How to Set Your Private Practice Fee
By Lisa Reidsema, LMHC • Craft Your Practice™
Most therapists set their fee by looking around at what everyone else charges and landing somewhere that feels polite. That is how you end up undercharging for years, because the number you picked came from what felt acceptable, not from what your life actually costs.
Your fee is not a confidence problem. It is a math problem that nobody showed you how to do. When you build the number from your own numbers, the fee you need stops feeling brave and starts feeling obvious, and saying it out loud gets a lot easier.
Here is how to build a fee you can actually live on.
Start with what you need to take home
Begin at the end, with the income you actually need from the practice in a year. Not what would be nice. What your life costs. Add your personal expenses, taxes, and anything you are saving toward, and you have a real annual target to work backward from.
Add the cost of running the practice
Your fee has to cover the business, not just your salary. Rent or a virtual office, your EHR, malpractice insurance, a scheduling tool, your license renewals, continuing education, and the software that keeps you legal all come out before you pay yourself. Total your yearly practice costs and add them to your take-home target. That sum is what the practice has to earn.
Count the hours you can actually bill
This is the step that changes everyone's number. You do not bill forty hours a week. Between notes, admin, no-shows, cancellations, vacation, sick time, and the weeks nobody books, your billable hours are far fewer than your working hours. Most full-time therapists realistically bill somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five sessions a week, not thirty-five.
Be honest here, because this is where undercharging is born. If you set your fee against forty imaginary sessions, you will run yourself ragged and still come up short.
Do the division
Take what the practice has to earn in a year and divide it by the number of sessions you can realistically bill in a year. That is your fee. Not a feeling. A number that comes from arithmetic you can show anyone.
Almost always it is higher than the polite figure you were circling. That gap is exactly the money you have been quietly giving away.
What to do with the number
Sit with it, then name it. If it feels far from your current rate, you do not have to leap there overnight, but you now know the direction and the destination. A rate that comes from math is one you can hold in a conversation, because when someone pushes on it, you are not defending a feeling. You are stating what your work costs.
Build your number
If you want the whole launch mapped out in the order that actually works, my free Private Practice Starter Kit is the place to start. [Grab it here.](https://craftyourpractice.com/start)
If you want your fee built page by page from your own numbers, the Rate Setting Workbook in my Practice Library walks you through it. [See it here.](https://craftyourpractice.com/the-practice-library)
And if you want your whole first ninety days in order, my Private Practice Foundations course covers it step by step. [See it here.](https://craftyourpractice.com/launch)