How we collect vet prices

We systematically visit UK veterinary practice websites and extract prices from their publicly accessible fee pages, pricing guides, and downloadable price lists. Only prices that the clinic itself has chosen to make public are included in our dataset.

Each clinic in our database is checked by an automated crawler that reads the clinic's own published fee schedule. The crawler records the exact fee as listed, the page it was found on, and the date it was collected. No manual editing or estimation is applied to the collected values.

When a clinic does not publish its prices online, we mark it as “prices not listed” rather than guess or exclude the practice. The clinic is still shown on Petfair so pet owners know it exists, but no price is displayed.

We do not scrape data that requires login, a quote request, or a phone call to obtain. If a price is only available after providing personal details, it is not in our dataset.

A price is included in Petfair's dataset only when all of the following conditions are met:

• The price appears on a page that is publicly accessible without login or registration
• The price is attached to a named procedure or service (not a vague "treatment" or "consult-on-request")
• The price is expressed as a single numeric fee or a defined range (e.g. £80–£120)
• The price is associated with a specific, identifiable UK veterinary practice
• The source URL belongs to the clinic's own domain or an authorised chain website

Prices published only as part of a health plan, membership scheme, or insurance arrangement are excluded — these are personalised and cannot be fairly compared across clinics.

Veterinary practices name their services in highly varied ways. “Consultation”, “Standard vet appointment (regular hours)”, “Examination fee”, and “Consult” are all names different clinics use for the same thing — a standard GP vet appointment.

Petfair maintains a canonical procedure taxonomy that covers the most commonly priced veterinary services in the UK. Every price we collect is mapped to a canonical procedure by our data pipeline. When you view a procedure page — for example, consultation prices — you are seeing all prices that our system has confidently matched to that procedure type, regardless of the label the clinic uses.

Where a mapping is ambiguous — for example, a “surgery fee” that could be a spay or a general anaesthesia charge — the row is flagged for manual review and excluded from published results until the mapping is confirmed. This means our clinic counts are conservative: we only include a clinic when we are confident about what procedure its price refers to.

Prices shown are the fee as published by the clinic for the named procedure. They may or may not include:

• Consultation or examination fee (some clinics include this; others charge separately)
• Pre-operative blood tests for surgical procedures
• Anaesthesia monitoring
• Post-operative medication
• Follow-up appointments

We always recommend confirming the total cost directly with your chosen clinic before booking. The clinic's own fee schedule is the authoritative source.

We re-check clinic pricing pages on a rolling basis. Clinics are revisited periodically to detect fee changes, new procedures, and pages that have been removed. Our dataset was last rebuilt on 2026-05-17. Individual price rows display the date they were last verified where available.

Vet fees can change without notice — particularly for surgical procedures where the final cost depends on the individual animal's circumstances. Always treat prices shown as a guide and verify directly with the clinic before booking.

Prices that sit far outside the typical range for a procedure are reviewed before being published. Common causes of outliers include:

• Specialist or referral clinics whose fees are not comparable with standard GP practice prices
• Data collection artefacts — for example, a currency conversion or decimal error in the source data
• Procedures that bundle multiple services together under one fee
• Genuinely high prices from central London practices or premium clinics

Where an outlier is a confirmed data error, it is corrected or removed. Where a price is genuinely high — for example, a specialist-only procedure at a referral hospital — it may be excluded from the average and range statistics shown on the procedure page, or annotated to make the context clear.

If you find a price on Petfair that appears out of date or incorrect, the first step is to check the clinic's own website — they are the authoritative source. Prices on clinic websites can change between our collection cycles.

If there is a genuine discrepancy between what Petfair shows and what the clinic currently publishes, or if you are a practice owner who needs a price corrected or removed, please email us with the clinic name, procedure, and the current price on the clinic's website. We aim to process corrections within five working days.

Vets and practice managers who want their pricing removed entirely from Petfair can make the same request. Only publicly listed prices are included, but we will honour opt-out requests promptly.