IR35 for Locum Vets
IR35 only matters if you work through an intermediary, in almost all veterinary cases your own limited company. If you are a sole trader invoicing practices directly, IR35 does not apply to you, although employment status still can.
On This Page
- Who Decides Your Status
- What the Tests Look At
- What Happens If You Are Inside
- If You Disagree With a Determination
The rules ask a single question: if the company were removed and you contracted with the practice personally, would that relationship look like employment?
Who Decides Your Status
For engagements with medium and large clients in the private sector, the client is responsible for determining status and must give you a status determination statement with reasons. Where the client is a small company, responsibility for applying the rules stays with your own company.
Practice size therefore matters. A single site independent practice and a corporate group with hundreds of sites can reach different answers on the same working arrangement, because the rules put the decision in different places.
What the Tests Look At
- Personal service and substitution
- Whether you must do the work personally or could genuinely send a suitably qualified substitute. In clinical veterinary work a substitution right is often real in principle and rarely exercised in fact, and how the contract is worded is not the whole answer.
- Control
- How much the practice directs what you do, when and how. Clinical autonomy helps, but a fixed rota and practice protocols point the other way.
- Mutuality of obligation
- Whether the practice must offer work and you must accept it. Ad hoc cover looks different from a standing weekly commitment.
- Being in business on your own account
- Multiple clients, your own indemnity cover, your own equipment, financial risk and the ability to profit from sound management all point away from employment.
What Happens If You Are Inside
Where the client is responsible and determines the engagement is inside the rules, the fee payer deducts income tax and National Insurance before paying your company. You still have a company, but most of the tax advantage of using one has gone for that engagement.
It is worth saying plainly: an inside determination on your main engagement is usually the point at which running a company stops making sense, and the sensible response is to review the structure rather than to argue about it.
If You Disagree With a Determination
Clients responsible for determinations must have a process to consider a challenge and respond within a set period. Put your disagreement in writing, set out the specific factors you say were misread, and keep the response. Where the amounts are significant, get advice before you escalate.
Last reviewed 3 August 2026. [REVIEWER DETAILS REQUIRED BEFORE PUBLICATION]
Sources
Frequently Asked Questions
Does IR35 apply if I am a sole trader locum?
Does having several practices as clients put me outside IR35?
Can I use HMRC own tool?
Get Your Engagement Reviewed
Send us the contract and a description of how the work actually runs. Working practices matter more than the wording.