Protect your investments and ensure continuity of your business operations
Despite your best efforts and plans, life can throw unexpected curveballs. A major injury or severe illness can force you out of your veterinary hospital for extended time, flipping your world upside down and pulling you away from your business. How will you pay the salary for the relief vet you now have to hire to help take care of your clients while you are recovering.
Business overhead expense (BOE) insurance can keep your veterinary hospital running even if a terrible incident mandates a long-term recovery for you due to an accident or illness.
What is Business-Overhead Expense (BOE) insurance?
Business overhead expense insurance shouldn’t be confused with personal disability insurance. A business overhead expense policy covers all of the operating expenses of running a business in the event you are disabled and cannot run your veterinary practice.
The purpose of this type of insurance policy is to keep your business afloat without cutting into your personal assets. Most overhead expense insurance policies cover the following types of recurring business expenses:
- Rent or mortgage
- Salaries and benefits for employees
- Administrative overheads
- Utilities
- Office supplies
- Repairs or maintenance costs
As a general rule, you can expect nearly any routine business expense to fall under this type of policy. The main types of expenses not covered include income taxes, furniture, and other purchases that are non-essential to keeping your veterinary practice running.
In some cases, a business overhead expense disability policy can even pay to hire a temporary employee who covers your work, depending on the nature of your situation. In any case, this type of insurance covers most fixed overheads necessary for a small business.
Do I need BOE if I have personal long-term disability insurance?
Personal long-term disability insurance and business overhead expense insurance cover different situations.
Personal disability insurance protects your income, while business overhead expense insurance protects your business. This means that if you can’t work due to long-term hospitalization or medical care, you won’t accrue personal debt with an individual long-term disability policy. However, business overhead expense insurance can prevent a disabling incident from forcing you to sell or liquidate your veterinary practice. In essence, you retain the power as the owner of your business to decide if you want to move on from it, rather than the situation necessitating such a decision.
Additionally, when a single vet practice owner experiences a disabling event, revenue drops by at least 25% in the first 60 days. Having insurance protection to ensure you can afford to hire another veterinarian, while you may still be drawing a salary, can be a gamechanger in keeping the doors open while recovering and prevent the hospital from permanently closing.
What you should consider
Most business overhead expense policies have shorter benefit periods than personal long-term disability policies. For example, a personal disability policy may pay a monthly benefit to age 65 if the disabling event prevented that person from working in the same capacity again. Whereas business overhead expense insurance typically covers up to two years.
But, the primary thing to consider is that having BOE insurance would allow the business to continue to function during a time of recovery. If a full recovery was not possible and selling the business was the only option, BOE insurance may be the only thing keeping the business running and buying valuable time to get affairs in order for a sale. Many veterinary hospitals have closed because a single vet practice owner was injured severely and no safety net to cover overhead while they recovered.
© 2026 Vetinsure. All rights reserved.
© Copyright 2026 Vetinsure. All rights reserved.