Who Pays When the Dog Gets Sick

When Janet Toh's chihuahua, Mochi, collapsed at two in the morning in March last year, she drove to a 24-hour emergency clinic in Clementi. Mochi had congestive heart failure. She spent four days in intensive care. The bill was S$13,000.

"I paid it," Janet says. "I don't know how. I had some savings. I borrowed from my sister. But I paid it." She pauses. "If it had been S$20,000 I don't know what I would have done."

Mochi is alive. She is on three medications and sees a cardiologist every four months. The quarterly cardiology appointment costs approximately S$350. The medications cost S$180 a month. Janet estimates she has spent S$22,000 on Mochi's healthcare in the fourteen months since the collapse.

This is not an unusual story in Singapore in 2026. Veterinary costs on the island have risen by an estimated 100 to 300 per cent over the past two decades, depending on the procedure and the clinic. The same period has seen a near-doubling of the number of licensed dogs in Singapore — from approximately 70,000 in 2019 to over 114,000 by 2023 — and a significant upgrade in the complexity of care that owners expect and clinics now offer. Singapore has veterinary specialists, oncologists, cardiologists, and neurologists. It has MRI scanners and laparoscopic surgery. It has, in other words, very good veterinary care. What it does not have is any mechanism to make that care affordable.

A veterinarian in scrubs examining a small dog under bright clinical lighting — Singapore's veterinary hospitals now offer specialist care — oncology, cardiology, neurology — that rivals any major city in the world. The bills reflect it.

The fee question parliament refused to answer

On 8 April 2026 — six weeks before this article was written — Singapore's parliament passed the Veterinary Practice Bill, Bill No. 7 of 2026. It was the first major reform of veterinary regulation in Singapore's history. The bill creates a Veterinary Council of Singapore with powers to set practice standards, handle complaints, and discipline errant practitioners. It is a significant and overdue step toward professional accountability.

It does not regulate fees.

The omission was debated in parliament. MP Diana Pang raised the issue of affordability directly, asking whether the new council would have any role in ensuring that veterinary care remained accessible to ordinary Singaporean pet owners. The Ministry of National Development's response was clear: fee regulation was not within the council's mandate. Pricing would remain a matter for the market.

The exterior of a Singapore HDB block with a veterinary clinic at ground level, showing the mixed-use urban fabric of the island — Veterinary clinics at HDB ground floors are a feature of Singapore's urban landscape. Accessibility of location and accessibility of price are not the same thing.

MP Cai Yin Zhou raised a related concern: brain drain. Singapore's veterinary workforce is internationally trained, internationally mobile, and increasingly internationally recruited. If the salary structures in Singapore do not reflect the cost of that training and the conditions of the work, the argument goes, Singapore will struggle to retain the vets it needs. Regulating fees downward, in this view, would accelerate the problem.

The workforce behind the fees

Singapore has approximately 700 licensed veterinarians for a pet population that, including cats and small animals, numbers in the hundreds of thousands. The ratio is roughly one vet per 1,700 pets — a figure that represents a significant undersupply relative to peer cities like Hong Kong or Melbourne. Veterinary training requires five to six years of specialist education; Singapore has no local veterinary school, which means all licensed vets have trained abroad at significant personal expense.

The profession also carries mental health burdens that are only beginning to be documented. Research consistently finds rates of depression, anxiety and burnout among veterinarians that are four to nine times the rate in the general population. The drivers are well understood: high debt loads from overseas training, a client base that is emotionally distressed and sometimes aggressive about cost, and the unique moral injury of being the person who administers euthanasia. In Singapore, these pressures are compounded by the cost of living and the intensity of client expectations in a market where "world-class" has become the baseline.

“People want MRI-level diagnostics and general-practice prices. Those two things cannot both be true at once.”

— Veterinarian, Singapore, speaking on condition of anonymity

What abandonment tells us

The connection between veterinary costs and animal welfare outcomes is not theoretical. The SPCA Singapore reported 285 animals surrendered to its shelter in 2023, approximately three times the rate of previous years, with owners citing an inability to afford veterinary care as a primary reason. AVS recorded 310 abandoned dogs in 2022, a 38 per cent increase on the year before. These numbers are imperfect proxies — abandonment has multiple drivers — but the directional signal is consistent.

An older woman sitting in a veterinary waiting room with her cat in a carrier, looking quietly anxious — The decision to seek veterinary care is, for many Singapore pet owners, a financial calculation as much as a medical one.

Pet insurance exists in Singapore and has grown in uptake in recent years. But penetration remains low, and the claims process — which requires upfront payment followed by reimbursement — still requires the owner to have the cash in the first place. For a S$13,000 emergency like Mochi's, even an insured owner may face a period of financial stress before the claim is settled.

The market's answer

The veterinary sector's response to affordability pressures has been largely market-driven: tiered pricing at some practices, subsidised schemes at welfare clinics, payment plan options at larger hospitals. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals operates a subsidised veterinary clinic that provides care to low-income pet owners, with a means-tested fee scale. Some community hospitals run subsidised wellness packages. These are meaningful interventions at the margins.

What is absent is any systemic mechanism — either regulatory or social — that ties the cost of veterinary care to the capacity of ordinary Singaporeans to pay it. The Veterinary Practice Bill, for all its importance as a professional regulation reform, does not address this. Parliament's position is that the market should set prices.

A dog recovering in a veterinary ward, lying on a padded mat with monitoring equipment nearby — Intensive care for a dog in Singapore can cost as much as S$13,000 for a four-day stay. The bill is the owner's.

Janet Toh is not bitter about Mochi's bill. "She is alive," she says simply. "That is what I wanted." But she is clear about the calculation she made and the resources she had to make it. "If I had not had the savings, and if my sister had said no, I don't know. I really don't know what I would have done." She looks at Mochi, who is asleep on the sofa in a posture of total boneless relaxation. "People say pets are not humans. But when they are sick, you do not think about that. You just want them to not be in pain."

Parliament passed the Veterinary Practice Bill without the fee clause. The Veterinary Council will regulate practice standards. The market will regulate price. For Janet Toh and the hundred thousand other dog owners in Singapore whose pets will at some point need expensive care, the answer to who pays remains exactly what it has always been: whoever can.