How we calculate this

Bills with a coupon or discount on them

Sometimes a bill states a discount outright — a loyalty discount, a new-client coupon, a seasonal promotion. When it does, we say so on your results page and compare your bill exactly as it stands: the comparison you see is against what you actually paid, not against some reconstructed pre-discount figure. We only report a discount the document itself prints. We never infer one from a total that looks low, and we never characterize a discount as a good or a bad thing — it is a fact about your bill, not a verdict on it.

That same bill is then left out of the de-identified regional pool described above, and out of the per-procedure medians we publish on that clinic's profile. A promotional price is by definition not what a clinic typically charges, so counting it would pull a "typical price" toward a figure most people can't actually be quoted, and would misstate the clinic's standard rates to everyone reading its page. The exclusion is one-directional and affects nothing you see about your own bill.

For the same reason, a discounted bill doesn't count toward the clinic's Fair Price Score, or toward the number of verified bills that score is built from. A discount makes a bill cheaper than the clinic's standard rates, so scoring it would flatter the clinic for a price it doesn't normally charge — and since a clinic can publish a special that produces exactly such a bill, counting them would give a clinic an indirect way to move its own score. It has none, by design.

Medication prices

Our medication prices come from the same shared, decoded bills as everything else here — nothing is bought from a pharmacy database or typed in. When a bill is decoded, each take-home medication line is matched to a fixed list of products at a specific strength (or, for flea, tick and heartworm preventives, a specific weight band), and the quantity printed on the bill is read alongside it.

A medication price is always a price per tablet, capsule or chew: what the bill charged for that product, divided by the quantity it printed. We never compare medication line totals, because a two-week fill and a two-month fill of the same drug are very different totals at the same price. A line that names a drug but no strength, or prints no quantity, can't be priced that way — it's left out of the figures and counted on the page, so you can see how many there were.

The bars are the same as our cost guides: a product needs at least 5 priced bills before any figure appears, a chart only when those prices genuinely vary, and a state, metro area or clinic needs 5 priced bills of its own before it gets a figure. "Above" or "below" the national median means by more than 5% — within that, it's in line. Only bills from clinics in our directory, whose owners chose to share them and which print no discount, are counted.

The FairVet Price Index

The FairVet Price Index is a monthly release. On the first of each month we take the regional benchmark data described above — the same numbers behind every other tool on the site, not a separate dataset — and compute one snapshot for the twenty procedures with the most data behind them. That snapshot is then stored and never recalculated. If you cite the September release, the September release will still say the same thing next year.

For each procedure we publish a national median and a breakdown by state. The national figure is a sample-weighted rollup across every region where we have data, so a region with 200 submissions counts for more than one with 20. It is a computed aggregate of the areas we actually cover, not an independently drawn national sample, and it will lean toward the parts of the country where FairVet users are concentrated.

Which states appear, and why one might not. A state is listed under a procedure only when the data we hold for it clears the same minimum sample size — 5 data points — that every other trend figure on this site uses. Below that, the state is simply absent: we show no number rather than one built on a handful of submissions, and a state that vanishes between one release and the next means its data thinned out, not that its prices did anything in particular. We also cover some areas as three-digit ZIP-prefix regions that can straddle a state line. Those count toward the national figure but are never assigned to a state — each procedure says how many were left out for this reason.

Month-over-month and year-over-year changes compare one stored release to another. Until two releases exist, a change reads "Not enough history yet" rather than being estimated from some other source. As with the rest of our reports, the index describes what moved, not why.

The embeddable Fair Price badge

The badge a verified clinic can add to its own site is just its Fair Price Score, read live from the same number shown on its FairVet profile — it recomputes on every page load, the same way the score itself recomputes nightly from real matched bills. There is no separate test to pass and no way to buy your way onto it: a clinic earns the badge the same way it earns its score, algorithmically, from verified bills, with the same 5-verified-bill minimum described above.

A clinic can pay to customize how that badge looks on its own site — a color, a size, and the option to remove the "Verified by FairVet" backlink — but that's the only thing for sale. It changes nothing about the number the badge shows, whether a clinic qualifies for it, its Fair Price Score, or its ranking anywhere on FairVet. On the free tier, every badge shows the same default styling with the FairVet backlink intact and not removable.

Fair Price Certification — not the same thing as the Fair Price Award

Separately, once a year we recognize a small number of verified clinics per metro area with Fair Price Certification. This is a distinct, smaller program from the Fair Price Award described above — deliberately named without the word "award" so the two are never confused:

• Fair Price Award — nationwide, recomputed automatically every month, no human review.
• Fair Price Certification — grouped by metro area, decided once a year, and for this first cycle confirmed by hand rather than by an automated job — the same conservative posture we take anywhere we'd rather under-promise than publish something we haven't actually checked.

To be considered for Certification a clinic must already hold the verified badge, have at least 5 verified bills, and carry a Fair Price Score of 85 or higher. Meeting that bar makes a clinic a candidate for review, not an automatic winner — same as the badge and the Fair Price Award, Certification can never be purchased.

Veterinarian profiles and credentials

A veterinarian gets a page on FairVet only when the clinic has confirmed them. Names we read off bills are not enough on their own: a name on a bill is evidence that one person saw one animal on one day, and we never turn that into a staff list. When a clinic undoes a confirmation, the page stops being published immediately.

Photos and biographies come from the clinic, and from nowhere else. We do not take a photograph or a biography from a clinic's website, a social media profile, a specialty-board directory or any other outside source, under any circumstance. If a profile has no photo, you see a plain placeholder rather than a picture we found somewhere.

“Verified” means we checked it. We mark a credential verified only when we queried a real public source and it agreed, and the badge links to that source so you can see the same record. In practice that is narrower than it sounds, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise:

• State licences: we can check Colorado, Illinois, Washington and Delaware, which are the only states publishing a current, queryable public roster of veterinary licences. We look the licence up by its number, never by name — a common name returns several people, and attaching a stranger's licence to a profile would be a fabricated credential rather than a verified one.
• Veterinary school: we check the claim against the AVMA Council on Education's list of accredited colleges.
• Board certification: we cannot verify this anywhere. The specialty colleges' directories are opt-in — a diplomate may simply not be listed — and their terms do not permit us to compile them. Every board certification on FairVet is shown as clinic-reported.
• Everything else, including licences in the other 46 states and graduation years, is clinic-reported too.

Clinic-reported is not a weaker verification. It means the clinic told us and we could not confirm it. We show it in plain words rather than a badge, and we never let a claim sit in a “pending” state that looks like verification is on its way when no source exists to check it against.

A “we're hiring” note is the clinic telling you it has a vacancy. It is a small badge, it never affects a clinic's Fair Price Score or where it appears in our directory, and we are not paid for it.

Clinic specials and coupons

Clinics can publish their own offers on FairVet — a discount on a dental cleaning, a new-client rate — which appear on that clinic's profile and on our specials page. These are written by the clinic. They are advertising, not evidence, and we treat them accordingly.

A special has no effect on any number or any order on this site. Running one — or running a hundred — cannot change a clinic's Fair Price Score, its verified badge, its eligibility for Fair Price Certification or the Fair Price Award, or its position in the clinic directory, in search results, or in the procedure finder. This is the same rule that already governs everything else a clinic can pay for, and it is enforced in the code rather than promised in prose: the scoring and ranking queries cannot read the specials table at all.

We hold that rule against the indirect route as well. A special produces discounted bills, and a discounted bill is cheaper than the clinic's standard rates — so if those bills counted toward the Fair Price Score, a clinic could raise its own score by running a promotion, without a single line of the scoring code ever touching a special. They don't count. Bills with a stated discount are excluded from the score and from the verified-bill count behind it, exactly as they're excluded from the regional benchmarks — see bills with a coupon or discount on them above.

A clinic on our Pro tier can pay to mark a special as Featured, which moves it higher within the specials list itself — and nowhere else. Featured specials are always labelled, so you can tell the paid position from the rest. Nothing about featuring changes a clinic's score, its badge, or where it ranks anywhere on FairVet.

Every special has to state a concrete offer and a real expiry date, both of which we show you. We don't allow countdown timers, "X people are viewing this" counters or similar urgency devices, or claims comparing a clinic's prices to other clinics' — comparisons on this site come from benchmark data, not from marketing copy. We don't independently verify that an offer will be honored, so confirm the details with the clinic before you book.

How the procedure finder ranks clinics

The procedure finder answers a narrower question than the clinic directory does. The directory lists who is near you; the finder ranks them for one specific procedure. It considers every clinic we list in the same 3-digit ZIP area as you — the same rough notion of "near you" used everywhere else on the site — and orders them on four factors, each scored from 0 to 1 and multiplied by a fixed weight:

• Fair Price Score — 40%. The clinic's existing score out of 100, used exactly as it appears elsewhere on the site.
• Distance — 25%. Straight-line distance, worth full marks at the door and nothing at 25 miles out. This is a gradient, not a search radius: a clinic is never dropped from the results for being far.
• Verified bills for that procedure at that clinic — 20%. How much evidence we actually hold about this procedure here, credited up to 20 bills and no further. Below 5 bills the figure isn't published or counted, the same floor the per-procedure medians on a clinic profile use.
• Review rating — 15%. The mean star rating, counted only once a clinic has at least 3 reviews. Every review already comes from an owner with a real bill matched to that clinic.

A factor we have no data for contributes nothing, and the remaining weights are not re-scaled to compensate. That is deliberate. Re-scaling would let a clinic we know almost nothing about reach the top of a list precisely because there was nothing to measure it on. A clinic keeps every point it has earned, no more, and each result says which factors it was actually ranked on — so a listing with little behind it reads as thin rather than as bad.

Unclaimed listings appear in the same ranked list, labelled as unclaimed, and are never omitted for being unclaimed. They are ranked on Fair Price Score and distance only: reviews and quote replies both require a clinic that has claimed its listing and can respond, so scoring an unclaimed listing on them would measure our reach rather than the clinic. Claiming a listing makes those two factors available to a clinic; it adds no points by itself.

We have no ZIP-centroid table or geocoder, so your ZIP is placed using the average position of the clinics we list in that exact ZIP code. When no listed clinic shares your ZIP, we say which clinics are in your ZIP area instead of printing a mileage we can't compute; the same applies to an individual clinic whose coordinates we don't hold. Distances are straight-line and approximate — never driving distance.

Your pet's species decides which procedures you can search for — a cat is not offered a DHPP vaccine — but it is not a ranking factor. Nothing in our data records which species a clinic treats, and inferring it from the bills we happen to hold would be a guess presented as a finding.

Nothing a clinic pays for affects this order. Subscription tier, payment status, advertising, sponsorship and every other commercial relationship with FairVet are not inputs to the ranking, and there is no promoted or paid placement on that page. This is the same rule that governs the Fair Price Score and the verified badge: neither can be bought, and neither can this.