South Florida Veterinary Report: September 2026

This report covers veterinary practices and pet care businesses (grooming, boarding, sitting and training) in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe counties, with Florida-wide context where local data does not exist. Most figures come from public sources: federal price indexes, county shelter records, county 311 logs, federal employment counts and the FDA's adverse event database. The figures on clinic websites come from Pixedi's own measurement at the start of October 2026, and each section says when that is the case.

Key findings

• US veterinarian service prices were 54.6% higher in August 2026 than in August 2019, against 30.6% for all consumer items over the same stretch.
• In August 2026 veterinarian service prices were still rising faster than everything else, up 5.7% year over year against headline inflation of 3.4%.
• Broward County Animal Care took in 6,623 dogs and cats from January through September 2026, down 14.8% from the same months a year earlier.
• Owner surrenders in Broward moved the other way, reaching 885 pets in the twelve months to September 2026, up 19.4%.
• South Florida had 794 veterinary practices with employees in 2025, 29 more than a year earlier, and they employed 7,888 people on average.
• The median Florida veterinary website Pixedi tested scored 59 out of 100 on mobile performance, and none of the tested sites met the 2.5-second mark for showing their main content on a simulated phone.
• 71.3% of reachable Florida veterinary websites offer an online booking path, while only 7.9% offer a Spanish-language version or say they speak Spanish on the home page.
• 11.1% of the Florida veterinary websites in Pixedi's sample failed to load or were parked when tested.

Prices: veterinary care keeps outrunning inflation

The price data shows how far veterinary care has pulled away from the rest of the economy. US prices for veterinarian services were 54.6% higher in August 2026 than in August 2019, while prices for all consumer items rose 30.6% over the same period. Pet services outside the clinic (grooming, boarding and other non-vet care) rose 44.2% over that stretch, and pets and pet products rose only 20.1%. So the gap is concentrated in the services that need trained people, and the goods side of pet spending has stayed much closer to general inflation.

• Veterinarian services54.6%
• Pet services (non-vet)44.2%
• All consumer items30.6%
• Pets and pet products20.1%

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics

The pace has not cooled much. Veterinarian service prices rose 5.7% year over year in August 2026, against headline inflation of 3.4%, and averaged over the twelve months to August 2026 they were 6.1% above the prior twelve months. Pet services excluding the vet rose 4.5%, pets and pet products 1.9%, and the combined index for pets, pet products and services 3.2%. For a clinic owner this means clients are absorbing increases well above what they see at the grocery store, which makes price communication and payment options more than a front-desk detail.

There is no local index for veterinary prices. The closest one is recreation prices in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach metro, which rose 3.2% year over year in August 2026. That is a rough stand-in, and it is preliminary for this purpose, but it suggests local households are seeing the same general cost pressure as the national figures describe.

Some practices are already responding on their websites. Pixedi's measurement found that 27.7% of reachable Florida veterinary websites mention financing or a payment plan on the home page, 30.7% mention a wellness or care plan, and 10.9% mention pet insurance. With vet prices up by more than half since 2019, the share of clinics that say nothing about how a client can spread the cost looks large.

Shelter demand: fewer animals in, more owners giving up pets

Broward County Animal Care has the newest local numbers on pets in trouble. They took in 6,623 dogs and cats from January through September 2026, down from 7,775 in the same months a year earlier, which is a 14.8% drop. Looking at the full twelve months through September 2026, intake hit 8,948, a 9.2% decrease from the year before. That dip comes after a long climb, with annual intakes jumping from 7,099 in 2021 to 10,100 in 2025, a 42.3% increase, so the current numbers are just a return from a really high point.

The mix of animals matters for clinics that do low-cost spay and neuter work or partner with rescues. Cats made up 72.2% of intake in the twelve months to September 2026, strays accounted for 82.8%, and 38.5% of animals entering were under six months old. That profile points to unaltered outdoor cats and their litters as the main source of shelter pressure in Broward, which is where community spay and neuter programs and kitten care have the most to do.

The figure worth watching is owner surrenders. Owners gave up 885 pets to Broward County Animal Care in the twelve months to September 2026, up 19.4% from the prior twelve months, even as total intake fell. The data does not say why, but it lines up in time with veterinary prices running well ahead of inflation. A clinic that sees clients hesitating over a treatment estimate is seeing the same pressure that ends, in some households, at the shelter door.

Outcomes slipped slightly. The live-release rate (animals leaving through adoption, return to owner, transfer or return to field) moved from 81.7% to 80.0% between the prior twelve months and the twelve months to September 2026. Adoptions totaled 3,657, down 6.8%, and adopted animals spent an average of 36 days in the shelter. Fewer adoptions also mean fewer newly adopted pets arriving at local clinics for their first exams.

Miami-Dade calls and product safety reports: older but telling

Miami-Dade's animal-related 311 data lags behind, so everything here is preliminary, with the published series ending in July 2024 and the latest full year being 2023. In that year, residents filed 36,597 animal-related 311 service requests, down 14.4% from the 42,763 in 2019, while requests in January through July 2024 were down 13.6% from a year earlier, showing that overall call volume was falling well before Broward's intake decline.

The data is more than two years old, but it shows some categories climbing even as the total dropped, like animal cruelty investigations hitting 3,948 in 2023, up 75.2% from 2019, with an average of 10.5 days to close. Breeder and pet store complaints jumped to 362, a 139.7% increase, and calls for injured animals rose 10.5% to 4,222, while bites on people fell 4.0% to 2,224 and lost-pet reports dropped 13.0% to 826.

The FDA's adverse event database gives a national look at medication and device issues, though the reports are unverified and don't prove a product caused an event. The FDA received 76,751 reports in 2025, which is 5.9% more than in 2019. Reports involving cats hit 12,649, up 71.3% from 2019, while those involving dogs reached 54,078, up 2.5%. Dogs still make up 81.4% of reports that name a species. Since cat reports are climbing fast, practices with a heavy feline caseload might want to watch their reporting habits and client follow-up when prescribing.

Labor and competition: more practices, modest hiring

South Florida had 794 veterinary practices with employees in 2025, which is 29 more than a year earlier, and they employed 7,888 people on average. The practice count grew by 3.8% but headcount only by 1.2%, so new locations are likely opening with lean staffing or existing practices are having a hard time adding people.

South Florida veterinary practices paid $62,565 on average in 2025, quite a bit higher than the $36,535 average at pet care businesses that do grooming, boarding and training. Those pet care businesses were growing faster on the hiring side: there were 529 of them with employees, up 2.3%, and they employed 2,761 people, up 7.3% from the year before. Everyone is reaching for the same pool of entry-level hands, so clinics are competing with boarding facilities and groomers for the people they need for kennel and assistant work.

Beyond businesses with payrolls sits a large self-employed layer. In 2024, the four counties counted 875 veterinary businesses with no employees, with $52.5 million in combined receipts, and 4,479 pet care operators with no employees (grooming, boarding, sitting and training), with $159.1 million in combined receipts. Many of these are mobile vets, relief vets and solo groomers. For an established practice they are both competition for clients and a possible pool of contract help.

Digital presence: what Florida clinic websites get right and miss

Pixedi measured veterinary websites directly at the start of October 2026. OpenStreetMap lists 452 veterinary clinics and animal hospitals in Florida, 143 of them with a website link (126 distinct sites). Pixedi requested all 126; 101 returned a usable page, 11 blocked an automated request and 14 failed or were parked. That means 11.1% of the sample failed to load or were parked, a plain loss of any client who searched and clicked. Another 8.7% answered with a block page, usually a hosting platform's bot shield, which can also stop some search and preview tools from reading the site.

• Online booking path71.3 % of reachable sites
• Online pharmacy or store63.4 % of reachable sites
• Reviews or testimonials46.5 % of reachable sites
• Financing or payment plan27.7 % of reachable sites
• Spanish-language content7.9 % of reachable sites

Source: Pixedi

The basics are mostly in place. Among reachable sites, 98.0% use a secure HTTPS address and 100.0% declare a mobile viewport. But 13.9% have no tap-to-call link on the home page, which matters in a business where many visits start with a worried owner on a phone. Measurement is common, with 79.2% loading Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager, though 19.8% load neither those tools nor a Meta pixel, so those practices cannot see where their clients come from. 55.4% run on WordPress, 20.8% carry business-type structured data that helps search engines read their details, and 13.9% of sites that display a copyright year show one from 2024 or earlier.

On booking, 71.3% of reachable Florida veterinary websites offer an online booking, appointment or quote path from the home page, and 43.6% load a recognizable third-party scheduling tool. Among the 95 reachable clinic websites the booking share is 73.7%, with 14.7% lacking a tap-to-call link. The South Florida subset is small (14 reachable sites, out of 77 listed clinics with 16 distinct sites in the three metro counties) so treat it with care, but there only 57.1% offer an online booking path and 21.4% load a scheduling tool. Local practices may be trailing the state on the most direct way a website turns a visit into an appointment.

Content choices show room to stand out. 63.4% link an online pharmacy or store, 46.5% mention reviews or testimonials, 44.6% speak to new clients or patients, 24.8% mention after-hours or 24-hour emergency care, and 24.8% run a live chat or text widget. Fewer mention Fear Free or cat-friendly handling (8.9%) or telehealth (6.9%). For South Florida, the striking gap is language: just 7.9% of reachable Florida veterinary websites offer Spanish or say they speak it on the home page.

Website speed: slow on the phone

Pixedi ran a mobile Lighthouse performance test (Google's page speed test) on 50 of the sampled sites in the week leading up to early October 2026, and 46 completed with a score. The median site scored 59 out of 100, and clinic websites alone (40 sites) also had a median of 59. Only 4.3% scored 90 or higher, the "good" band, while 15.2% scored below 50.

The loading time is where this becomes concrete. On a simulated mid-range phone over a slow 4G connection, the median tested site took 9.5 seconds to show its largest element, 93.5% took longer than four seconds, and 0.0% met the 2.5-second mark. Servers themselves are not the main problem: the median reachable site answered a plain request in 0.65 seconds and served 187 KB of HTML. The delay comes from images, scripts and third-party widgets loading afterwards. The median site blocked the main thread for 101 milliseconds, and 8.7% shifted their layout enough to rate poor on visual stability, the kind of jump that makes a visitor tap the wrong button.

For an owner, a nine-second wait on a phone is long enough for a client looking for an emergency vet to go back and pick the next result. Compressing images and trimming add-ons that load on the home page are usually the cheapest fixes.

What changed since the last edition

This is the first edition of the South Florida Veterinary Report, so there is no earlier edition to compare against; future editions will track month-to-month movement against the figures published here. The newest data vintages are August 2026 for consumer prices, September 2026 for Broward County Animal Care, 2025 for county employment and FDA adverse event counts, 2024 for self-employed business counts, July 2024 for Miami-Dade 311 requests, and early October 2026 for Pixedi's website measurements.

Methodology and sources

Price figures come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index, using the national series for veterinarian services, pet services, pets and pet products, and all items, through August 2026, along with the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach recreation index as a local stand-in. Shelter figures come from Broward County Animal Care intake and outcome records through September 2026. Miami-Dade figures come from the county's published Animal Services 311 service request series, which ends in July 2024. Adverse event counts come from the FDA's openFDA animal and veterinary database for 2025 and earlier; these reports are unverified and show no causal link between a product and an event. Employment, establishment and pay figures come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages for 2025, with counties whose data is suppressed excluded. Self-employed counts and receipts come from the US Census Bureau's Nonemployer Statistics for 2024.

Website figures are Pixedi's own measurement. The sampling frame is OpenStreetMap's list of Florida veterinary clinics and animal hospitals with a website link. Pixedi requested each distinct site at the start of October 2026, checked the home page for the features described above and ran mobile Lighthouse tests on a subset in the week before. Percentages refer to reachable sites unless stated otherwise.

The following figures are preliminary: the Miami metro recreation index used as a proxy for pet spending; all Miami-Dade 311 figures; all FDA adverse event figures; and these website measurements: online booking path (statewide, clinic-only and South Florida subset), third-party scheduling tools, financing mentions, Spanish-language content, structured data, chat widgets, review mentions, outdated copyright years, server response and HTML size, pharmacy or store links, wellness plans, emergency care mentions, new-client messaging, Fear Free mentions, telehealth, pet insurance, main-thread blocking and layout stability, and the clinic-only median performance score.

Sources

1. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index
2. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages
3. FDA openFDA animal and veterinary database
4. US Census Bureau, Nonemployer Statistics
5. OpenStreetMap

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