Selling a veterinary practice: the market you are selling into

Who the buyers actually are

The CMA's final report of 24 March 2026 put hard numbers on a market most practice owners only knew anecdotally. Over 60% of veterinary practices are owned in whole or in part by six large veterinary groups. In 2013 that figure was 10%, and the expansion came, in the CMA's words, mainly from a significant number of acquisitions over a relatively short period.

The scale spread is more extreme than most sellers assume. The largest of the six, IVC Evidensia, has over 900 first opinion practices in the UK. The smallest of the six, Linnaeus, has around 180. The next largest owner in the whole market owns just 38, and 76% of veterinary businesses have only one practice — between them accounting for 20% of all first opinion practices. There is a very large gap between the six and everybody else, and if you own one practice you are in the majority.

Two details in that table matter to a seller. First, Pets at Home and Medivet are structurally different: a joint venture or partnership model means the question is not only "what will you pay" but "what am I still holding afterwards, and on what terms". Second, five of the six grew mainly by acquisition — Pets at Home is the exception, having expanded mainly by opening new practices. If you are approached, you are being approached by an organisation that has done this many times and you probably have not.

One more verified number is worth having in your head. Between January 2023 and July 2024, average prices for consultations and treatments at practices owned by Medivet, IVC, CVS, VetPartners and Linnaeus were together 18.3% higher than at independent practices. Corporate buyers price differently after completion, and if you are selling a practice whose clients you will still see in the local shop, that is worth knowing before you sign.

The tax on your exit has changed, and it has changed the timing question

Business Asset Disposal Relief is the relief most practice sales turn on, and its rate has moved twice in two years.

Worked example — illustrative. A qualifying gain of £400,000, ignoring the annual exempt amount and any other disposals in the year:

• At the old 10% rate the capital gains tax would have been £40,000.
• At 14% it would have been £56,000.
• At the current 18% rate it is £72,000.
• Without BADR at all, at the 24% main higher rate, it would be £96,000.

Read the last two lines together, because that comparison is the real change. BADR now saves £24,000 on this gain, where at 10% it would have saved £56,000. The relief is now within six percentage points of the main higher rate, which materially reduces the incentive to time a practice sale around it. Sellers who spent 2024 and 2025 being told to hurry for tax reasons are being told something that is much less true in 2026 — and a deal structured badly to hit a tax date costs more than the six points ever saved.

The qualifying conditions have not moved, and all of them look back two years before the disposal:

• Sole trader or partner: you are a sole trader or a business partner and have owned the business for at least two years.
• Shareholder: you are an employee or office holder of the company, and the company's main activities are trading rather than non-trading activities like investment.
• The 5% personal company test for non-EMI shares: at least 5% of the shares and 5% of the voting rights, plus entitlement to 5% of either the profits and assets on a winding up or the disposal proceeds.

That third test is the one that catches people in practices with several shareholders and an alphabet share structure. Shares and votes are not enough on their own: the economic entitlement has to be there too, and it has to have been there for the whole two years. If a share reorganisation is part of getting the practice sale-ready, do it with the two-year clock in mind rather than after the buyer has been found.

Merger control: voluntary, and the CMA is watching this sector by name

UK merger notification is voluntary. There is no mandatory pre-notification obligation, and the CMA's veterinary market investigation created no new notification duty. That is the correct starting point and it is worth stating clearly, because a lot of commentary implies otherwise.

What did change is the thresholds. From 1 January 2025, under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, the Enterprise Act 2002 tests are:

• Turnover test — UK turnover of the target exceeding £100 million (raised from £70m).
• Share of supply test — creation or enhancement of a 25% share of supply of goods or services in the UK or a substantial part of it, with a £10 million UK turnover floor for the small merger safe harbour.
• A new acquirer-focused threshold — the acquirer holds a 33% share of supply in the UK and has UK turnover of £350 million or more, with a UK nexus condition.

Now put that next to what the CMA said in its final report. Previous CMA merger investigations in the veterinary sector have led to divestments of first opinion practices to address competition concerns, and the CMA stated it will continue actively monitoring merger activity in the veterinary sector and will take account of the analysis in the market investigation. A footnote adds that in assessing future mergers it may use share of FTE vets in specific local areas, as it has in previous veterinary merger cases.

The honest position for a seller is this: no filing obligation arises from your sale, but a sale in a locally concentrated area — where the buyer already owns the other practices within a reasonable drive — carries genuine call-in risk on a voluntary regime. That risk sits with the buyer commercially, but it can affect your timetable, your conditions and occasionally whether the deal completes at all. It is a question to ask an acquirer early, not a reason not to sell.

What can honestly be said about value

You will not find a valuation multiple on this page, and that is deliberate rather than coy. No primary source publishes veterinary practice valuation multiples — not EBITDA multiples, not price per full-time-equivalent vet, not a percentage of turnover. The CMA's final report, which had access to the financial records of all six large groups and a sample of independents, deliberately does not publish them either. Any multiple you have been quoted from trade press or broker material cannot be traced to a primary source, and we are not going to repeat it as though it can.

What the CMA's Appendix C does verify is far more useful for the conversation you actually need to have, which is about the profitability a buyer is pricing. Its sample of 36 small independent veterinary firms across 2021 to 2023 showed:

Three things fall out of that table. The spread among independents is enormous — a 43 percentage point range between the worst and best margin in a sample of 36 firms doing broadly the same work. The direction of travel over those three years was downwards, from 15% to 9%, with 24 of the 36 firms declining. And only 9 firms stayed in the same sextile for all three years, which means most practices' margins are not stable enough for a single year to describe them.

Worked example — illustrative. A practice with fee income of £900,000:

• At the sample's 2023 figure of 9%, EBIT is £81,000.
• At the three-year weighted average of 11%, EBIT is £99,000.
• At the top sextile figure of 28%, EBIT is £252,000.

That is a £171,000 difference in annual profit on identical turnover, and it is the gap between the two ends of a real sample of real independent practices. Whatever multiple a buyer applies, it is applied to that number. Which is why the productive work before a sale is on the margin, not on the multiple.

The CMA also assessed a pre-tax cost of capital of 7.5% to 10.5% a year, mid-point 9%, and found an aggregate return on capital employed across all the large groups' local clinics of 19% a year. Four of the six groups — CVS, IVC, Pets at Home and VetPartners — made profits which materially exceeded the cost of capital over a sustained period.

Worked example — illustrative. A practice with £600,000 of capital employed needs £54,000 of annual return simply to cover a 9% cost of capital. At the 19% aggregate figure the same capital would produce £114,000. The gap between those two numbers is, in economic terms, the prize a corporate buyer is bidding for. It is a better guide to why you are being approached than any multiple.

Group-specific profitability, return on capital and margin figures are redacted in the published version of the CMA's appendix. We will not reconstruct them and you should be wary of anyone who claims to have.

The buyer's goodwill problem is your price problem

One asymmetry is worth understanding before you negotiate. A corporate buyer paying for goodwill often gets no corporation tax relief on it at all: relief on goodwill acquired since 1 April 2019 runs at a fixed 6.5% a year but only where the acquisition includes qualifying intellectual property, capped at six times the cost of that IP. Most independent practices have none.

That is not an argument for accepting less. It is an explanation of why buyers push value towards assets, towards earn-outs and towards share purchases rather than asset purchases, and why the structure of an offer can matter more to your net proceeds than the headline number. Our guide to buying a practice sets the same point out from the other side of the table, which is worth reading before you meet an acquirer.

What to do in the two years before you sell

• Fix the margin, not the story. The sample above says a practice can move by tens of percentage points. That work takes more than one year and it is what the price is calculated from.
• Get the two-year clocks running. Every BADR condition looks back two years, including the 5% economic entitlement. Share reorganisations after a buyer appears are too late.
• Clean up the compliance record. Premises registration for every branch, the annual medicines audit, the complaint log, the out-of-hours contract. A buyer prices uncertainty.
• Separate the property. If you own the premises personally or through another company, decide early whether it is being sold, retained and let, or held. It changes both the tax and the negotiation.
• Understand what a joint venture or partnership offer really is. Two of the six groups do not simply buy practices outright.

If you want the numbers side of a sale worked out properly, that is what our practice sale service does, and the arithmetic on structure is worth having before an acquirer sets the agenda.