Why veterinary fees are so much cheaper in France

Travelling to France with your pet? Bring back the pet passport, I hear you cry! Since stricter rules were introduced for pets travelling from the UK to France following Brexit, Connexion has been inundated with complaints from pet owners, particularly concerning the cost of obtaining an Animal Health Certificate (AHC) from a vet in the UK.

As both a veterinary surgeon and a pet owner who has regularly travelled between the UK and France with up to three pets at a time, I sympathise.

Despite being a veterinary surgeon myself, conflict-of-interest rules prevent me from signing my own pets’ certificates, meaning I have had to pay another vet to complete the process.

This frustration was eased when we discovered that we could obtain a European pet passport. However, strict rules meant that pets had to be vaccinated in France to keep the passport current. For owners with holiday homes in France, this often required considerable forward planning.

Now that the rules are being more rigorously applied, pet owners without permanent homes in France can no longer benefit from what was effectively a loophole in the system and must now obtain an AHC each time they travel. 

Vaccination costs in France

What adds to the discontent of some pet owners is that when they visit a veterinary practice in France, they often discover that charges can be very different from those in the UK.

In August 2022, our three cats required their booster rabies vaccinations, so for the first time since moving to France we visited our local veterinary practice.

Each cat received a clinical examination and dental check, had its microchip verified, and was then vaccinated. We were back at reception in no time to face the inevitable bill, which I had mentally calculated was going to be around €200.

The receptionist handed me the invoice, and I queried it.

Have you ever queried a veterinary bill because you thought it was too low?

I was assured it was correct.

The first cat’s vaccination cost €20.44, the second and third €9.09 each, and three syringes were charged at €7.56 in total, giving a total bill of €55.42.

As someone who had spent almost 50 years in veterinary practice in the UK, I was genuinely surprised. At first, I assumed French veterinary regulations might cap the amount that vets could charge in the same way certain medical fees are regulated within the French healthcare system.

However, a little investigation revealed this was not the case. French veterinarians, like their British counterparts, are generally free to set their own fees.

This raised a more interesting question.

If veterinary fees are not regulated in either country, why can there be such a difference in cost?

The answer, as I discovered, is more complex than I first imagined.

In the UK, an Animal Health Certificate (AHC) can only be issued by an Official Veterinarian (an OV registered with DEFRA). Not all UK vets are OVs, and few work 24 hours a day.

In France, there is no equivalent of an OV. All veterinarians are permitted to sign official veterinary documents.

Veterinary salaries and take-home pay in France are not dramatically different from those in the UK. This raises the question: why can veterinary care appear so much less expensive in France?

I hope to explore that question in my next column. Are there aspects of pet ownership in France that puzzle, concern or frustrate you? Please let Connexion know. We’ll try to deal with them in future columns.

Article by Peter Culpin, a British veterinary surgeon with over 45 years of clinical experience in the UK who now lives in Normandy