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If you wanted to find America’s next great pet market, the obvious place to start would be a list of the country’s fastest-growing metros.
Raleigh, North Carolina has grown 12.6% since 2020. Austin, Texas is up nearly 14%. Wilmington, North Carolina is up almost 16%.
More people should mean more pets, more veterinary visits, more grooming appointments and more boarding demand. But that only tells half the story. Raleigh also added 53 veterinary establishments between 2019 and early 2026, an increase of nearly 32%. Austin added 111, up 45%. Wilmington added 29, up 56%.
Then there is Lakeland-Winter Haven, Florida. Its population grew nearly 20%, but the metro finished the period with the same number of veterinary establishments it started with.
That was the opening we wanted to find.
The Underbite analyzed 139 U.S. metros using Census metro population estimates, housing-unit estimates, American Housing Survey pet-ownership data, BLS establishment and employment records, and Census employer and nonemployer business data. We looked separately at veterinary care and pet-service businesses, a federal category that includes boarding, grooming, sitting, walking, training and related non-veterinary services.
The goal was not to find the cities adding the most people. It was to find places where the local pet market has grown faster than the businesses serving it.
Lakeland stands out
Lakeland-Winter Haven is not a small Central Florida town. The metro sits between Tampa and Orlando and reached roughly 875,000 residents in 2025. Its population increased 19.8% from 2020 to 2025, housing stock grew 17.7%, and we estimate the metro now has roughly 169,000 pet-owning households.
It had 62 private veterinary establishments in the first quarter of 2019. Seven years later, it still had 62.
There is no accepted number of clinics a metro of Lakeland’s size is supposed to have. A large hospital can serve far more patients than a small practice, and owners routinely cross city and county lines for care. The comparison with other markets is what makes Lakeland notable.
Across the 124 metros that qualified for our veterinary analysis, the median market had roughly 1,859 estimated pet-owning households for every veterinary establishment. Lakeland had about 2,732, nearly 50% more pet households per establishment than the typical market in our analysis. Its practices do not appear dramatically larger either. Lakeland has about 14 veterinary-services employees per establishment, almost exactly in line with the median market.
The same broad pattern appears outside veterinary care. Lakeland had 56 pet-service businesses with employees in early 2026, plus 277 nonemployer operators in the latest Census data. The employer side works out to roughly 3,025 estimated pet households per business, compared with a median of about 2,173 across the markets we studied.
Businesses are being added. The local market has simply been growing quickly enough that capacity still looks relatively light compared with peers. That makes Lakeland the clearest broad-based opening we found.
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina also stands out on both sides. Its population grew 20.9% between 2020 and 2025. Veterinary establishments increased from 29 to 33, but nowhere near as quickly, and pet-service capacity also remains relatively light for the size and growth of the market. Its seasonal housing base complicates the picture, so housing growth alone would overstate the number of permanent households arriving. The population numbers still point to substantial real growth.
Bakersfield, California gets to a similar place for a different reason. Its population grew only 2.3%, but the metro has roughly 156,000 estimated pet-owning households and 50 veterinary establishments. That is more than 3,100 pet households per establishment. Its pet-service business base also remains relatively small for the size of the market.
Myrtle Beach stands out because demand grew very quickly. Bakersfield stands out because the current business base still looks light for the number of pet-owning households already there.
The answer changes depending on the business
Only three of the 93 metros where we could make a clean comparison stood out strongly in both veterinary care and pet services: Lakeland, Myrtle Beach and Bakersfield. Everywhere else, the picture starts to split.
Spartanburg, South Carolina is one of the clearest examples.
Its population grew 14.3% from 2020 to 2025, while its veterinary establishment count remained at 30 between 2019 and early 2026. Its pet-service market moved in the other direction, with the number of businesses that have employees more than doubling from 16 to 34. Spartanburg therefore looks much more interesting through a veterinary lens than as a broad pet-services opportunity.
Ogden, Utah shows a similar split. Veterinary establishments moved from 47 to 49 between 2019 and 2026, while pet-service businesses grew from 35 to 62. The market still looks relatively light on veterinary capacity compared with peers, but its broader service market has already attracted much more supply.
Texas often runs the other way. Dallas-Fort Worth added veterinary establishments from 725 to 878, while Houston went from 565 to 695. Neither looks nearly as light on the veterinary side as Lakeland or Spartanburg, but their pet-service markets stand out more.
Dallas-Fort Worth has roughly 1.5M estimated pet-owning households and 598 pet-service businesses with employees. Houston has roughly 1.28M estimated pet households and 466. Both also have relatively fewer nonemployer operators per pet household than many peer markets.
Austin is slightly different. Its pet-service businesses also grew quickly, up about 44%, so this is not a market where supply stood still. Austin keeps showing up because demand has been growing so quickly. Housing stock expanded more than 21% from 2020 to 2025. In Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, the current service base itself looks relatively light. In Austin, the question is whether rapid growth continues to create room even as new businesses arrive.
There is an important limitation here. The federal pet-services category bundles grooming, boarding, daycare, sitting, walking, training and related businesses together. It cannot tell us whether Houston has plenty of groomers but too few boarding facilities, or whether Dallas has ample daycare but not enough training capacity. A city can look adequately supplied in aggregate and still have a hole in one specific service.
The map is also broader than Florida, Texas and the Carolinas.
California has several interesting outliers. Stockton is the strongest pet-services signal in the dataset, while Vallejo and Fresno look more constrained on veterinary care. Phoenix, Arizona remains one of the stronger large veterinary markets and has the benefit of direct Census pet-ownership data rather than a modeled estimate.
The Northeast has fewer extremes. Scranton, Pennsylvania and Syracuse, New York show some veterinary constraints, while Albany and Buffalo look somewhat more interesting on pet services. The Midwest is more muted. Indianapolis, Indiana and Wichita, Kansas lean more toward pet services, while Minneapolis-St. Paul looks relatively well supplied on veterinary care. Colorado largely falls on the well-supplied side. Denver and Colorado Springs do not show obvious broad capacity gaps in either category.
Plenty of competition can still leave room for something new
Business count is only one way to look at a market. It tells us how much supply exists, but not whether that supply is convenient, modern, specialized or especially good at solving a specific problem.
Denver is a good example. The market does not show an obvious broad veterinary gap in our data, yet Sploot has built a growing metro footprint around extended hours, same-day access and a more modern primary-and-urgent-care mode.
Austin shows another version of the opportunity. The market now has multiple mobile dog-gym concepts, along with narrower dental businesses such as Bright N Shine and Calm Bite. In Aurora, Colorado, Animal Dental Clinic has built an entire veterinary practice around dentistry rather than trying to be another general hospital.
These businesses are not betting on a complete lack of competition. They are unbundling services and building a business around it. The same logic applies to modern veterinary models. A market can have plenty of clinics and still leave room for longer hours, urgent care, memberships, mobile care, hospice, specialty services or simply a better customer experience.
Ownership adds another layer. We also took a quick look at the Private Equity Vet corporate-ownership database as a directional check. Its map shows corporate and investment-backed groups represented across markets that land very differently in our analysis, from large Sun Belt metros to heavily supplied coastal markets. The database is independently maintained and not exhaustive, so we did not use it in our scoring. It does highlight a useful distinction: two metros with the same clinic count can have very different competitive structures depending on how fragmented or consolidated those practices are.
Fast growth does not guarantee an opening
Raleigh is a good example of why demographic growth alone can mislead. The North Carolina metro added 12.6% more residents between 2020 and 2025, while housing stock increased 16.5%. Veterinary establishments grew even faster, from 168 in 2019 to 221 in 2026, an increase of 31.5%.
Wilmington, North Carolina reached a similar point through an even bigger supply response. Population grew 15.9% and housing grew 19.3%, while veterinary establishments increased 55.8%, from 52 to 81.
Both markets are growing quickly, but veterinary businesses have been arriving quickly too. There may still be attractive neighborhoods, specialties or service models within them, but the metro-level numbers do not show the same broad gap we see in Lakeland or Spartanburg.
The opposite case also needs caution. Visalia, California has roughly 485,000 residents, about 80,000 estimated pet-owning households and only 22 veterinary establishments, down from 25 in 2019. That looks striking on paper, but IDEXX reported that U.S. same-store clinical visits at veterinary practices declined about 2% in 2025 and initially expected a similar decline in 2026.
A shrinking establishment count does not automatically mean pent-up demand. It could reflect weaker visit volume, consolidation, practices expanding internally, a true access problem, or several of those things at once. Visalia is worth investigating because its clinic density looks unusual relative to peers, but that is not enough evidence by itself to call the metro an obvious expansion opportunity.
That same caution applies inside metros. Kaufman County outside Dallas grew its population 42.2% while its veterinary establishment count remained at 14. Caldwell County outside Austin grew 20% while its count fell from five to four.
Owners may be driving into neighboring commercial centers, existing clinics may have added doctors or expanded capacity, or residential growth may simply be arriving before commercial development catches up. What the numbers do show is that a metro-wide average can hide where growth is actually landing.
So where are America’s pet-economy boomtowns?
Lakeland-Winter Haven, Florida is the clearest broad answer in our data. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina belongs in the conversation, with an asterisk for its seasonal housing base. Bakersfield, California shows that a market does not need explosive population growth to have relatively little capacity for the amount of pet demand already there.
After those three, the answer depends much more on what kind of business you are talking about. Spartanburg, Ogden, Phoenix, Vallejo and Fresno look more interesting through a veterinary lens. Stockton, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Tulsa, Jacksonville and Albuquerque look more interesting for pet services. Raleigh and Wilmington grew quickly, but veterinary businesses responded quickly too.
Colorado offers another version of the story. A market can already have substantial supply and still leave room for a better format, a narrower service or a different customer experience.
The best pet markets are not simply the places adding the most people. They are the places where something pet owners need has not grown as quickly as the market around it. The hard part is figuring out what that something is.
