Submitting a bill is simple

Pet owners can upload their vet bill through Vetted's secure submission form. You can submit a bill for routine care, urgent care, emergency care, surgery, dental work, vaccines, diagnostics, medication, end-of-life care, or anything else you paid for at a veterinary clinic.

The most useful submissions include a clear photo, scan or PDF of the full invoice; the clinic name and location; the date of service; the type and approximate size of pet; a short description of why you went to the vet; and whether the final bill matched the estimate, if you received one.

How a bill becomes data

What we collect vs. what we publish

Vetted's database is built around invoice-level information. We record clinic and visit details to compare similar services fairly — a vaccine visit shouldn't be lumped in with emergency surgery. But what we record and what becomes public are not the same thing.

How we clean the data

Vet bills are messy. One clinic's invoice may say "office visit"; another separates a consultation fee from a technician fee; others bundle services together entirely. Before anything is published, Vetted reviews each submission and standardizes it — grouping similar line items into broader, comparable categories while preserving the original price.

What Vetted publishes

Median prices, price ranges, clinic-level examples, borough and ownership comparisons, line-item breakdowns, and reported estimates versus final bills. Whenever possible, Vetted shows how many bills sit behind a number — a price based on two submissions is treated differently than one based on 200.

Costs can vary based on a pet's age, weight, breed, medical history, temperament, anesthesia needs, complications, clinic type, staffing, location and whether a visit happened during business hours or as an emergency. The point isn't to tell you exactly what your bill should be — it's to help you know whether a number is in the realm of normal, unusually low, unusually high, or worth asking more questions about.

What Vetted does not do

Vetted is not a veterinary clinic. We do not diagnose pets, recommend treatment plans, or tell people to delay care because of cost. We also do not assume the cheapest clinic is the best one — a higher bill may reflect longer appointment times, more experienced staff, overnight monitoring or specialty care; a lower bill may reflect a nonprofit model or a different standard of care. Price is one part of the story, not the whole story.

Vetted's goal is to give pet owners better questions, not easy villains:

• What is included in this estimate?
• Is bloodwork required or recommended?
• Are there lower-cost options?
• What happens if I decline this line item?
• Is this urgent, or can I compare prices first?
• Will the final bill be higher than the estimate?
• Is this clinic independently owned, or part of a larger group?

Why ownership matters

Veterinary care in New York City isn't just a story about individual clinics — it's also a story about the businesses behind them. Some clinics are independently owned; others are part of larger regional or national groups, nonprofits, or shelter-affiliated networks. Vetted tracks ownership where possible because it can affect pricing, staffing and how care is delivered. That doesn't mean one model is automatically good or bad — but pet owners deserve to know who they're paying.

Why your bill matters

One bill can help another pet owner walk into a clinic with a better sense of what to expect. Ten bills can show whether a price is typical. A hundred bills can show patterns across neighborhoods, clinic types and ownership groups. That's how Vetted becomes useful — one receipt at a time.