purchase from buying any other small business is a short list of items that will not appear on a general due diligence checklist, and each of them can cost real money after completion:

• Premises registration. Every premises that stores or supplies medicines must be registered, and branches register separately.
• The Practice Standards Scheme position. Voluntary, four-yearly, and it changes whether the premises gets a separate medicines inspection.
• The medicines records. Five-year retention, recorded prescribing reasons, antibiotic records and an annual audit.
• The CMA remedies. They attach to the business, so they arrive with it.

Then there is the tax, and on a veterinary deal the tax often changes the price rather than merely following it. That is the second half of this guide.

Premises registration: the one that is compulsory

The Register of Veterinary Practice Premises is held by the RCVS on behalf of the Veterinary Medicines Directorate. The RCVS states the obligation plainly: if your practice supplies or stores medicines, you are legally required to register it. This is the mandatory registration in the veterinary sector, and it is registration of premises, not of a business or an owner.

The fee is £38 per premises per year in England and Wales, exempt from VAT, and it renews on 1 April. The RCVS is explicit that the fee is per premises: one main site and two branches means three registrations and three fees. So a group of three premises costs £114 a year — trivial money, and completely beside the point. The point is that an unregistered premises storing or supplying medicines is a compliance defect you are buying, and it is one of the few items in a veterinary deal that can be verified from outside the business in an afternoon.

Ask for the registration certificate or confirmation for every single address the practice operates from, including any branch that has been opened since the last renewal, any site advertised as part of the practice, and anywhere that takes wholesale deliveries of medicines. Do not accept a statement that "the practice is registered" — the registration is per building.

Where the seller sits on the Practice Standards Scheme

The Practice Standards Scheme is, in the RCVS's own words, a voluntary accreditation for UK veterinary practices. Nobody has to be in it. Accredited practices are assessed every four years, across levels running from Core Standards through General Practice to Veterinary Hospital, and accredited premises may then enter the PSS Awards.

There are two reasons a buyer should care about it anyway. The first is commercial: the CMA's practice-information remedy will require staff qualifications, RCVS accreditations and PSS awards to be published, so an accreditation the seller holds becomes a visible marketing asset and one they have lost becomes a visible gap. The second is practical: PSS-accredited premises are exempt from a separate VMD inspection, because the PSS assessment includes a medicines module that meets VMD requirements. Accreditation therefore replaces one inspection with another.

So establish three things: whether the practice is accredited and at which level, when the four-yearly assessment falls due, and whether the assessment date lands within a few months of your completion. Inheriting an assessment you have had no time to prepare for is an avoidable problem, and PSS fees carry 20% VAT, which the £38 premises fee does not.

Read the medicines records. Actually read them

Under the Veterinary Medicines Regulations 2013, in force since 1 October 2013 and amended most recently with effect from 17 May 2024, a practice supplying prescription-only veterinary medicines carries record-keeping duties that are specific, dated and auditable. They are the closest thing in this sector to a bookkeeping trail, and they are a reasonable proxy for how well the whole business is run.

Two things to look for. Ask to see the last annual audit: if it does not exist, or it is a single line in a diary, the practice has not been doing something it is required to do. And check that the recorded reason for prescribing appears where no written prescription was issued — that is the record which will matter most once the CMA's written prescription remedies are in force, because the practice will be handling far more written prescriptions than it does now.

If you are buying a practice in Northern Ireland, note that the regime is different. Under the Windsor Framework, EU Regulation 2019/6 applies in NI rather than the GB Veterinary Medicines Regulations, and a prescription for an antimicrobial or antibiotic is valid for 5 days from issue, against up to 6 months as standard in Great Britain.

The CMA remedies come with the business

The CMA published the final report of its market investigation into veterinary services for household pets on 24 March 2026. The next stage is an Order on businesses, and the CMA has six months to make it, so the Order must be made by 23 September 2026. That is the CMA's own deadline for writing the Order — not a date by which anyone has to comply. Compliance runs from three to twelve months after the Order is made, depending on the remedy and the size of the business. As at the date of this guide no Order exists: the draft went out for consultation on 21 July 2026 and that consultation closes on 20 August 2026, and every compliance date in the draft is written as a bracketed month with no day in it — literally "9 months [X June 2027]" — so there is no calendar date to plan to yet.

For a buyer, the practical consequence is that you are acquiring a business with a known set of obligations arriving on an unknown calendar. Three of them are worth diligence before you sign:

• The publication duties. A comprehensive standard price list by weight band, a parasiticide price list with a link to the VMD Register of Online Retailers, pet care plan disclosures, and practice information. The CMA found that of the first opinion practice websites it reviewed, 84% had no pricing information at all. If the practice you are buying is one of them, someone has to build all of that, and it is easier to negotiate for before completion than to fund afterwards.
• The complaints package. An in-house process that acknowledges a complaint in writing within 5 working days and gives a full response within 8 weeks, a published process, a complaint log, and participation in mediation in good faith once the in-house process is exhausted. Ask for the existing complaint log. A practice that cannot produce one has both a compliance gap and, more usefully to you, no record of what its clients have actually been unhappy about.
• The out-of-hours contract. Notice periods will be capped at 12 months and termination fees restricted, and that remedy bites from the day the Order is made rather than months later. Read the existing OOH contract during diligence: a long tie is a cost you inherit, and the seller's contract may be about to become unenforceable in part.

Written estimates for treatment reasonably likely to cost £500 or more including VAT, updated in writing whenever the cost is likely to rise by 20% or £500, whichever is lower (emergencies excepted), and itemised bills, both sit further out in the compliance timetable. They are process changes rather than cost changes, but they need a practice management system that can produce them.

The goodwill trap: you may get no tax relief on what you are paying for

This is the item that most often changes a veterinary deal, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion. Corporation tax relief on purchased goodwill and other "relevant assets" acquired on or after 1 April 2019 is given at a fixed 6.5% a year under Part 8 Chapter 3 of CTA 2009. But it is available only where the acquisition includes qualifying intellectual property, and the amount that qualifies is restricted to the lower of the cost of the asset or six times the cost of the qualifying IP.

A typical independent small-animal practice's value sits in goodwill and client relationships, with little or no registered intellectual property. Which means the buyer frequently gets no corporation tax relief whatsoever on the largest single item in the purchase price.

Worked example — illustrative. A company buys the trade and assets of a practice for £1,200,000: goodwill £900,000, equipment £250,000, stock £50,000.

• No qualifying IP in the deal. None of the £900,000 of goodwill qualifies. Relief is nil, for the whole life of the asset.
• With qualifying IP costing £100,000. The cap is six times £100,000 = £600,000, which is lower than the £900,000 cost, so £600,000 qualifies. Relief runs at 6.5% a year: £39,000 of deduction a year, worth £9,750 a year at a 25% corporation tax rate, and £150,000 of tax in total across the write-off period. The remaining £300,000 of goodwill gets nothing.

£150,000 of tax is not a rounding error on a £1.2m deal, and the difference between the two lines turns on facts about the target that are established during diligence. There is also no relief where there is no accompanying business acquisition, where the asset comes from a related party and was internally generated there, or where the asset was previously restricted.

This is one of the real reasons veterinary deals get structured as asset purchases or share purchases the way they do, and one of the reasons a buyer's and a seller's preferred structures rarely coincide. It belongs in the price conversation, not in a post-completion tax computation.

Capital allowances on the equipment

The equipment is the part of the purchase price that does attract relief, and there are two regimes with different eligibility.

• Annual Investment Allowance, £1,000,000 a year — in place since 1 January 2019 and available to companies, sole traders and partnerships alike. It covers most plant and machinery but excludes cars, items owned for another purpose before business use, and gifted items.
• Full expensing — companies only, and only for assets that are new and unused. Second-hand equipment is outside it.

On a practice purchase, almost every piece of equipment you acquire is second-hand by definition. So the £250,000 of equipment in the example above is an AIA claim, not a full expensing claim — and because it sits well inside the £1,000,000 annual limit, that is a 100% deduction in the year of purchase worth £62,500 at a 25% corporation tax rate. The distinction only starts to matter when you replace that kit with new equipment, which is dealt with in our guide to capital allowances on veterinary equipment.

Getting the apportionment between goodwill, equipment and stock right in the sale agreement is therefore worth real money, and it is a negotiation, not a formality. A pound moved from goodwill to plant is a pound that attracts immediate relief instead of none at all.

The structure question

There is no regulatory constraint on who owns a UK veterinary practice. Non-vets have been able to own one since 1999, and the RCVS regulates individual veterinary surgeons and veterinary nurses rather than the businesses they work in — it has no statutory power to regulate practices. That is the opposite of the position in several other regulated professions, and it is exactly why the corporate consolidation described in our guide to selling a practice was possible in the first place.

What that means for a buyer is that the structure decision is a commercial and tax decision with no regulatory approval layer sitting behind it. If you are buying through a new company alongside other companies you already own, read the associated-companies point in our incorporation guide before you incorporate anything: a practice company plus a property company plus a personal service company can divide the corporation tax marginal relief limits by three.

A short list to take into diligence

• Registration confirmation for every premises, including branches, with the renewal position as at 1 April.
• The PSS accreditation level and the date of the next four-yearly assessment.
• The last annual medicines audit, plus a sample of receipt and supply records and of recorded prescribing reasons.
• The current out-of-hours contract, with its notice period and any termination fee.
• The complaint log, and whatever exists of a written complaints process.
• The current price list, and an honest answer on whether anything is published on the website.
• An equipment schedule with ages and purchase prices, for the capital allowances apportionment.
• Whether the deal includes any registered intellectual property, because the goodwill relief depends on it.

If you would like help with the numbers side of a specific target, that is what our practice purchase service exists for, and the first conversation costs nothing.