Where Veterinarians Sit Relative to Roughly the Healthcare and Apparently Social Services Category
Does a veterinary degree earn a veterinarians healthcare category express entry match? It’s a fair question to ask, and answering it honestly starts with what the category is actually built around, not the word “healthcare” in its title.
What the category’s name actually covers
IRCC’s category is officially called “healthcare and social services,” and its current version lists 37 specific occupations — the broadest occupation list of any category currently running, defined by National Occupational Classification (NOC) codes rather than a general theme. That breadth is exactly why this question comes up so often: a large list invites the assumption that most healthcare-adjacent work is covered, without confirming which specific codes actually made the cut.
Is veterinarian included in healthcare category — the honest limits here
Is veterinarian included in healthcare category as currently published? This research pass did not verify the full 37-occupation list in enough detail to answer that directly, and this article isn’t going to guess rather than check. What’s worth noting structurally is that IRCC treats human medicine and veterinary medicine as genuinely separate professional and regulatory worlds in most contexts — the “Physicians with Canadian Work Experience” category, for instance, names three specific human-medicine occupations by NOC code and Canadian experience only, which shows how granular and occupation-specific these category definitions actually are rather than broad by theme.
Vet NOC code express entry category matching, properly done
A vet noc code express entry category match, if one exists, would rest on the applicant’s actual NOC code lining up with whatever the published list contains — not on the word “veterinary” appearing anywhere in a job description. The only reliable way to check is against IRCC’s current category-based selection page, matched to your own confirmed NOC code. Veterinary practice also covers a wide spread of roles — clinical practice, laboratory and diagnostic work, public health and food-safety inspection — and it’s entirely possible for one of those to land on a different NOC code than another, even within the same broad profession.
Animal health occupations express entry status, and what to do next
Animal health occupations express entry eligibility, in short, is a check-your-own-code situation rather than a settled yes-or-no this article can hand over. What is settled: the healthcare and social services category has drawn repeatedly and recently, at real volume — thousands of invitations across several 2025 and 2026 rounds — so if a specific occupation is genuinely on the list, it’s sitting inside one of the more active current routes, not a dormant one.
The practical next step
Work out your NOC code before drawing any conclusion — Canada’s official classification system is the tool for that — and hold it up against the current healthcare and social services list rather than reasoning from the category’s name. That’s the realistic shape of any veterinarians healthcare category express entry question: a NOC-matching exercise, not a name-matching one. A licensed RCIC can help work through NOC classification for an unusual or borderline profession if the answer isn’t obvious.
Our free Express Entry Explained guide covers how the category system is structured overall, which is useful context even before the NOC-matching step.