US veterinary universe, mapped
Largest veterinary chains in the US: the top 10 hold roughly 14%, and Mars runs more than the next 50 groups combined.
Updated June 8, 2026
For practice management software, diagnostics vendors, vet supply distributors, staffing platforms, and PE roll-ups selling into 54,297 US vet locations. The brand on the clinic sign is rarely the buyer. The PE parent, the regional VP, or the owner-DVM is.
Active US veterinary care locations
iUS practice entities at entity-grain, a different ruler for the same universe
True independent locations, no PE backer, no corporate parent
The top ten chains
The ten largest US veterinary chains, by hospital count.
Ranked by US freestanding hospital sites, not revenue or headcount. One PE holding company sometimes controls multiple brands, and the practice owner is almost never the corporate parent. The full parent-and-brand breakdown, with data-quality caveats on the chains our resolver currently under-rolls, sits in Chain breakdown below.
Who buys this data
Vet supply distributors, practice management software, and diagnostics vendors selling into 54,297 US vet locations.
This page is for the teams selling into vet practices, not the operators themselves. The buyer for this dataset usually falls into one of these categories.
Practice management software
PIMS vendors
Cornerstone, Avimark, ezyVet, IDEXX Neo, Vetspire. The independent owner-DVM is the buyer; the PE group's regional ops VP is a different sale entirely. Know which parent group you are pitching before you book the demo.
Diagnostics and imaging
Diagnostics and reference labs
IDEXX, Zoetis, and Mars Veterinary Health's diagnostics subsidiaries themselves. Reference lab contracts, in-house chemistry analysers, digital radiography upgrades. Long contract cycles anchored at the practice level.
Veterinary supply distribution
Supply distribution
Covetrus, Patterson, Henry Schein Animal Health, MWI. Pharmaceuticals, consumables, surgical supply, foodservice. Chain vs independent means entirely different rep coverage models and purchasing authority.
Pet insurance and financing
Pet insurance and patient financing
CareCredit, ScratchPay, and pet-insurance carriers placing collateral in clinic lobbies. The decision to display a product or integrate a payment flow is the owner's, not the front-desk team's.
Vet staffing platforms
Relief DVM and staffing marketplaces
IndeVets, Vetster, Stat Vet, and the rest of the relief-DVM platforms. Demand is heaviest where PE rollups are stretching staff coverage thinnest, which makes parent-group segmentation the most useful filter.
CME and continuing education
Continuing education and specialty boards
VetGirl, VIN, NAVC, and the specialty boards. State licensure renewal drives the cycle; the buyer is the individual DVM, the budget is sometimes the practice.
Equipment and capital goods
Equipment and capital goods
Dental units, anaesthesia machines, autoclaves, cage banks. Long sales cycles with deal sizes that depend entirely on which parent group is signing. Mars VCA and NVA have national procurement contacts; the independent vet owner makes the call alone.
Adjacent universes built the same way: the how many veterinarians in the US page (DVM headcount, not location count), the veterinarian email list, and the broader email lists by medical specialty.
The long version
Detail, on demand.
Orbital counts 54,297 US veterinary locations. Entity-grain rollups land closer to 32,000 US practice entities. The gap is location-grain versus entity-grain. Both numbers are right. They answer different questions.
How the 54,297 figure is built
- Start with every active US veterinary care site. Includes freestanding hospitals, in-store retail clinics, mobile and pop-up locations, satellite ER hospitals, urgent-care storefronts, and house-call businesses. Anything billing for veterinary services at a discrete address.
- Classify each site by model. Freestanding hospital, in-store retail clinic, mobile pop-up, urgent care, emergency, hospice. These are different ICPs. A vendor selling a digital radiography upgrade does not sell to VIP Petcare. A vendor selling pop-up logistics does not sell to BluePearl.
- Resolve each site to a real owner. The brand on the building is the chain affiliation. The operating business is the LLC or sole proprietor who holds the lease and the DVM licence. Around 53.6 percent of US vet locations are true independents.
- Reconcile entity-grain versus location-grain. Entity-grain counts log each practice entity once. Orbital’s monthly refresh counts each operating location once. Same universe, different ruler. Vendors prospecting by storefront or sales territory use the location count. Vendors prospecting by buying entity use the practice count.
- Refresh on a rolling schedule. Mars closes a Banfield inside a PetSmart in March, NVA acquires a four-clinic group in April, a new VEG opens in Houston in May. The annual report catches none of it in real time.
If you want the breakdown for a specific state, model, or parent group, ask. We do not hide the working.
Two tables, on purpose. Table A covers freestanding hospital chains, the right number for vendors selling exam-room equipment, practice management software, or specialty referrals. Table B covers non-hospital networks, the right number for vendors selling vaccines, retail-clinic logistics, or pop-up infrastructure. Conflating them is how vendor data goes wrong.
Table A. Largest freestanding veterinary hospital chains
| # | Brand | Parent / brands | US locations | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mars Petcare | Mars Inc. Three brands: VCA Animal Hospitals (982), Banfield Pet Hospital (999, most inside PetSmart stores), BluePearl Specialty and Emergency (100). | 2,081 | Largest veterinary operator by a wide margin. VCA's chain entity dropped from Orbital's finalize step in 2026-06 while 982 locations still reference it; the location count is authoritative. No other operator is close. |
| 2 | NVA | National Veterinary Associates. JAB Holding-backed. | ~1,100 (public) | Orbital's chain resolver currently under-rolls NVA's acquired-brand identities (Carolina Veterinary Specialists, etc.), so the parent entity surfaces 0 to 1 US sites in our raw data. Public PE coverage and NVA corporate communications cite roughly 1,100 US clinics consistently. |
| 3 | VetCor | PE-backed. | ~700 (public) | Same resolver caveat: name-string match surfaces 38 US sites in Orbital data; public sources cite roughly 700. We use the public number. |
| 4 | Thrive Pet Healthcare | TSG Consumer Partners (PE). | 305 | Mix of general practice and specialty hospitals, heavy in Texas and the Southeast. |
| 5 | Ethos Veterinary Health | PE-backed. Specialty and emergency hospitals. | ~145 (public) | Resolver caveat: name-string match surfaces 2 US sites in Orbital data; public sources cite roughly 145. |
| 6 | VEG | Veterinary Emergency Group. JAB Holding (also owns NVA). | 114 | Pure-play 24/7 ER, open-floor model, urban concentration. |
| 7 | Lap of Love | PE-backed. | 101 | In-home hospice and euthanasia; no physical clinic. Included for completeness; flagged as a non-hospital model. |
| 8 | UrgentVet | Privately held. | 92 | Urgent-care vet storefront, walk-in friendly, no overnight. Concentrated in the Southeast. |
| 9 | CityVet | Privately held. | 67 | Texas-focused general practice with day-boarding and grooming attached. |
| 10 | GoodVets | PE-backed. | 65 | General practice with vet-partnership equity model. |
Footnote on Table A. Lap of Love is in-home hospice with no physical clinic; treat it as a non-hospital model in any prospecting motion. NVA, VetCor, and Ethos counts cite public sources because Orbital’s chain resolver currently keeps their acquired-brand identities separate from the PE parent. The location-level records are present and accurate; what is in flux is the parent attribution on each row.
Table B. Largest non-hospital vet-care networks
| # | Brand | US locations | Model |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | VIP Petcare | 2,105 | Mobile and pop-up community clinics at Tractor Supply, Pet Supermarket, and similar retail hosts. Roughly 60,000 individual pop-up clinic days a year run through host retail addresses. Acquired by Tractor Supply from PetIQ in 2025. NOT freestanding hospitals. |
| 2 | Petco / Vetco | 1,633 | In-store at Petco retail stores. Mixed model: roughly 250 to 300 full-service Vetco Total Care hospitals, the rest walk-in vaccination clinics. NASDAQ:WOOF. |
| 3 | ShotVet | 372 | Pop-up clinic model. Sterling Partners (PE). |
| 4 | UrgentVet | 92 | Urgent-care storefront. Also in Table A; included here for the urgent-care lens. |
| 5 | Bond Vet | 47 | Urgent-care storefront. NYC and East Coast concentration. |
| 6 | Petfolk | 37 | Membership-based. Suburban-focused. |
| 7 | Modern Animal | 29 | Membership-based, app-driven. Coastal urban markets. |
| 8 | Lap of Love | 101 | In-home hospice. Also in Table A; the largest pure-mobile model. |
Footnote on Table B. These business models are not comparable to freestanding hospitals. VIP Petcare and ShotVet are mobile and pop-up host-address counts, not hospital counts. Petco / Vetco mixes full-service hospitals with walk-in vaccination clinics inside retail stores. If you sell exam-room hardware or anaesthesia, half these rows are the wrong ICP. If you sell vaccines, retail-clinic logistics, or pop-up insurance, they may be your entire ICP.
California (4,530), Texas (3,624), and Florida (3,424) combined hold nearly 25% of US vet hospitals, and they are also where Mars VCA, Banfield (inside PetSmart), and the PE-backed rollups concentrate their footprint. Texas is the Thrive Pet Healthcare and CityVet stronghold; California is VCA's home market; Florida is where Lap of Love and VEG continue to add the most net-new sites. The 15 largest states carry roughly 65% of the universe.
| # | State | Veterinary locations | Share of US |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | 4,530 | 9.70% |
| 2 | Texas | 3,624 | 7.76% |
| 3 | Florida | 3,424 | 7.33% |
| 4 | New York | 2,062 | 4.41% |
| 5 | Ohio | 1,788 | 3.83% |
| 6 | Pennsylvania | 1,758 | 3.76% |
| 7 | Illinois | 1,613 | 3.45% |
| 8 | North Carolina | 1,572 | 3.36% |
| 9 | Georgia | 1,448 | 3.10% |
| 10 | Michigan | 1,415 | 3.03% |
| 11 | Virginia | 1,329 | 2.84% |
| 12 | Colorado | 1,194 | 2.56% |
| 13 | Tennessee | 1,140 | 2.44% |
| 14 | Washington | 1,105 | 2.36% |
| 15 | Missouri | 1,050 | 2.25% |
Share is each state’s portion of the 54,297 US location total. Source: Orbital data team, June 2026 snapshot.
We believe
If you sell into vets and you are not segmenting Mars-owned vs PE-rollup vs true-independent in your CRM, you are sending the same pitch to three buyers who behave nothing alike.
One company, Mars, runs roughly 4 percent of every US vet clinic. VCA, Banfield, and BluePearl together, more than the next 50 corporate groups combined. PE rollups, NVA at 1,100, VetCor at 700, Thrive at 305, VEG at 114, Ethos at 145, Lap of Love at 101, collectively own another 5 percent or so. A decade ago that combined number was under 3 percent. The independent neighborhood vet still holds 53.6 percent of locations, but every quarter that share drops by roughly 30 basis points as PE buys another 20-clinic group.
The procurement motion at Mars VCA is one signed master agreement and a corporate buyer in Los Angeles. The procurement motion at NVA is a regional VP and a six-week pilot. The procurement motion at a true independent in Spokane is a forty-minute conversation with the owner-DVM who pays the lease and also performs the surgeries. Three buyers. Three pitches. The vendors who treat them as one market are the ones who keep wondering why the pipeline never converts past the first call.
Do not buy this if any of the following are true.
You sell only to mass-vaccination clinics or retail-vet networks. The freestanding hospital data is the wrong slice. Table B is closer, but you probably still need a tighter pop-up dataset.
Your sales motion only fires on $1M+ ACV. The true independents are too small. You want Mars, NVA, VetCor, Thrive, and maybe Ethos. Five named accounts, not 54,000 records.
You sell to pet-owner consumers. Pet food, training apps, telehealth for consumers. This is operator-side data, wrong audience.
You need clinical or DEA-regulated practice data. Schedule II controlled-substance inventory, board complaints, malpractice records. Those live with state veterinary boards and the DEA. We do not stand them up here.
If you Google “largest veterinary chains in the US,” the top results are usually a chain-revenue chart citing Mars and a market-summary page citing aggregate revenue. Those are useful for a board deck. They are not useful for a quarterly outbound motion. Both publish at entity grain, both lag by 18 to 24 months, and neither names the operator at the location level.
The deeper problem is that vendor data tools index by chain. “Mars Petcare” comes back as one row with its full hospital base. NVA comes back as one row with 1,100. The reality, on Monday morning when an outbound rep is dialling, is each individual hospital with a practice manager, a head DVM, and a regional supply-chain contact at corporate. The big database returns three rows. The job requires several thousand.
Orbital was built for that gap. We surface the individual Mars hospitals, the practice manager at each, and the supply-chain contact at corporate, not three rows. Same playbook works for dentists and HVAC. What is specific to veterinary care is the layer on top: parent group attribution (Mars, NVA, VetCor, Thrive, true independent), model classification (freestanding hospital, mobile, in-store, urgent care, hospice), and PE backer where relevant.
Trade-association entity censuses ship once a year. Practice-accreditation registries publish on accreditation cycles, not refresh schedules. Third-party aggregators sit on top of both and lag further. For a vendor doing outbound this quarter, the question is which locations are open this Monday, who owns them, and which parent group is signing the PO. That is the gap a location-grain, monthly-refreshed map closes. See the companion how many veterinarians in the US page for the DVM-headcount view of the same universe.
Questions
Before you ask sales about veterinary chain data.
How many veterinary clinics are in the US?
Orbital counts 54,297 active US veterinary care locations as of June 2026. That is a location-grain count. Entity-grain rollups that fold multi-site groups, mobile networks, and in-store retail clinics into a single record land closer to 32,000. Both views are right; they answer different questions. Vendors prospecting by sales territory use the location count. Vendors prospecting by buying entity use the practice count.
What is Mars Petcare's actual US footprint?
Mars runs three brands: VCA Animal Hospitals at 982 sites, Banfield Pet Hospital at 999 sites (most of which sit inside PetSmart stores), and BluePearl Specialty and Emergency at 100 sites. Mars’s own corporate communications cite roughly 2,000 US hospitals, which reconciles within about 10 percent of the location-level count. No other operator is close.
Why does the Orbital count differ from entity-grain rollups?
Entity-grain rollups are self-reported and refresh annually. Orbital's count is location-grain, signal-driven, and refreshed monthly. The two diverge because of mobile-clinic networks, in-store retail clinics at Petco and PetSmart, satellite emergency hospitals, and house-call businesses, all of which entity-grain rollups fold into a single practice entity and Orbital counts as separate operating sites. Neither approach is wrong. Pick the one that matches your sales motion.
Who are the largest PE-rolled vet chains?
NVA (National Veterinary Associates), backed by JAB Holding, runs roughly 1,100 US clinics. VetCor runs roughly 700. Thrive Pet Healthcare (TSG Consumer Partners) runs 305. Ethos Veterinary Health runs roughly 145 specialty hospitals. VEG (Veterinary Emergency Group) is at 114, also under JAB. Lap of Love runs 101 in-home hospice businesses. Combined, the PE-rolled networks below Mars own roughly 5 percent of US locations and most of the dollar growth in the segment over the last decade.
How do mobile-clinic networks like VIP Petcare differ from hospital chains?
They are a different business entirely. VIP Petcare runs 2,105 pop-up community clinics inside Tractor Supply, Pet Supermarket, and similar retail partners. Each pop-up uses the host retailer's address. There is no freestanding hospital. ShotVet runs 372 of the same model. Petco operates 1,633 in-store Vetco clinics, a mix of full-service Vetco Total Care hospitals and walk-in vaccination clinics. These are a distinct ICP: they buy vaccines and pop-up logistics, not exam-room equipment.
Can I filter by state, metro, or model?
Yes. The dataset is segmentable by state, metro, model (freestanding hospital, mobile, in-store, urgent care, emergency, hospice), parent group (Mars, PE-rollup, true independent), and chain affiliation. The sample includes 100 records pulled to your filter; if you want California-only Mars VCA hospitals or Texas-only true independents, that is what arrives.
When is this dataset the wrong fit?
If you only sell to one or two corporate accounts (Mars's procurement team or NVA's central supply group), you do not need 54,297 records. You need a named contact at two companies. If your product is for pet owners (a consumer app, a direct-to-consumer pet food), this is operator-side data, wrong audience. If you need clinical or DEA-regulated practice data (Schedule II inventory, board complaints), state veterinary boards and the DEA are your sources.
Why is NVA listed at 1,100 from a public source instead of Orbital data?
Orbital's chain resolver currently keeps NVA's acquired-brand identities (Carolina Veterinary Specialists, Mission Veterinary Partners pre-merger entities, and so on) separate from the NVA parent, so the NVA chain entity surfaces only a handful of US locations in our raw data. Public PE coverage and NVA's own corporate communications cite roughly 1,100 US clinics consistently across sources. Re-rolling the acquired brands under their PE parent is on our engineering backlog. We surface the public number because it is closer to ground truth than our current chain entity.
See the verified veterinary owner dataset before you pay for it.
Tell us the parent groups (Mars VCA, NVA, VetCor, Thrive, true independent), models (freestanding hospital, mobile pop-up, in-store retail, urgent care, hospice), or states you want. We send a free sample of around 100 verified owner records you can check against your own pipeline, no commitment, no email-list back-and-forth.
Get the sample