Vet Health Plan and Price List Pages: What the CMA Order Requires

For years a vet practice website could get away with opening hours, a team page and a phone number. That changed when the Competition and Markets Authority finished its investigation into veterinary services for household pets, which ran from September 2023 to March 2026. In September 2026 the CMA published a legally binding Order requiring veterinary businesses that care for household pets to publish far more information, much of it on their websites.

This article focuses on the CMA's guide for veterinary businesses with 14 or fewer practices. Groups with 15 or more practices have a separate guide and some earlier dates. If the Order is breached, the CMA can work with the business to fix it, issue directions or impose a financial penalty. The guide itself says you must read the full Order and Explanatory Note and not rely on the summary alone, so treat this article as a planning aid for your web work, not a substitute.

The useful way to think about it: your website becomes the place where pet owners compare your prices, your plans and your complaint process with other practices. If it is clear, it helps you win clients. If it is muddled, it creates compliance risk.

For small veterinary businesses, the guide lists four deadline months: September 2026, December 2026, March 2027 and September 2027. In each case you must comply from the next working day after the relevant date. Most of the website work falls in March 2027.

There is also an administrative step sooner than all of these. Practices, out-of-hours centres, crematoria and referral centres must send certain business information to the RCVS by the end of 30 November 2026, and tell the RCVS of changes within 28 days. If your contact details are wrong in that submission, any later website data you send under the Order will not line up.

Pet health plans, which the Order calls pet care plans, are where most practices have the most work to do. The guide lists the "Pet Care Plan Standard Information" you must publish online and in the practice for each plan:

• a list of all products and services included;
• how many times each service can be used, including making clear when something is typically used just once in a pet's lifetime;
• the time frame during which each service is available, for example per month or per year;
• the total price of the plan as both a monthly and an annual figure;
• the standalone price for each service included;
• information on cancellation terms.

If the plan includes flea, tick and worming treatments, you must link to your parasiticide price list, say which parasiticides are included and add a message that owners should speak to their vet or SQP about which products, doses and frequency suit their pet. If annual plans renew automatically, you must send owners a reminder.

Savings claims

Most plan pages lead with "save up to" figures. The Order adds specific requirements on how savings are calculated and disclosed, set out in paragraphs 82 to 87 of the Explanatory Note. Until you have checked your savings figures against those paragraphs, it is safer to show the plan price and the standalone prices side by side and let owners do the arithmetic. A one-time microchip counted as an annual saving, for example, would inflate the claim.

A layout that works

One page per species and size, with a table of included services, uses per year, standalone prices and a total, then the monthly and annual plan price beneath. Put the cancellation terms directly below the price, not in a PDF. Keep the same structure for every plan so owners can compare them quickly.

From the next working day after 22 March 2027, you must publish a price list on your website showing a price for each defined service in Schedule 1 of the Order, and make it available at each premises. The guide says the list should cover all 36 services in the schedule, except those your practice does not offer.

Several rules affect how the page is built:

• No extra text inside the price list beyond the service name used in the schedule. Supplementary explanations go elsewhere on the site.
• Prices must use the Order's 6 standardised pet characteristic and weight categories where your prices vary by species or weight.
• Each price must be the typical price for a standard case with minimal complexity.
• The list must tell owners clearly that prices may be adjusted upwards in more complex cases.
• When a price changes, the list must be updated before the new price is charged.

The last point is a content management issue. If your website is updated by an agency on request, there may be a lag between a practice management system price change and the website. A price list that pulls from one source, or a clear internal rule that the web update goes first, removes that risk. Our web development team can connect the list to an export from your practice management system.

There is also a change to booking messages. When you send the first email, text or other digital message confirming a consultation booking, you must state the price of that consultation and link to the page hosting your price list. That means your booking system templates need a price field and a stable URL.

Parasiticide price list

You must publish the prices of your most commonly sold flea, tick and worming products, with a prominent link to the VMD Register of Online Retailers. "Most commonly sold" means products where your practice sold at least 100 units in the previous financial year; if fewer than 10 products meet that threshold, list your top 10 by sales. Prices must include any unavoidable dispensing or administration fees and VAT, and the list needs a notice telling owners to consult their vet or SQP before choosing a product.

Cremation options

The Order requires you to publish on your website the full range of options: an individual or communal cremation bought from the practice, separate arrangements made directly with a crematorium, or taking the pet home for burial. You must offer a basic communal cremation and give clear prices for individual and communal services. Optional extras such as urns, paw prints or fur clippings must be priced separately rather than built into the cremation price.

Complaints process

Each practice must publish its written in-house complaint process on its website. If a complaint is not resolved informally within 10 working days it becomes an actionable complaint, which must be acknowledged in writing within a further 5 working days, with a full response within 8 weeks. You must also display a Decision Tree, which the RCVS is developing and will make available by 22 January 2027, both in reception and on the website, and explain that mediation is available once the in-house process is exhausted.

Two further pages are required from March 2027. The practice information page must cover staff qualifications, including any RCVS professional accreditations (these can be anonymised), current Practice Standards Scheme accreditations and awards with a link to the RCVS information for owners, and full details of your out-of-hours care. If you outsource out-of-hours services, you must name the provider and give their phone numbers, premises and web addresses, when they are available and what they provide.

The ownership rule applies to groups and networks: the identity of the group must be shown clearly and prominently on websites and in other online data, premises, signage and communications. A genuinely independent single-site practice has nothing to disclose here, but it may still want to say so plainly, since the CMA's work has made owners curious about who owns their vet.

Later, these pages, the price lists and plan information will feed the RCVS Find a Vet platform, and you will need to submit the public URLs where each is published. Choose clean, permanent addresses now, for example /prices, /health-plans and /complaints, so you are not changing them when the submission is due.

Many practices promote pet insurance and payment plans alongside health plans. These are separate products with separate rules, and the page should make that obvious. A health plan is a package of preventive care paid monthly. Insurance covers unexpected illness and injury. Owners confuse the two, and a page that blurs them invites complaints.

The Financial Conduct Authority's page on permissions for vets and dentists explains that introducing customers to insurance providers is a regulated matter. A firm with limited permission could become an appointed representative of the insurance provider, while a full permission firm would need to apply for insurance permissions. Introducing customers to third-party finance to pay for your own services typically requires limited permission for secondary credit broking. Before your website carries an insurance banner, a referral link or a "spread the cost" button, confirm with the provider or lender what status you need and what wording they require.

On the website, keep insurance and finance information on their own pages, state who provides the product and avoid recommending a specific policy unless your permissions allow it.

The Order sits on top of general consumer law. The CMA's price transparency guidance says that prices must include unavoidable charges such as fees and VAT and that a "from" price is acceptable only if it includes those mandatory charges. For a vet practice that means a vaccination price that excludes a compulsory consultation fee should not be shown as the headline price. Breaches can attract fines of up to 10% of turnover or £300,000, whichever is greater.

From September 2027 the Order also caps written prescription fees at £21.40 for the first medicine and £12.70 for each additional medicine, with the caps applying until 31 March 2028 and then adjusted annually for inflation. Practices will also have to tell owners they can ask for a written prescription and that medicines may be cheaper elsewhere, using standard materials from the RCVS and CMA. At the same date, written estimates become mandatory where a treatment pathway is reasonably likely to cost £500 or more including VAT and at least 20% of that cost relates to tests or treatments not yet provided or chosen, and itemised bills must accompany every payment request. Plan your website literature section so these standard documents can be added without a redesign.

For a one or two-site practice, the work fits into a single project if you start before the end of 2026:

1. Audit current prices, plans and parasiticide sales so the data exists before the pages do.
2. Create permanent URLs for prices, parasiticides, health plans, cremation, complaints and practice information.
3. Build the price list from one data source with the 6 weight and characteristic categories.
4. Rewrite each health plan page with the standard information and cancellation terms.
5. Update booking confirmation templates with the consultation price and price list link.
6. Add space for the RCVS Decision Tree and standard prescription literature.

We build practice sites with structured price tables that staff can update without breaking the layout. See our website maintenance options or ask for a fixed scope through our quote form.

• CMA: What veterinary businesses and vets need to do following the CMA's final vets report
• FCA: Vets and dentists, permissions you'll need
• CMA: Providing clear and accurate information about prices: summary