The number that scared every independent owner during COVID has quietly returned to something ordinary.

Tyler's read of the data matches what he sees crossing his desk: the spike was real, and the thaw is real. Three things drove it down.

• Corporates are buying fewer clinics. Less acquisition means less need to lock down the doctors who come with them.
• There's less money in the private-equity space to fund headline bonuses at 2021 scale.
• The legal ground shifted. A big part of why corporates paid those bonuses was to get their fingers on associates so they couldn't easily quit. States have made that harder and harder to enforce.

Three or four years ago, every signing bonus came with teeth. Most of those teeth have fallen out.

• The old structure. Twenty thousand dollars, with a staggered refundability schedule — make it a year and half becomes non-refundable, make it two and the rest does.
• Increasingly unenforceable in most states, and groups have moved away from it.
• The money migrated. Dollars have shifted out of signing bonuses and into relocation bonuses — largely a tax-driven move.
• And the enforcement was always theatre. Corporate groups share one thing in common: they do not want to sue veterinarians. They do not want litigation, and they don't want it circulating in the community.

That's not a licence to breach your agreement. It is worth knowing when someone waves a repayment schedule at you as though it were self-executing.

Twenty years ago a salaried veterinarian was an oddity. Today, straight production is the oddity.

• Base salaries in urban markets have risen — but not considerably, and not enough to outpace inflation.
• The base is usually very attainable. For most doctors the production side should vastly exceed it — so in practice the base functions as a draw you out-earn, not as a salary you collect. It's a floor, not a target.
• Negative accrual is largely a ghost. Everybody asks about it; Tyler rarely sees it anymore. The younger owners writing these agreements grew up on ProSal and don't feel the need for it.

Then there's the fine print underneath the percentage: nutraceuticals, refills, refills accompanied by an exam. That's where the five and ten percent add-ons live, and where two offers with identical headline percentages stop being identical.

Everett to Tacoma, 2026. Tyler's method: start with the add-ons, then build the number.

The first-associate discount

Here's a pattern Tyler has never seen anyone study. Clinics that have employed associates before typically pay more than a doctor hiring their very first associate. Dr. Smith, tired and looking to scale back, has no idea what that working relationship looks like yet — so Dr. Smith is nervous about paying market.

The most reassuring thing in this entire briefing, if you own a practice.

• They struggle as much as you do — possibly more. Most sophisticated groups now run dedicated HR and development departments purely to staff hospitals.
• The tell is in their job postings. Many don't even name the location. We need ten DVMs in Oregon. We need five in the Whatcom–Skagit–Snohomish area.
• Private practice wins more often — but the courtship runs far longer. Study clubs, an informal coffee with a student, an alumni board, a relationship that matures over a year.
• You will not find them on Craigslist. The associates who sign are the ones you already knew: a former client's daughter, someone from the same church, parents from your kids' team.

A curious blind spot: in private practice, nobody asks for production reports. Do a dental deal and it's on the table immediately. In veterinary medicine, associates almost never ask the one question that determines their own paycheck — how busy am I going to be?

Ask what's absent from nearly every veterinary employment agreement, and the answer is the same one every time.

• A real path to ownership. Almost never discussed. When it does appear, it's a ceremonial clause — once a year we'll meet to talk about ownership — with nothing behind it.
• Other professions do this differently. The oral surgeon knows that five good years makes them a partner. That is simply not how veterinary agreements are written.
• Meanwhile the newest trend is going the other way: private practices building large profit-sharing and bonus pools for the entire team — front desk, assistants, technicians, not just doctors. Partly to align everyone with the mission, partly because owners want to give unlicensed staff a sense of ownership the law won't let them hold.
• And corporates are adapting too. Their new move is setting aside sizeable pools inside the purchase offer specifically to pay the acquired clinic's doctors to stay — with whatever goes unused reverting to the seller. They know they can't simply replace associates.