What should you charge?

What exactly is the calculator calculating?

Four calculations, in order. Each uses only the inputs above it, so you can reproduce all of them on paper.

1. Billable hours a year

   Client hours a week multiplied by weeks a year. At 15 hours across 46 weeks, that is 690 billable hours. The weeks input defaults to 46, which is 52 minus holiday and slow weeks.

2. The rate you need

   Target income divided by billable hours. $90,000 across 690 hours is $130 an hour. This is the headline figure, and it is gross revenue per delivered client hour rather than take-home pay.

3. The same rate as a package

   The required rate multiplied by eight sessions, which is the most common core-tier length in the source data. At $130 an hour that is an $1,043 package, which is a useful reality check: it is well below the $1,200 to $2,500 typical of a three-month life coaching programme.

4. The real working week

   Client hours plus the non-client work hours you enter. The starting 20-hour allowance is only an illustration; replace it with your own log of preparation, marketing, administration and sales.

What does the same target look like at different hour loads?

A $90,000 target across a 46-week year. The first column is the only thing that changes, and it changes everything else.

Arithmetic on the calculator formulas, rounded to the nearest dollar, with 20 non-client hours held constant as a scenario. Replace that assumption with your own hours in the calculator.

Where do the assumptions come from?

Non-client hours are the load-bearing assumption. The default of 20 hours is an illustration and is editable. ICF 2025 reports 11.6 hours working as a coach, not 11.6 paid session hours, so it cannot supply a billable ratio for this calculator.

Eight sessions comes from the package data: the core tier across niches is a three-month engagement of eight to twelve sessions, and eight is the low end, which keeps the derived package price conservative. If you sell twelve-session engagements, multiply the package figure by 1.5.

The 46-week default is a practitioner convention rather than a published figure: 52 weeks minus four weeks of holiday and two slow weeks around the year end. It is editable, and it is worth editing honestly. Coaches consistently overestimate how many weeks they sell.

The niche and experience bands the verdict line checks against are the published bands from the board: the ICF Global Coaching Study 2025 and salary aggregator data for annual income, with practitioner estimates for the stage-by-stage hourly breakdowns where no study publishes them.

The three figures behind the formulas

What does the calculator deliberately not do?

It does not account for tax. Rates, structures and allowances vary too much by country and business structure to guess usefully, so every figure it produces is gross revenue. Treat the target as turnover, not take-home.

It does not subtract costs. The 2026 report puts a typical fragmented tool and platform stack at roughly $539 to $600 a month, which is about $7,000 a year before any marketing, insurance, supervision or professional body fees. If that applies to you, raise the target before you run the calculation rather than being disappointed by the result.

It does not model the ramp. It assumes every billable hour is sold, which is true of an established practice and never true of a new one. A coach building a book should run the calculation twice: once for the steady state, and once at the client load they can honestly expect in the next six months.

It also ignores unpaid work that is genuinely part of the sale: discovery calls, proposals, and the free first session many coaches offer. Those hours land inside the 60% of the week that is not client time, which is one more reason not to price against client hours alone.

How to read the result

What should I do with the number?

Check it against the band for your niche first, which the verdict line does automatically. A required rate above the published band is not impossible, but it is information: it says the target needs a different buyer or a different offer, not a bolder number on the same one.

Then convert it into an offer rather than a rate. Almost nobody buys an hour, and the package figure is the number you will actually quote. The packages page has the structures that sell and the three methods for pricing one.

Then look at the hours column rather than the rate column. The single most effective change available to most coaches is not charging more per hour but selling fewer, larger engagements, because that reduces sales conversations, onboardings and the unpaid 60% of the week at the same time.

How do I work out a rate from the income I want to keep?

The calculator starts from turnover, so a take-home goal has to be converted first. A worked example: a coach who wants $60,000 a year before tax, on 12 client hours a week across 46 weeks.

1. Add the running costs to the goal

   A fragmented tool stack at the top of the report's $539 to $600 a month is $7,200 a year. $60,000 plus $7,200 gives a turnover target of $67,200, before insurance, supervision or marketing, which should be added the same way if they apply.

2. Divide by billable hours

   12 client hours across 46 weeks is 552 hours. $67,200 divided by 552 is $122 an hour, rounded up.

3. Convert to a package

   Eight sessions at the unrounded rate is about $974. That is below the $1,200 to $2,500 typical of a three-month life coaching programme, so a coach in that niche can price at the bottom of the published range and still clear the target.

4. Check the week and the sales load

   If 12 client hours bring 18 other work hours, the week totals 30 hours. At 552 paid hours, eight-session packages require 69 engagements, so check whether your pipeline supports that volume or whether longer engagements and renewals are needed.

What hourly rate does each niche's income band imply?

The published annual band for each niche divided by 552 billable hours, which is 12 client hours a week across 46 weeks, set beside the published hourly band. Arithmetic, not a survey result.

Rounded to the nearest dollar. Annual bands come from the ICF census and salary aggregators, hourly bands from the census, aggregators and practitioner estimates.

Why do the annual and hourly bands not agree?

Because most coaches do not sell 552 hours a year at their published hourly rate. In six of the eight niches the bottom of the implied range falls below the floor of the hourly band, and in seven of the eight the whole implied range sits in the lower half of the hourly band or beneath it; in health and wellness it ends just past the midpoint.

That means the reported annual incomes are consistent with fewer billable hours, lower realised rates, or both.

Two ordinary explanations account for most of it. The annual bands include part-time and employed coaches, and published hourly rates are list prices before discounts, free sessions and unsold weeks. Neither is a flaw in the data; both are reasons to plan against sold hours rather than available ones.

The practical reading is that the published hourly band is the ceiling of the plan and the annual band is its floor. A calculator result that needs the top of the hourly band and a full 12-hour week is possible, and it is the optimistic case.

How does the calculation change for group coaching?

It breaks the link between income and client hours, which is why it changes the answer so sharply. A cohort of 12 people at $1,500 each, inside the published $500 to $3,000 range, brings in $18,000; delivered as eight one-hour group sessions, that is $2,250 per delivered hour.

The per-hour figure overstates the gain, because a cohort needs recruiting, preparation and support that one-to-one work does not. Even so, two cohorts a year add $36,000 for 16 delivered hours, and on the 12-hour week above that matches the revenue of about 295 hours of one-to-one work at $122.

What happens to the result if some hours go unsold?

The required rate rises faster than most coaches expect, because every unsold hour has to be paid for by the hours that are sold. On the $90,000 target at 15 client hours a week, selling three quarters of the 690 available hours leaves 517.5, and the rate needed rises from $130 to $174.

Kept at $130, the same year grosses $67,500 rather than $90,000, which moves the practice from the third quarter of the profession toward its middle. Running the calculator twice, once at full capacity and once at the share you have actually sold over the past year, shows the gap before the year does.

The same logic applies to cancellations and no-shows that are not charged. A cancellation policy that bills late cancellations protects the billable-hours figure the whole calculation rests on.

What rate does each income band need at a realistic client load?

From about $87 an hour for a $20,000 side practice to about $280 for a $180,000 practice in the top tenth, at client loads between 5 and 14 hours a week. Every row is the calculator's own arithmetic across 46 weeks, with the band taken from the percentile page.

Rounded to the nearest dollar and hour. The last two rows hold the client load constant, so the whole step from the fourth row to the fifth is carried by the rate.

Which of those rates can a niche actually hold?

All five sit inside at least one published hourly band, and the higher the target, the fewer bands remain. $87 fits only the life and wellness bands, $109 to $186 fit every consumer band, and $280 sits above the top of every consumer band and inside only the business, leadership and executive bands.

The experience bands add a harder constraint for newer coaches. The published hourly bands for the first four years in practice run from $25 to $75, so a coach at that stage who needs $109 is pricing above the published band for the stage and should expect the target to take more hours or more time.

Read together, the two checks say where a target is realistic. A $75,000 year on 12 client hours is an ordinary full-time plan in most niches, while a $180,000 year on 14 hours is a business, leadership or executive plan, whatever the practice currently calls its niche.

How many discovery calls does the calculator's result imply?

Roughly two to three and a half a week for a $90,000 target sold as eight-session packages, falling to 1.3 to 2.3 a week when the same hours are sold as twelve-session ones. A worked example, not a survey result, using the 12-hour row of the table near the top of this page.

1. Start from the result

   A $90,000 target at 12 client hours a week across 46 weeks needs $163 an hour, and its 552 billable hours hold 69 eight-session engagements.

2. Take out the renewals

   Standard packages renew at 35 to 50% in the 2026 report's retention figures. If each client renews at most once, a new client is worth 1.35 to 1.5 engagements, so 69 engagements need 46 to 52 new clients a year.

3. Apply a close rate

   The practitioner benchmark for a well-priced package is a third to a half of qualified enquiries. At that rate, 46 to 52 new clients need 92 to 156 discovery calls.

4. Spread it across the year

   92 to 156 calls across 46 weeks is 2.0 to 3.4 a week before follow-up. The report's time breakdown gives 2 to 4 hours a week to sales calls and follow-up together, which the upper end of that range will strain.

5. Lengthen the engagement

   Sold as twelve sessions, the same 552 hours hold 46 engagements, which need 31 to 35 new clients and 62 to 105 calls, or 1.3 to 2.3 a week. The rate is unchanged and the sales load falls by about a third.

How do I move from my current rate to the one the calculator returns?

Apply the new rate to new enquiries and leave existing clients where they are. Keeping current clients at their price removes the risk of losing the book you already have, and the old rate runs off on its own as their packages end.

Then measure the gap honestly. A coach at $120 an hour on 552 billable hours grosses $66,240, so reaching $90,000 needs $163, a rise of about 36%, and a rise that large is worth splitting between price and offer rather than asking the price alone to carry it.

The close rate is the test of whether the new price holds. If almost every discovery call converts at the new rate, it is probably still below the market; if conversion falls well below a third of qualified enquiries, look first at where the leads come from, since referral leads close at 40 to 70% and paid-search leads at 14 to 18% on the practitioner estimates.

How do I use the calculator for a monthly retainer?

Convert the retainer into sessions and months first, then treat it like any other engagement. The published business retainer is $1,500 to $4,000 a month for two to four sessions, which is $375 to $2,000 per session before on-call access is counted.

Five retainers at $1,500 a month across twelve months come to $90,000, the calculator's example target, on 120 to 240 sessions a year. That is between about two and five sessions a week, against the 12 client hours a week the one-to-one example above uses for the same target.

The catch is the sale rather than the delivery. Retainers give the best revenue stability of any shape on the packages page and are the hardest to sell to a new client, which is why they are most often sold to clients finishing a package.

What are the common mistakes when calculating a coaching rate?

Five inputs are routinely set too generously, and each one lowers the rate the calculator returns.

• Too many weeks. Anything above 48 assumes almost no holiday, illness or slow season. Use last year's real number if you have one.
• Client hours that were never sold. Available hours are not billable hours. Enter what you expect to sell in the next six months, not your diary's capacity.
• A take-home figure entered as turnover. The target is gross revenue. Add costs first, as in the worked example, or the result will be short by several thousand dollars a year.
• Ignoring free sessions. A free discovery call for every prospect is unpaid client time. Count it inside the 60% of the week that is not billable.
• Stopping at the rate. The package figure and the engagements figure are the ones that decide whether the plan can actually be sold.