Picture a Tuesday afternoon: three rooms backed up, a euthanasia squeezed between two wellness exams, and a client on hold who is unhappy about the estimate. That is not a mood. For roughly 1 in 5 veterinarians, per the most recent Merck Animal Health-AVMA Wellbeing Study, that is a measured state with a name and a score.
The study is the fourth in a series running since 2017, sponsored by Merck Animal Health and conducted by Brakke Consulting with AVMA's cooperation. It fielded September 11 to October 9, 2023, as an anonymous online survey sent to a random sample of 40,000 US veterinarians drawn from AVMA's list. It got 4,636 usable responses, an 11.6% response rate, weighted by age, gender, and region, with a margin of error of plus or minus 1.4% at 95% confidence. The results ran in JAVMA in July 2024, peer-reviewed, authored by John Volk and colleagues at Brakke, the University of Toronto, the University of Tennessee, and Merck Animal Health itself. We read the paper, not the press release.
The Instrument Changed, and That Matters
The first three waves of this study measured burnout with a 7-question yes/no screen built for physicians at the Mayo Clinic. The 2023 wave switched to the Burnout Assessment Tool, a Belgian-developed instrument that scores four components separately: exhaustion, cognitive impairment, emotional impairment, and mental distance. That is a real methods change, not a tweak, so year-over-year burnout comparisons before and after 2023 are not apples to apples. We would treat this wave as a new baseline, not a continuation of the old trend line.
Scored on a 1-to-5 scale, BAT categorizes respondents as low, medium, high, or very high burnout. The study reports 82% of veterinarians (3,781 of 4,634) scored low to medium, matching the 84% low-to-medium rate McKinsey found in a global working-adult sample using the same tool. The remaining 18% (854 of 4,634) scored high or very high. That 18% is the number in this piece's headline, and it is the group whose exam-room afternoon looks like the one above most days, not just on the bad ones.
Within total burnout, veterinarians scored notably higher on the exhaustion component than on cognitive impairment, emotional impairment, or mental distance. In plain terms: vets in this sample are more tired than checked out. They still care. They are just running low.
Who Is Carrying It
Burnout was not distributed evenly. Companion-animal veterinarians had the highest rate of high-or-very-high burnout at 20% (679 of 3,377). Food-animal veterinarians had the lowest at 8% (8 of 93) -- a striking gap, though that food-animal figure rests on just 93 respondents, small enough that we would not lean on it hard.
Age split the numbers further. Veterinarians under 35 scored high-or-very-high burnout at 26% (274 of 1,064), versus 13% (120 of 962) for those 55 to 64. The authors' own multi-wave analysis attributes this to a generational cohort effect rather than simple aging into resilience, meaning today's early-career vets are not obviously going to burn this off as they get older.
The distress numbers, measured separately with the Kessler-6 psychological distress scale, tell a similar story. Overall, 10% of veterinarians (463 of 4,625) met the threshold for serious psychological distress, compared with 6.3% of employed, college-educated US adults 25 and older in a 2021 federal survey (SAMHSA's National Survey on Drug Use and Health). Veterinarians also reported having ever had suicidal thoughts at a higher rate than the general population, 6.7% (311 of 4,636) versus 4.5%, though the study found no statistical difference in suicide attempts between the two groups. Separately, an older CDC-affiliated study published in JAVMA in 2019, tracking veterinarian mortality records from 1979 through 2015, found suicide accounted for a disproportionate share of veterinarian deaths versus the general population -- context for why the profession watches this number, even though that data predates the current wellbeing series by years and used a different methodology entirely.
What Actually Predicted It
The paper ran multiple regression to find what moved burnout, well-being, and distress scores. The strongest predictor of high burnout, by a wide margin, was a personality trait: neuroticism (effect size b = 0.22). A negative work environment and a personal history of mental health challenges were next, tied at a much smaller b = 0.04 each.
On the protective side, work-life balance was the single strongest factor across all three outcomes -- lower burnout (b = -0.15), higher well-being (b = 0.24), and lower odds of serious psychological distress (b = -0.10). Pride in the work and a sense that the job matters to others also predicted lower burnout, but neither came close to work-life balance's effect size. Income was not among the top predictors reported for any of the three outcomes.
That is the actionable line in this data set. Not a treatment recommendation -- the study did not test interventions -- but a correlational finding worth sitting with at the next contract negotiation: this data set found work-life balance outweighed income as a predictor of burnout, well-being, and psychological distress. A bigger number on the offer letter did not show up as a top predictor of any of the three.
Where We'd Caveat This
This is one study, industry-funded by Merck Animal Health, though conducted by an outside research firm and peer-reviewed. The authors disclosed no conflicts and no AI-assisted writing. It is cross-sectional and correlational -- respondents were surveyed once, so "predictor" here means statistical association, not proven cause. An 11.6% response rate leaves real room for who chose to answer differing systematically from who did not; the authors say as much themselves, noting they lacked data on nonresponders. And the burnout instrument changed this wave, which breaks direct comparison to 2017, 2019, and 2021 results.
On the practice side, the same study found real movement: employee assistance program access at practices rose from 21% in the 2017 wave to 38% in 2023, and insurance coverage for mental health treatment rose from 44% in the 2019 wave to 52% in 2023. Fewer than half of practices, though, said they discussed wellbeing or mental health in team meetings beyond "a little" -- 36% said not at all, 28% said a little. The infrastructure is showing up faster than the conversation is.
None of this tells any individual vet what to do about their own Tuesday afternoon. It tells us, as a desk, that the number behind "high burnout" in this data set is 18%, not a vague sense of a tired profession, and that the strongest lever this particular study found was not the one on the offer letter.