If you have sat through a practice-management CE talk or a corporate recruiter's pitch in the last few years, you have heard the number: consolidators buy 700 to 800 independent practices a year. It shows up in slide decks, LinkedIn posts, and more than a few contract negotiations as shorthand for "the roll-up is inevitable."
We went and found where that number came from. It is real. It is also from 2020, and it has not held since.
The 700-800 Number
The figure traces to Brakke Consulting senior consultant John Volk, who told VIN News in a December 30, 2021 report that corporate consolidators acquired an estimated 700 to 800 independent companion-animal practices in 2020, and 800 to 1,000 in 2021. At the time, Volk put the number of companies actively trying to buy practices at 45 to 50, and estimated consolidators owned roughly 25 percent of U.S. companion-animal practices by count, but captured 40 to 50 percent of client visits because corporate-owned hospitals tend to be bigger.
Multiples were the tell that something unusual was happening. Volk described general-practice deals moving from the historical 12 to 15 times EBITDA range up to 18 to 20 times by late 2021, a jump he tied directly to pandemic-driven visit volume and cheap debt.
That was the peak. Two things happened after it.
Where IDEXX's Count Diverges
A separate tracker, cited by Today's Veterinary Business using IDEXX data in a November 27, 2023 article, put 2021 acquisitions at 1,550, nearly double Brakke's estimate for the same year. We are flagging that gap rather than picking a winner: different firms count differently (Brakke surveys the market qualitatively; IDEXX's estimate comes from practice management software transaction data), and neither publishes full methodology. Treat both as informed estimates, not a census.
Where the two sources agree is the direction after 2021. The same IDEXX-sourced count fell to roughly 500 acquisitions by 2023, a 68 percent drop from the 2021 high. Today's Veterinary Business tied the collapse to three things: the Federal Reserve pushing rates to a 22-year high, which made consolidator debt more expensive; hospital visit volume reverting to pre-pandemic levels, which pressured the revenue those valuations were built on; and National Veterinary Associates shelving its IPO plans while an FTC review slowed its purchase of Ethos Veterinary Health. Deal multiples came back down to earth with it: from an 18x EBITDA peak in 2022 to an 8 to 13x range by 2023, which the outlet noted is close to pre-COVID norms.
So the honest version of the stat: 700-800 was a real, single-year Brakke estimate for 2020 that briefly doubled, then roughly halved from its own peak within two years. Anyone still quoting "700-800 a year" as a steady-state fact is quoting 2021 conventional wisdom about 2020 data.
The New Map
The buyers have not disappeared. They have consolidated among themselves.
Mars remains the largest owner by hospital count and is not PE-backed. Banfield and VCA, both Mars-owned, run roughly 1,000-plus locations each, plus the BluePearl specialty network. VCA came into the fold via Mars's $9.1 billion 2017 acquisition.
JAB Holding, the private investment firm that owns NVA, split its veterinary holdings into two businesses in 2023: NVA for general practice and Ethos for specialty and emergency care, reportedly to position each for a separate path to public markets or resale.
The newest major entrant is Mission Pet Health, formed from a merger of Southern Veterinary Partners and Mission Veterinary Partners. VIN News reported the deal in August 2024, when the two companies operated more than 400 and more than 330 practices respectively, a combined total north of 730. Shore Capital Partners was described as a major investor in both companies before the deal. The FTC cleared the merger in October 2024 and it closed that December.
The pattern across all of it: fewer, bigger buyers, doing fewer, bigger deals, often by merging with each other rather than adding independents one at a time.
FTC's Repeat Visits
If your practice sits in a market a consolidator has already touched, the FTC's file on that market may be longer than you think. The commission has stepped in on veterinary roll-ups at least four times since 2017: Mars was required to divest 12 clinics across 10 localities to close the VCA deal; Compassion First and NVA, both JAB entities, were ordered to divest three clinics, in Asheville, North Carolina, Norwalk, Connecticut, and Manassas, Virginia, as a condition of Compassion First's $5 billion purchase of NVA, finalized in April 2020; and in June 2022 the FTC hit JAB twice in one month, ordering divestitures in Austin and the San Francisco Bay Area tied to its purchase of SAGE Veterinary Partners, and separately in Richmond, Denver, San Francisco, and the D.C. area tied to its acquisition of Ethos. That second round also came with standing prior-approval requirements on future JAB veterinary deals in those markets.
The takeaway for an owner-DVM fielding a call is not that a deal will get blocked. Most will not. It is that specialty and emergency care draws the closest antitrust scrutiny, because those markets tend to have fewer competitors to begin with. General practice sales have not drawn the same level of FTC interest.
Before the Next Call
If you are an owner weighing a consolidator offer, or an associate deciding whether to sign with one, ask two questions before you look at a number. First, who is actually buying, past the brand name on the letterhead. Mission Pet Health is a Shore Capital Partners platform; NVA and Ethos are JAB entities operating as separate brands since 2023. The entity signing your contract and the entity holding the debt are not always the same name on the sign. Second, ask what multiple they are offering and where it sits against the 8 to 13x EBITDA range Today's Veterinary Business reported for 2023, not the 18 to 20x headlines from 2021. If an offer is being pitched with 2021-era language, it is worth asking why.
We will keep tracking acquisition counts as 2025 and 2026 data becomes available. For now, the number to retire is "700-800 a year." The number to remember is that it was never steady to begin with.