Therapy fee calculator
Work out what to charge per session to earn what you need, after the real costs of UK private practice.
To take home £35,000 you need to charge at least
£80per session
£77.34 exactly, rounded up to the nearest £5.
- Booked sessions a year
- 660
- Paid after no-shows
- 607
- Practice costs
- £11,963
- Revenue needed
- £46,963
Fee = (target income + costs) ÷ paid sessions.
At £70 a session you would need about 16.6 client sessions a week to reach your target.
All figures are before tax. Budget separately for income tax, National Insurance and, if your bill passes £1,000, payments on account.
How to read the number
The figure this calculator produces is a floor, not a market price. It is the least you can charge and still take home your target after the practice has paid for itself. Sanity-check it against what therapists near you actually charge: most UK counselling sessions sit between £50 and £90, higher in London and for psychologists. If your floor comes out above the local going rate, the honest options are more sessions, lower costs or a revised target, not hopeful pricing.
No-shows are in the model because they change the price of every session that does happen. At 15 sessions a week over 44 weeks, an 8% no-show rate is roughly 53 lost sessions a year, and the revenue they were meant to bring in has to be carried by the sessions that go ahead. That is why the rate is an input rather than a footnote: automatic reminders from your calendar and tidy follow-up on unpaid sessions both push it down, and every point you shave off it lowers the fee you need.
A session hour is not a working hour. Notes, emails, invoicing and scheduling sit on top of clinical time, unpaid, which is one reason 15 client sessions is considered a full week rather than a part-time one.
Everything here is before tax. As a self-employed practitioner you pay income tax and Class 4 National Insurance through Self Assessment, and once your annual bill passes £1,000, HMRC also asks for payments on account, which makes the first full tax year feel more expensive than expected. Setting aside 25 to 30% of what you draw is a sensible habit.
The cost defaults are 2026 figures: BACP individual membership at £196, UKCP full clinical membership at £330, the tier 1 ICO data protection fee at £52, and indemnity insurance in the £50 to £100 range most counsellors pay. Every one of them is editable, so replace them with your own numbers where you know better.
Frequently asked questions
If chasing payment is the part of practice you like least, Bloom records paid and unpaid sessions against your calendar and sends the reminder for you. The software line in the costs above, £350 a year, is roughly what Bloom costs.