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Practice of the Practice: What Should I Charge?
Find the session rate you need to reach your income goals.
| Taxable income | Fed rate | Est. effective |
|---|---|---|
| Up to $11,600 | 10% | ~10% |
| $11,600–$47,150 | 12% | ~12–15% |
| $47,150–$100,525 | 22% | ~17–20% |
| $100,525–$191,950 | 24% | ~20–22% |
| $191,950–$243,725 | 32% | ~24–26% |
| Over $243,725 | 35–37% | ~28–32% |
What should my private pay fee be in private practice?
One of the most common questions in counseling private practice is, “What should I charge in my private practice?”
There are tons of ways to think through this question about money and private practice:
How much do I want to make in my counseling private practice?
How much should I work in my mental health private practice?
Do I want to hire new therapists in a group private practice?
What does my life look like outside of the therapy practice?
Am I accounting for all the costs in my private practice? (Retirement, rent, savings, EHRs, etc.)
How the Private Practice Calculator Works
Today this calculator will help you figure out your average session rate you need to achieve your private practice goals. We’ll look at a number of factors in setting your counseling rate, then we’ll tinker with those things and see how it effects the bottom line average.
First we’re going to start with how much you want to take home per year from your therapy practice? Maybe you’re leaving a job at the hospital or CMH as a licensed professional counselor, so we need to know the replacement cost of that income.
Or maybe your partner makes a certain amount and you know you need to make a specific amount through your practice. So we’ll start with the amount you want to take home after taxes and operational costs.
Next we’ll look at your tax bracket. Now tax optimization is a huge discussion you should have with your accountant. In general, you want to legally pay as little in taxes as possible. So this private practice calculator is not accounting for those tax strategies, so just do your best approximation. If you’re not sure, the little info pop-up will help.
Next, we’ll look at the overall operational costs. In general, we want your operational costs to be less than ⅓ of the total gross income that is coming into the private practice. On the calculator you can set your percent of operations and it adjusts accordingly.
After that we look at your schedule, how many weeks do you want off from doing counseling in your practice? Make sure you think of planned holidays and also ones that are built in for example Memorial Day, Labor Day, Fourth of July…all those count. We want to know how many total weeks you can plan to work in a given year.
Next in those weeks, how many days a week do you want to work? Maybe with your kid’s schedules, you know that you can only work three days a week, that’s ok, we just want the calculator to be accurate.
Then, how many sessions can you do per day? We want to look at billable sessions for counseling. Lastly, we want to think about how many no show/no calls you’ll have per week, that you don’t charge for. This needs to come off the total.
After that, the calculator will give you the total sessions scheduled per year in your private practice, the gross revenue needed for your practice goals, the net revenue needed for you in the counseling practice, and lastly, the revenue lost to not charging for no shows/late cancel.
Then, you’ll see the average you need per session to reach these goals!
So what happens if that counseling session average is too high?
How to Charge Less in Counseling Sessions?
I give you three tips on how to lower your sessions rate, usually they are:
Charge your full fee every time for no show/late cancellation: But you need to ask yourself, if someone is in a car accident or is deathly ill, am I going to charge them? Maybe it’s just about being a little better in your private practice no show policy.
See one more client per day: If you feel like the fee really is too high, you can always see an extra person per day and the calculator will tell you the new rate.
Take less time off: If you have a more than average amount of time off, maybe you need to take less time off, although that’s not that fun.
I hope this private practice calculator helps you plan more for success. These calculators are fully available in The Practice Academy, where you can interact with us and other therapists 3x a week live! Also, we have our free Basics of Private Practice Course that can help you get to the next level, totally free!
AI Disclosure:
AI was used to help build the code (I had been doing this math with consulting clients for years) and for images, I wrote the whole article without AI, I didn’t even have it proofread it!
