Stop selling hours

What is a coaching package?

A coaching package is a fixed-price engagement covering a defined number of sessions over a defined period, usually with some between-session access included and a stated focus. "Twelve weeks, eight sessions, messaging between sessions, to get you through the transition" is a package. "$150 an hour" is not.

The practical difference is what the buyer compares it against. An hourly rate can be compared line by line against any other hourly rate, including that of someone with a different level of experience doing a different job. A twelve-week engagement with a stated outcome can only be compared against other twelve-week engagements with stated outcomes, which is a much smaller and better-informed field.

The second difference is commitment. Hourly billing makes every session a renewal decision, which puts a small amount of churn risk in front of the client every single week.

A package moves that decision to one point at the start, which is better for the outcome as well as for the coach: coaching works on a time-course, and a client who can leave after session two frequently does, at the exact moment the work becomes uncomfortable.

What are the package shapes that actually sell?

Five structures cover almost everything sold in the profession. The prices are the observed ranges across niches; the mechanism column is why each one exists.

Ranges span all niches on the site, from wellness at the low end to executive at the high end. Individual niche tables are further down the page. Prices are practitioner-reported rather than surveyed.

How do the three tiers differ, and why does the top one cost so much more?

Length, session count and access all step up together, which is what holds the ladder up. The pattern in the data is entry at $1,500 to $3,000 for around six calls over three months with email support, core at $3,000 to $6,000 for eight to twelve calls over three to six months with messaging included, and premium at $7,500 to $15,000 for weekly contact across six months with priority asynchronous access.

Run the ratios and the top tier is not a markup on the same delivery. Weekly across six months is roughly twenty-six sessions against core's eight to twelve, so premium carries two to three times the contact for two and a half times the price at both ends of the band. Against entry it is about four times the sessions for five times the price.

The premium tier costs more mostly because it contains more, and any pricing argument that denies this is contradicted by the table above.

What access decides is where inside its band a tier lands, not which band it is in. Priority asynchronous contact — being reachable between sessions, quickly, without booking — is the scarcest thing a coach sells and the most expensive to supply, and it is the difference between a premium tier that holds $15,000 and one that settles at $7,500.

Include it at every tier and the ladder collapses into three lengths of the same offer.

A ladder with three rungs also does something a single price cannot: it lets the buyer choose how much rather than whether. The entry tier exists to make the core tier the sensible middle choice, and the premium tier exists to make the core tier look moderate.

This is ordinary offer construction and it is not a trick, provided all three tiers are real offers you would be happy to deliver.

What does a target income imply about package price?

Straight arithmetic on the site's own figures, not a survey finding. A $100,000 target, delivered as eight-session engagements over a 46-week working year.

Arithmetic, not data: target divided by package price, multiplied by eight sessions, divided by 46 weeks. It ignores unpaid discovery calls, preparation and admin, which the report puts at roughly 60% of a coach's working time.

How should I price a package?

Three methods, and most coaches should run all three and look at where they disagree. The first is rate times sessions: take the published hourly band for your niche and stage, multiply by the session count, and treat the result as a floor rather than an answer. It is the least sophisticated method and the only one that guarantees you are not underwater.

The second is capacity-backed. Decide how many engagements you can deliver well in a year, divide your target income by that number, and see what price falls out. This is the method that catches the mistake in the table above: a $2,000 package at a $100,000 target means fifty engagements, fifty sales conversations and fifty onboardings, which is a different job from coaching seventeen people.

The third is outcome-linked, and it only works where the outcome is countable. A business coaching engagement aimed at a hiring decision or a revenue target can be priced against the value of that decision. A life coaching engagement usually cannot, which is why the wellness and life niches earn at the top of their bands through programme design and groups rather than through value-based pricing.

What goes wrong with packages?

Three failure modes account for most of the trouble, and all three are contract design rather than pricing.

• No end date. A package without an expiry becomes an open liability: clients who paid eighteen months ago reappear expecting sessions you have already spent. State a window and state what happens to unused sessions.
• Scope creep through access. "Messaging included" without a stated response time turns the premium tier into an always-on obligation. Define the access you are selling in hours, not in adjectives.
• Refund ambiguity. Decide before you sell whether a package is refundable, pro-rated or transferable, and write it down. The worst moment to invent a refund policy is during the conversation that requires one.
• Instalments without terms. Paying in three instalments is a credit arrangement. Say what happens if the second payment fails, and keep delivery and payment on the same schedule.
• Tiers that are not real. A premium tier you would resent delivering will be sold eventually, and then you have to deliver it.

What should I sell alongside one-to-one packages?

The 2026 report puts the share of coaches earning above $100,000 who sell something other than one-to-one sessions at 94%. The reason is capacity rather than ambition: a full one-to-one book at $5,000 a package needs twenty clients a year, which is close to a full load with no buffer for attrition or a slow quarter.

The usual second offer is a group programme: eight to twenty participants, $500 to $3,000 each, run once or twice a year. Two cohorts of twelve at $1,500 bring in $36,000, which is the difference between needing twenty one-to-one clients and needing about thirteen. The argument is stability as much as income.

Courses and memberships are sold to coaches as passive income and the data is more measured. The median online course makes under $5,000 in its first year without an established audience, and coaches earning meaningfully from courses typically have email lists above 5,000 or social audiences above 50,000, plus three to six months of production already spent.

As an entry-point offer that converts buyers into coaching clients, a course earns its place. As a replacement for client work in year one, it does not.

What does a three-tier ladder earn in a year?

A worked example on the published tier bands, not a survey result. Twelve entry clients, eight core clients and two premium clients a year, priced first at the bottom of every band and then at the top.

Entry $1,500 to $3,000, core $3,000 to $6,000 and premium $7,500 to $15,000, from the three-tier structure reported among coaches above $100,000. Core is taken at ten calls, the middle of its eight to twelve, and premium at weekly across six months. Tier prices are practitioner-reported.

How much more does a package ladder earn than hourly billing?

On paper, far more than the 40 to 60% premium, and the difference is a warning about reading the arithmetic. The ladder above delivers 204 sessions a year, about 4.4 client hours a week across 46 weeks, for $57,000 to $114,000, which works out at $279 to $559 per session.

Three things close most of that gap. The tier prices include between-session email, messaging and priority access, which is real delivery time that no session count captures. The bands describe coaches already above $100,000, so they are where a ladder ends up rather than where it starts. And 22 engagements still mean 22 sales conversations and 22 onboardings.

The honest comparison is against the same coach billing the same 204 hours by the hour. At $150 that is $30,600, and at the $234 census average it is $47,736, so even a bottom-of-band ladder comes out ahead. How far ahead, once access time is counted, is exactly what no study has measured.

How do I build a first package from an hourly rate?

A sequence for a coach currently billing by the hour. Each step uses figures published on this site and can be done in an afternoon.

1. Pick the single problem the package solves

   A transition, a launch, a reset or a promotion. A package with a stated end point is easier to buy than one that promises general progress.

2. Set the length and session count

   Three months and eight sessions is the most common core shape in the source data. Shorter sprints of four to six weeks suit bounded problems such as a job search.

3. Floor it at rate times sessions

   Eight sessions at $150 is $1,200, which is the floor rather than the price. The published three-month range for life coaching is $1,200 to $2,500, so the floor sits at its bottom edge.

4. Define the access in hours

   Messaging between sessions with a stated response time, such as within one working day. Access defined in adjectives becomes an always-on obligation.

5. Write the terms before the first sale

   Expiry window, unused sessions, refunds and instalments. A $2,400 programme in three monthly payments of $800 keeps payment and delivery on the same schedule.

6. Check it against capacity

   Run the price through the calculator. A package that needs fifty buyers a year to reach the target is a sales plan rather than a pricing decision.

Should package prices differ by niche?

Yes, and by more than the hourly bands suggest. The published three-month programme runs $900 to $2,000 in health and wellness, $1,200 to $2,500 in life and career coaching, and $3,000 to $6,000 as a business accelerator, while a six-month executive contract runs $8,000 to $20,000.

The spread tracks the buyer rather than the effort. A business or executive client can price the engagement against revenue or the cost of a leader, while a wellness client compares it with apps and subscriptions that start at $17 a month, which caps what a three-month programme can hold.

What does a core package work out at per session in each niche?

Above the top of the niche's hourly band at the upper end of every range, and inside it at the lower end everywhere except executive coaching. Arithmetic on the practitioner-reported package prices on this page: the price divided by the published session count.

Low ends divide the lowest price by the most sessions, and high ends the highest price by the fewest. Career sessions run 50 minutes and executive sessions 60 to 90, so the per-session figure is not an exact hourly equivalent in either.

Does the per-session figure prove the packaging premium?

No, and it is worth being precise about why. A package price includes between-session email or messaging, worksheets and resources, and in the executive case assessments and action plans, so dividing it by sessions assigns all of that delivery to the hour and overstates the rate actually earned.

What the table does show is that buyers pay package prices whose per-session equivalent reaches beyond the hourly band in every niche. That is consistent with the 40 to 60% premium practitioners report, and it is not a measurement of it, since the coaches selling at the top of a package range may also be the ones at the top of the hourly one.

How many discovery calls does a package price imply?

At a $100,000 target, a $4,000 package needs 36 to 63 discovery calls a year if every lead is a warm referral, and 139 to 179 if every lead comes from paid search. Arithmetic on the close rates in the 2026 report's practitioner data: 40 to 70% for warm referrals and 14 to 18% for paid search.

Engagements divided by the close rate, rounded up to whole calls. Close rates are practitioner estimates, and a real pipeline mixes sources, so most practices sit somewhere between the two columns.

Why does the package price decide the sales workload?

Because every engagement needs a sale, and a lower price needs more of them. At $2,000 on paid-search leads, the table implies six to eight discovery calls a week across 46 weeks before any follow-up, against the 2 to 4 hours a week the report's time breakdown gives to sales calls and follow-up combined.

At $6,000 on referral leads, the same target needs 25 to 43 calls, fewer than one a week. The coaching delivered is similar in both cases; the difference lies almost entirely in how the week outside the sessions is spent.

The practitioner benchmark for a well-priced package is a close rate of about a third to a half of qualified enquiries. A coach converting nearly every call is probably priced below the market, and one converting far fewer should look at where the leads come from before changing the price, because the source moves the close rate further than anything in this table. Coaching Stats has the close rates by source.

What happens when a coaching package ends?

Between 35 and 50% of standard one-to-one packages renew, on the retention figures in the 2026 report, and the rest end. A book of 20 core clients at $4,000, which is $80,000, therefore carries 7 to 10 renewals into the next year, worth $28,000 to $40,000 before a single new sale.

Group programmes feed one-to-one work as well as sitting beside it. The same data puts 20 to 30% of group participants moving to one-to-one coaching afterwards, so a cohort of 12 produces 2.4 to 3.6 new one-to-one clients on average, worth $9,600 to $14,400 at $4,000 each.

The practical consequence is that the end of a package is a sales moment rather than an administrative one. Deciding in advance what a finishing client is offered, whether a renewal, a retainer or a place in the next cohort, is acquisition that needs no marketing at all.

What should I check before launching a package?

Six checks that catch most of the problems described above before a client meets them.

• The package has an end date, and the agreement says what happens to unused sessions.
• The price is at or above rate times sessions for your niche and stage.
• Between-session access is stated as a response time, not as "unlimited".
• The refund and transfer policy is written down and shown before payment.
• Instalments stop delivery when a payment fails, rather than leaving you sessions ahead of the money.
• You would be content to deliver the top tier to the next person who buys it.