What should a counsellor charge? How to set your session fee

Setting your fee is one of the first uncomfortable decisions of private practice, and a lot of people get it wrong by aiming low. Charge too little and you either burn out trying to see enough people, or you quietly resent the work. The fee isn’t a measure of your worth as a person. It’s the number that lets you keep doing this sustainably. Here’s how to arrive at it.

How do you set a counselling session fee?

Start from your costs, not a guess. Your fee has to cover more than your time. Before you land on a number, add up what practising actually costs you over a year: supervision, insurance, ICO registration, professional body membership, room hire or a share of home costs, directories, CPD, software, and an allowance for tax. Divide that across the number of client sessions you can realistically deliver, and you have your floor. Anything below it means you’re paying to work.

Then remember you can only see so many clients a week and stay well. Fifteen to twenty client hours is a sustainable full-time load for most counsellors, because the work is emotionally demanding and the unpaid admin, notes and preparation stack up around it. If you need a certain income and you know your sustainable hours, the fee that bridges the two is the fee you need, not the one you hope you can get away with.

What do counsellors charge per session in the UK?

Most private counsellors charge £50 to £80 a session outside London, rising to £70 to £100 or more in London. Counsellors tend to sit at the lower end of that spread, with psychotherapists and specialists towards the top. These are the ranges we track across the major directories; see the key statistics page for the sourced figures.

Market context helps, as long as you don’t just copy the cheapest person near you. Where you land within the range depends on your location, your experience, your specialism and your setting. Use the range to sanity-check your costs-based figure, not to replace it.

How do you talk about your fee with clients?

A few practical points make the fee easier to hold. Say it plainly and early, ideally before the first session, so nobody is surprised. Decide in advance whether you’ll offer any lower-cost or concession spaces, and if so, how many, so it’s a deliberate choice rather than case-by-case guilt. And review your fee periodically rather than leaving it frozen for years out of nervousness, because your costs won’t stay still.

Work it out properly

The quickest way to a fee you can defend is to run your real numbers: your target income, your sustainable client hours, and your annual costs. That’s exactly what our fee calculator does, and it takes a couple of minutes. Set the fee from that, check it against the market range above, and you’ll be charging on evidence rather than nerves.

Rather not run the website side? Setting your fee is yours to decide, but if you’d like the practice’s website kept running without the hassle, our website care plan handles hosting, updates and small changes for £30 a month.

Try the tool: Put your own numbers into the free session fee calculator and get a fee that covers your costs.