By The Pawline veterinary teamVeterinary-reviewed by Alastair Greenway, BVM&S MRCVS · 25 July 2026
Reference range · g/dL
3237
Reference
32–37
Direction
Both unusually high and low values carry meaning.
This is the conventional reference interval. Your pet’s own report may print a slightly different range — always read the value against that. Sign in to see your pet’s value on this strip.
MCHC is how tightly packed the oxygen-carrying pigment is inside red cells. A low value suggests a regenerative or iron-poor picture; a high value is almost always a sample artefact, since cells cannot truly be over-filled with pigment.
MCHC (mean corpuscular haemoglobin concentration) measures how densely the oxygen-carrying pigment is packed within red cells — pigment per unit of cell volume, rather than per cell. This subtle distinction from MCH gives it one very useful property: because a red cell can only hold so much pigment, a genuinely high MCHC is essentially impossible, which makes a high value a reliable flag for a laboratory artefact.
MCHC is how densely pigment is packed in red cells. A low value suggests a regenerative or iron-poor picture; a high value is almost always an artefact.
Reading a low result
A low MCHC (hypochromia — cells under-filled with pigment) points towards a regenerative response (young cells are not yet fully filled) or iron deficiency (not enough pigment being made). Read with a low MCV, a low MCHC supports the iron-deficiency picture; read with a high reticulocyte count, it supports an active regenerative anaemia. Either way, it is a meaningful, interpretable finding.
Reading a high result
A high MCHC is almost always false, because cells cannot truly be over-concentrated with pigment. The usual causes are sample problems that falsely raise the measured haemoglobin or falsely lower the cell volume: haemolysis (red cells broken in the tube, spilling pigment), lipaemia (fat in the sample), or agglutination. So a high MCHC is read not as a red-cell finding but as a prompt to check the sample — and, usefully, its presence can itself hint that haemolysis or lipaemia is affecting the whole panel.
In chronic disease
MCHC is followed as part of the index set, mainly for its low values (which track iron-poor and regenerative states) and for its role as an artefact-detector. It rarely drives a decision alone but corroborates the other indices and guards against being misled by a poor-quality sample.
Cat vs dog
MCHC is interpreted the same way in both species, with species-specific reference ranges. The low-means-real, high-means-artefact rule applies to both. As always, it is read within the whole red-cell picture, and a high value in either species should prompt a look at sample quality before anything else.
How it's measured
MCHC is calculated by the analyser from the haemoglobin and the haematocrit, reported in g/dL. Because both inputs can be distorted by haemolysis and lipaemia, sample quality is central to interpreting it. Read the value against your own report's range.
What to do next
A low MCHC supports a regenerative or iron-deficient anaemia and is pursued with the other indices and the reticulocyte count. A high MCHC is treated as an artefact — a signal to check the sample for haemolysis or lipaemia rather than a real finding. As a supporting index, it is read within the broader red-cell picture.
Reference ranges reflect conventional laboratory intervals. Always interpret against your own lab's printed range and your veterinary surgeon's judgement. A brighter optimal band is shown only where a published guideline defines one, and it is cited.
This page is educational and is not a diagnosis. Lab results are interpreted in the full clinical context by your veterinary surgeon; a single value rarely tells the whole story.
