Which practices you see
- Within 15 miles. We look for practices within 15 miles of your postcode, measured in a straight line from the centre of your postcode area (not by road). If there are fewer than 10, we widen the search to 25 miles.
- The nearest 12. From those, we show the 12 nearest practices. If Google tells us a practice has closed permanently, we leave it out and take the next nearest instead. A temporarily closed practice is shown with a label.
- Your filters. The ownership filter (independent, group-owned or charity clinics) and other pets chosen in “Your pet” (rabbits, small pets, birds, reptiles) are applied before choosing the nearest 12. For other pets, prices shown are cat prices as a guide.
- Emergency now. The “Emergency now?” button shows only emergency clinics and practices that run their own out-of-hours service, nearest first (looking up to 40 miles away if there are few nearby), with their phone numbers and whether they’re open. Prices and ratings play no part in this order.
- Google details when you need them. Ratings, opening hours, addresses and phone numbers load from Google when you open a practice, or for all 12 when you sort or filter by rating or opening times. Each look-up costs us money, so we don’t fetch them until they’re useful.
The order
| Sort | How it works |
|---|---|
| Nearest first (standard) | By straight-line distance. |
| Highest Google rating | Highest Google rating first; equal ratings are ordered by number of reviews, then by distance. |
| Lowest price | By the published price for the service and pet you chose. Practices that don’t publish that price come after, nearest first. |
| Lowest price, yearly cost | With “Yearly cost” chosen, by the total of the services you include (for example a booster, a consultation and the kennel cough vaccine), each at the practice’s published price for your pet. Practices that don’t publish every one of them come after, nearest first. Where a practice publishes a monthly pet care plan, we show its yearly cost alongside for comparison. |
We show 12 practices rather than every one nearby to keep the list easy to compare. Changing the order never changes which 12 practices you see.
What the price labels mean
Each price is compared with the local median: the middle price for that service and pet among all the practices within your search radius (15 miles, or 25) that publish it. Within 5% either way it says “about the median”; otherwise it shows how far below or above it is. ▲ and ▼ show whether a price has gone up or down since the practice’s previous weekly check.
Prices follow the CMA’s standard price list: 36 common services, each priced for a cat or for one of five dog sizes, as the typical price for a standard case. Your vet’s final price depends on your pet.
On our medicine page, a price is only highlighted as cheaper when it is at least 1p lower per tablet, capsule, pipette or ml.
What we never do
- Take payment from a vet, group or pharmacy to be listed, ranked higher, featured or labelled.
- Earn commission when you choose a vet or buy medicine.
- Hide practices that don’t publish prices: every practice we know of in the area is listed, marked “price not published yet” (or “prices coming soon” if we’ve found their price list but not read it yet).
- Treat independent and group-owned practices differently: we show who owns every practice and rank them by the same rules.
This matches the standard the CMA has set for comparison sites that use the official vet price data: no paid or promoted rankings.
Special cases
- A charity clinic for owners on low incomes is labelled as such, so you know its eligibility rules apply.
- A dental-only practice appears only when you compare dental prices.
- Emergency-only and referral-only clinics are shown with a clear label, alongside the nearest 12 practices rather than instead of them, and aren’t used for price comparisons. Where an emergency clinic shares a site with a practice, it’s shown as that practice’s out-of-hours cover instead.
Where the information comes from
- Prices: each practice’s own published price list, checked every week; each practice shows the date of its last check. If a page can’t be read, we keep the last price and check it by hand.
- Ratings, addresses, phone numbers and opening hours: loaded live from Google Maps each time you search.
- Ownership: our list of vet groups, built from public company information and the practices’ and groups’ own websites, reviewed every quarter.
- Online medicine prices: Pet Drugs Online (owned by Inspiring Vet Care) and Animed (owned by CVS Group), checked every week.
- Distances: Office for National Statistics postcode data.
Spotted a mistake?
If a price or detail is wrong, practices and pet owners can tell us at [contact email – set “contact_email” in data/meta.json]. We check corrections against the practice’s own published information. Last updated: 26 October 2026.