"Exam, canine: $68.00." That's the first line on the invoice I brought home last Tuesday, folded in quarters in my coat pocket, and it's where I want to start, because the full list price is the number that matters for most people reading this, not the one I paid.
Hank's annual checkup happens every March. Tuesday is one of my workdays, so he rode to the clinic with me in the back of the Outback, spent the morning in a kennel run grumbling at nobody in particular, and had his appointment between my phone calls. He weighed in at 68 pounds, same as last spring. He stepped off the scale twice to sniff the treat jar, so we weighed him three times.
The itemized bill
I get a staff discount of 30 percent on services and most products, but only at the clinic where I work. Here's every line, list price first, then what we actually paid:
- Exam: $68.00 list, $47.60 paid
- Leptospirosis vaccine: $34.00 list, $23.80 paid
- Lyme vaccine: $39.00 list, $27.30 paid
- 4Dx heartworm and tick-disease test: $64.00 list, $44.80 paid
- Fecal test: $42.00 list, $29.40 paid
- Total: $247.00 list, $172.90 paid
In plain words, here's what those are. The exam is the vet's hands-on once-over: eyes, ears, teeth, heart, lungs, belly, joints, skin, weight. The lepto vaccine is for a bacterial disease that wildlife spread through urine in puddles and standing water, and Hank swims in the Rum River and drinks from every puddle he passes. The Lyme vaccine is for the disease deer ticks carry, and Isanti County has no shortage of deer ticks. The 4Dx is a small blood sample that screens for heartworm and several tick-borne infections at once. The fecal checks for intestinal parasites. Everything came back negative this year.
That's the set our vet recommends for Hank's life: river swims, wooded trails, a backyard that deer walk past at night. A dog with a different routine, in a different part of the country, may get a different list, and that's a conversation to have with your own vet.
What wasn't on it this year
The two vaccines people usually think of first, distemper combo (DHPP) and rabies, weren't due. Hank is on three-year schedules for both, and rabies comes due in 2026, so next spring's checkup will cost more. I've made a note of that already, because I don't love surprises, even small ones.
Also not on this bill: his monthly heartworm and flea-and-tick chew, which he gets year-round. It lists at $31.00 a dose, and with my discount we pay $21.70 a month.
So Hank's routine care for one year looks like this: $172.90 for the checkup plus $260.40 in monthly chews, or $433.30 total. Without my discount, the same care would run $247.00 plus $372.00, which is $619.00. I'm aware that the discount is a perk most people don't have, and I try to keep the list prices front and center for exactly that reason.
Where it goes in our budget
None of this is claimable on Hank's insurance. His policy is accident and illness only, with no wellness add-on. I priced the add-on once, and since I already get routine care at 30 percent off, I'd have been paying a monthly fee to get back money I was mostly already saving. The math might look completely different for someone paying full price, and some wellness plans are structured very differently from others, so it's worth asking the company to walk you through one.
Instead, the checkup goes on the pet tab, which is the tab in our household budget spreadsheet where every pet expense lives, under "routine." Routine care comes out of our monthly pet budget, not the separate savings account we keep for vet bills nobody planned. That distinction keeps the emergency money from slowly leaking into things we knew were coming all along.
One thing I'd pass along from years of handing out estimates: you can ask any clinic for an itemized estimate before a routine visit. Front desks do it all the time, and it's much easier to plan around a list than around a single number.
Hank got a biscuit from the jar at the front desk on his way out, and he grumbled in the back seat the whole drive home, which I take as his official review of the Lyme shot.
