How to Organize Group Programs for CBT Clients

Group CBT programmes are an underused income stream for solo practices. A six-session group with six to ten participants produces revenue equivalent to running ten or twelve individual sessions, in the same number of clinical hours. The barrier most therapists hit is administrative complexity, not clinical confidence.

The structure that works for a first group programme.

Six weekly sessions. 90 minutes each. Six to ten participants. A specific clinical focus (anxiety, low mood, panic, perfectionism). Pre-set curriculum and worksheets, designed before the first cohort runs.

The curriculum.

Session one: introduction to CBT, the cognitive model, what the next six weeks will look like. Plus the first worksheet assigned for next week.

Sessions two through five: each session covers a specific clinical theme (cognitive restructuring, behavioural experiments, avoidance work, etc.) with a brief teaching component and group work on participants’ own examples.

Session six: relapse prevention, plan for after the group, optional follow-up resources.

The worksheets are the same across the cohort. Build them once, assign the relevant ones each week. Each participant gets the same homework after each session.

The recruitment.

A landing page with the programme description, the dates, the cost, who it’s for. The booking widget allows participants to book a place by paying upfront for the full six sessions. Capping at ten enforces the size.

The pricing. A typical group session at 35-50 dollars per participant per session. Across six sessions and eight participants, that’s 1,680 to 2,400 dollars in revenue from six clinical hours.

In my-cbt, you can run the group as a series of bookings tied to a “group” tag in the case file. Each participant has a case file. The shared worksheets get assigned to all eight participants at once, with each participant submitting their own data. You can scan the cohort’s submissions before each session and tailor the teaching to what’s actually showing up.

What to think about before publishing dates: the inclusion and exclusion criteria (who fits the group and who doesn’t), the cancellation policy for the upfront payment, the structure of the in-session group work (rotating examples, paired exercises, structured teaching), the safety routing for any participant who’s in active crisis.

A first group is a learning experience. The second cohort is faster to set up because the materials and the flow are reusable. By the third cohort, you have a programme that runs efficiently and produces meaningful revenue alongside your individual caseload.