The CMA's veterinary market reforms will require practices to make substantially more information clear and accessible — from prices and ownership to medicines, care plans, out-of-hours care and complaints.
We help veterinary practices turn those requirements into modern, transparent websites that are easier for pet owners to understand and easier for practice teams to keep up to date.
Prices & fees
One click from the homepage
Structured, filterable, exportable — and easy for the practice team to keep accurate.
What's changing
The CMA's final veterinary market investigation identified significant problems around consumers' ability to understand and compare veterinary services. The solution goes considerably further than putting a consultation price somewhere on a website.
01
Practices will need to publish a defined standard set of prices clearly and prominently.
The CMA currently specifies that the price list should be accessible no more than one click from the homepage and clearly identifiable as “prices”, “pricing” or “fees”.
02
Relevant veterinary groups will need to make the identity of the business that owns the practice clear and prominent.
03
Practices need clear information covering their out-of-hours arrangements, including third-party providers where applicable.
04
Pet owners will receive clearer information about written prescriptions, the ability to purchase medicines elsewhere and associated prescription charges.
05
Practices will need to publish prices for commonly supplied parasiticide products together with the appropriate online-retailer information.
06
Plans need to explain what is included, frequency, total price, standalone prices and how any claimed saving has been calculated.
07
Cremation options, including communal cremation, individual cremation and associated pricing, need to be made clear.
08
Practices will need a documented complaints process and the process must be available through the website.
Where this comes from. The CMA published its final veterinary market investigation decision in March 2026 and has decided the remedies it will impose. A draft Veterinary Services Market Investigation Order 2026 has since been published, and the substantive Order is expected to be made in September 2026. Different implementation periods apply depending on the remedy and the size of the veterinary business, and smaller businesses generally receive longer implementation periods.
Information on this page reflects the CMA final decision and draft Veterinary Services Market Investigation Order available at the time of publication. Requirements may change before the final Order is made. This page is for general information and does not constitute legal advice. Optimise Local and the Meadow & Mere demonstration are not approved or endorsed by the CMA or RCVS.
The scale of it
It touches the whole client journey.
Treating each requirement as a collection of disconnected compliance pages risks leaving practices with a website that technically contains the information but is harder for clients to use.
We think there is a better approach: build transparency into the structure of the website from the beginning.
See it in practice
Meadow & Mere is a fictional two-branch veterinary group built by Optimise Local as a working reference implementation.
It demonstrates how pricing transparency, medicines information, pet care plans, ownership, out-of-hours care, end-of-life information and complaints can sit naturally inside a warm, premium veterinary website. It was deliberately designed to look like a website a practice would actually want — not a compliance portal.
Warm, commercial veterinary experience.
Open in the demo
A structured, patient-friendly approach to pricing.
Open in the demoClear inclusions, standalone values and plan information.
Open in the demo
Prescription and medicine-choice information made understandable.
Open in the demo
Clear provider and emergency information.
Open in the demo
Sensitive presentation of choices and costs.
Open in the demoMeadow & Mere is a fictional demonstration practice.
Scope
We don't pretend that rebuilding a website alone makes a veterinary business compliant. It is worth being clear about which side of the line each piece sits on.
Our role is to make the digital part straightforward — and give your team a structure that makes the operational part easier to maintain.
Timing
Not every practice site has these problems — plenty are in good shape. But where a website is showing its age, the issues tend to fall into familiar patterns:
You have to organise the information. We can make the whole website work harder while we're there.
Built to stay current
The CMA's proposed approach requires prices to be kept up to date as they change. A veterinary website therefore needs to be maintainable rather than treated as a static brochure.
Depending on the project, we create structured, editable information that updates the relevant public pages automatically — so nobody is hand-editing the same figure in five places.
See how the demo manages its informationWhy Optimise Local
01
We've already built the underlying data, research and reference implementation rather than starting with a generic website template.
02
The objective isn't simply to contain the required information. It still needs to communicate the practice's personality, reassure pet owners and convert visitors into registrations, bookings and calls.
03
Our work on VetCompliance involved indexing thousands of UK veterinary practices and creating data pipelines around veterinary pricing and transparency.
Different starting points
We can assess the current website and identify what would need to change rather than automatically recommending a rebuild.
Build a modern veterinary site with the new information architecture designed in from the beginning.
Create one structured source of practice, branch, provider and pricing information and surface it consistently across the relevant locations.
If you're going to change how your practice communicates prices, services and choices, it's worth doing properly. We'll look at your current website, explain where we think the gaps are and tell you whether we'd improve what you have or rebuild it.
