Free template

A veterinary rota template that survives contact with a practice

Most rota templates are a grid. A grid tells you who is in on Thursday and nothing else, which is why practices outgrow them in a fortnight. This veterinary rota template adds the three things a practice rota is actually missing: a cover check that flags a short day before it happens, a running out of hours count per person, and a leave record built for the duty that came in on 6 April 2026.

It is an Excel workbook, it is free, and we email it to you. Read what is in it below.

Where rota spreadsheets let practices down

They show cover, but never check it

The rota looks full until someone counts, and the counting happens at 7am on the day. This veterinary rota template counts every day for you and turns the number red when it drops below the minimum you set.

Out of hours load is invisible

Almost nobody objects to doing out of hours. They object to believing they do more than everyone else and having no way to prove it. A running count per person, published, settles that argument in about a minute.

The rota gets overwritten, and the evidence goes with it

Since 6 April 2026 employers must keep records adequate to show they met their annual leave obligations, and keep them for six years. A rota rebuilt every fortnight is not that record. The workbook keeps them as separate sheets so one does not destroy the other.

What is in the veterinary rota template

Five sheets, no macros, nothing to install.

• Start here. Shift codes, how each sheet works, and what the template is not.
• Rota. A four week grid for up to twelve people, with a drop down of shift codes and an on duty count across the top. Set your minimum staffing in one cell and any day below it turns red.
• OOH tracker. Pulls names from the rota and counts out of hours shifts per person, against a target you set, with a difference column.
• Leave record. Entitlement, how it was worked out, leave taken, carry over and the reason for it, the holiday pay calculation used, which pay elements were included, and anything paid in lieu on leaving. The columns practices almost never keep are the ones a six year record actually needs.
• Hours summary. Rostered hours plus overruns, call outs and required training, totalled. This is the figure a minimum wage check divides pay by, and the one nobody records.

Every sheet is set to print to one page width, and the rota prints landscape, because a rota that cannot be pinned up is not much use.

Who it is for

Practices running the rota in a spreadsheet, which is most independent practices, and practices about to move off one who want to know what the new system needs to do. If you have more than about twelve people or more than one site, a spreadsheet will start fighting you, and our rota system is where this template stops being enough.

Pair it with our veterinary rota policy guide, which covers the decisions the template assumes you have already made, and the annual leave records duty, which explains why the leave sheet is shaped the way it is.

A word on what this is not

It is a starting point, not legal advice, and a spreadsheet on a shared drive will not survive six years of editing on its own. Save a dated, read only copy at the end of every leave year and store it somewhere that is not the same file. That one habit is the difference between a record and a rumour.