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Key takeaways
- The honest answer to how veterinarians spend their day is that appointments take up less of it than the schedule implies. One UK study found a median consultation of 9 minutes 45 seconds.
- Full-time veterinarians averaged 48.7 hours a week in 2023, still above pre-pandemic levels.
- There is no rigorous published measurement of how much of a veterinary day goes to documentation. Figures circulating online are not traceable to one.
- The closest hard evidence comes from human medicine, where physicians were observed spending nearly two hours on records and desk work for every hour of patient face time.
Ask how veterinarians spend their day and you will find a confident answer within about four seconds of searching. You will also find that most of those answers trace back to each other rather than to anyone who measured anything.
So this is the version built only from sources you can check. Where good evidence exists, it is here with a citation. Where it does not, that is stated plainly rather than filled in with a number that sounds about right.
How long is a veterinary appointment, really?
Shorter than the slot it sits in.
Robinson and colleagues recorded consultations across two UK first opinion practices, which is the UK term for general practice, and found a median length of 9 minutes 45 seconds, with an interquartile range of 7 minutes 50 seconds to 14 minutes. That is the actual time from start to finish, not the time the diary allowed for it.
Compare that with what practices schedule. A survey of 307 people working in UK first opinion small animal practice found 15 minutes was the most common appointment length at 49.8%, with 10 minutes next at 39.4%. The same survey found that 41% of respondents said their practice squeezes in or double books every single day, and 91.5% said it happens at least occasionally.
A separate interview study found something that complicates all of this. Belshaw and colleagues spoke with 15 pet owners and 14 veterinary surgeons and concluded that allocated time was a poor guide to either actual length or perceived quality. Surgeons described overrunning on young, old or complicated patients, then deliberately shortening later consultations to claw the time back. One described trying to fit a full preventative discussion into ten minutes as simply not feasible.
So the schedule is not a description of the day. It is a target the day is measured against, and the variance gets absorbed by whoever is standing in the consulting room.
Worth noting
Those three studies are all from the United Kingdom. UK and US practice differ in appointment conventions, staffing and payment structure, so the specific minutes may not transfer. We have included them because they are the best measured data available, and we have not found an equivalent US study.
How many hours does the week actually hold?
This one is better documented, at least in the United States.
The AVMA's Census of Veterinarians puts the average for full-time veterinarians, defined as 37 or more hours a week, at 48.7 hours in 2023. That is roughly an hour below the 2021 and 2022 peak and still above where it sat before the pandemic. Across all veterinarians including part-time, the median rose from 40 hours a week in the four pre-pandemic years to 45 during 2020 to 2022, easing somewhat in 2023 but staying above 40.
Put the two sets of numbers together and the arithmetic gets interesting. If consultations run around ten minutes and the week runs close to fifty hours, appointments are not what fills the week.
So where does the rest of the time go?
Here is the honest answer: nobody has published a rigorous measurement of it in veterinary medicine, at least none that we could find.
We know what the work consists of, because every practice does it. Records, discharge notes, referral letters, lab follow-up, callbacks, prescription queries, insurance forms, and the conversations that happen in corridors between appointments. What does not exist is a published study that put an observer in a practice with a stopwatch and reported how those categories divide the day.
That gap matters, because it is precisely the number everyone quotes.
What the human medicine research found
Human medicine does have that study, and it is worth looking at as long as nobody pretends it is about veterinarians.
Sinsky and colleagues ran a direct observation time and motion study across family medicine, internal medicine, cardiology and orthopedics. Trained observers followed 57 physicians for 430 hours and recorded what they were doing minute by minute. During the office day, physicians spent 27.0% of their time on direct clinical face time with patients and 49.2% on electronic health records and desk work.
Physician office day, by direct observation
Direct patient face time. Rising to 33.1% once time with staff present was counted.
Records and desk work. Nearly two hours for every hour of face time.
Everything else. Movement, breaks, administrative tasks not at a screen.
The study also tracked what happened after the office closed. A subset of 21 physicians kept diaries and reported a mean of 1.5 hours of after-hours work per day, 59% of it in the electronic record. On nights when they were covering the practice, that rose to 2.2 hours.
Two reasons to treat this carefully. It is a different profession with different record systems, different billing requirements and different patients. And it is from 2016, so the technology has moved since.
It is still the only rigorously measured answer to this shape of question that exists in clinical practice. If someone tells you veterinarians spend a specific percentage of the day on records, this is the study their number is probably descended from, several citations removed and with the species quietly changed.
Why the numbers you see online do not add up
Search for how much time veterinarians spend on paperwork and you will find a figure repeated with great confidence across a dozen pages, usually in the range of a quarter to two fifths of the working day.
Follow the citations. Most of those pages are published by companies selling veterinary documentation software, and most of them cite each other. Several attribute the figure to studies that we could not locate at all. We went looking specifically so we could cite the original, and the trail ends without reaching one.
What we are not claiming
We are not saying the figure is wrong. It may well turn out to be close. We are saying that as of now it is commonly reported but not well documented, and that there is a difference between the two that matters when a practice is making decisions.
VetSkribe sells documentation software. That is exactly why we would rather publish the version with the gaps marked than add another page to the loop.
The practical consequence is simple. If you are being sold a tool on the strength of a percentage, ask where the percentage came from. A vendor who can answer that is worth more of your attention than one who cannot.
What a practice can actually measure
There is no national figure for how veterinarians spend their day. Your own figure can exist, and it is more useful anyway, because it reflects your caseload, your systems and your team rather than an average of practices unlike yours.
- Pick one week and one person. A single veterinarian logging what they are doing at fifteen minute intervals produces a rough but real picture. Five days is enough to see the shape.
- Separate scheduled from unscheduled. Appointments, surgery and procedures on one side. Everything that happens between and after on the other.
- Count the tail specifically. Time spent on records after the last appointment is the figure most practices have never put a number to, and the one that most affects whether people stay.
- Check the schedule against reality. If appointments are booked at fifteen minutes and consistently run at twenty, the schedule is producing the overrun, not absorbing it.
- Repeat it in six months. A single measurement tells you where you are. Two tell you whether anything you changed worked.
None of this requires software or a consultant. It requires somebody writing things down for a week, which is the step most practices skip.
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See how VetSkribe AI worksCommon questions
How do veterinarians spend their day?
Appointments take up less of it than the schedule suggests. Measured consultations in UK first opinion practice ran to a median of 9 minutes 45 seconds, while full-time US veterinarians averaged 48.7 hours a week in 2023. The remainder goes to records, callbacks, lab follow-up, prescriptions, referral letters and surgery, though the precise split has not been measured in a published veterinary study.
How much time do vets spend on paperwork?
There is no reliable published figure. Percentages circulating online are mostly published by documentation software vendors citing each other, and several attribute the number to studies that cannot be located. The closest rigorously measured evidence comes from human medicine, where observed physicians spent 49.2% of the office day on records and desk work against 27.0% on direct patient time. That is a different profession and should not be read as a veterinary statistic.
How long is a typical veterinary appointment?
Scheduled and actual lengths differ. A survey of UK first opinion practice found 15 minutes was the most common booked slot at 49.8%, followed by 10 minutes at 39.4%. Direct recording at two practices found a median actual consultation of 9 minutes 45 seconds, with an interquartile range of roughly 8 to 14 minutes.
How many hours do veterinarians work?
According to the AVMA Census of Veterinarians, full-time veterinarians averaged 48.7 hours a week in 2023. Across all veterinarians including part-time, the median rose from 40 hours before the pandemic to 45 during 2020 to 2022, settling somewhat in 2023 but remaining above 40.
Sources
- Robinson NJ, Dean RS, Cobb M, Brennan ML. Consultation length in first opinion small animal practice. Veterinary Record, 2014. doi:10.1136/vr.102713
- Corah L, Lambert A, Cobb K, Mossop L. Appointment scheduling and cost in first opinion small animal practice. Heliyon, 5(10):e02567, 2019. doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e02567
- Belshaw Z, Robinson NJ, Dean RS, Brennan ML. "I Always Feel Like I Have to Rush..." Pet Owner and Small Animal Veterinary Surgeons' Reflections on Time during Preventative Healthcare Consultations in the United Kingdom. Veterinary Sciences, 5(1):20, 2018. doi:10.3390/vetsci5010020
- Sinsky C, Colligan L, Li L, Prgomet M, Reynolds S, Goeders L, Westbrook J, Tutty M, Blike G. Allocation of Physician Time in Ambulatory Practice: A Time and Motion Study in 4 Specialties. Annals of Internal Medicine, 2016. doi:10.7326/M16-0961 (human medicine, included as the closest measured analogue)
- American Veterinary Medical Association. Chart of the Month: Work hours continue to exceed pre-pandemic norms, May 2024, drawing on the AVMA Census of Veterinarians and the 2024 Report on the Economic State of the Veterinary Profession.