How to Price CBT Sessions in Private Practice

You probably set your fee by asking around. A friend at another practice charges 140. A colleague who trained with you charges 160. You picked 150 because it sat in the middle and felt fair.

That number tracks the local market. It doesn’t track whether your practice actually works at that price. The fee a colleague charges has nothing to do with your rent, your supervision costs, your tax bracket, or what you need to take home for the practice to function as a job. You took her number and assumed it would also work for you. It might. It also might not, and you won’t know for a year.

Build the fee from your own numbers instead. Three of them.

Start with what the practice costs to run each month. List your rent, your insurance, your supervision hours, your software subscriptions, your professional registration fees, your accountant. Add them up. Say it comes to £1,200. Decide how many sessions you’re willing to do per week. Say twenty. That’s roughly eighty sessions a month. Divide £1,200 by 80. The practice costs you £15 per session before you’ve earned anything. Charge below that and you’re paying to see clients.

Add what you need to take home. Look at your annual living costs and the savings rate you actually want, not the one that sounds responsible. Say £48,000 a year, before tax. That’s £4,000 a month, or £50 per session at eighty sessions. Add it to the £15. You’re at £65. Charge that and the practice covers itself and your life when you’re at full capacity.

Then build in capacity slack. Nobody runs at full capacity every month. Slow weeks, holidays, sickness, the August dip, the Christmas dip. Plan for 75% utilisation. Multiply £65 by 1.33. You connect at £86. That’s the floor where the practice still works on a slow month.

Your defensible fee is £86 or above. The number might come out higher or lower than what your friend charges. Her number stops being relevant.

Two things tend to happen when you raise the fee to your math number. New clients accept it without comment. The fee was within their expectation already. A small fraction of inquiries don’t book, and most of them wouldn’t have stayed long anyway. Conversion rate from inquiry to booked first session drops slightly, revenue per session goes up by more than the conversion drop costs.

In my-cbt, the practice dashboard shows your active clients each week and your monthly new client signups. Combined with your own session-fee bookkeeping, you have the actual numbers to re-check the fee each January against last year’s data.

Run your own math. Charge what the math says.