Pricing therapy sessions confidently without undercharging
Key takeaways
- When fees don’t properly support the practice, something usually has to give, whether that is the practitioner’s time, availability, or eventually the practice itself.
- The Australian Psychological Society suggests a fee of $330 for a standard consultation in 2026–27, but should only be treated as a starting point when deciding prices.
- A session fee needs to cover far more than the time spent with a client, and all those overheads need to be taken into account.
- A fee is easier to justify when it is based on genuine costs, realistic client numbers, and the income the practice needs to provide, rather than basing it off competitors or gut-feeling.
- Smaller, regular fee increases are usually easier for clients to absorb, particularly when they are communicated clearly and with plenty of notice.
<div id="section-1">Setting a fee that actually holds up</div>
Setting your fees can be one of the more uncomfortable parts of running a practice. Even with years of experience behind you, putting a number on your work can still feel surprisingly difficult.
Part of the discomfort comes from the fear that charging more might say something about how much you care. In reality, your fee is simply one of the things that allows the practice to keep functioning. It needs to account for the time spent in sessions, as well as the admin, supervision, training, insurance, preparation, and follow-up that sit around them.
Setting the right fee is really about creating a practice you can keep showing up for. One that supports your clients well, covers the real cost of doing the work, and gives you a chance to continue without slowly reaching the point where the numbers no longer add up.
<div id="section-2">Why so many good clinicians end up underpriced</div>
A lot of the hesitation comes from using the wrong number as a starting point. Many practitioners look to the Medicare rebate when setting their fees because it is the figure clients ask about most. The problem is, it does not reflect the full cost of a session once you include admin, notes, supervision, training, insurance, software, and the unpaid time around each appointment.
There can also be a bit more of a personal side to it. Many people enter the profession because they want to help, so charging properly can feel uncomfortable or somehow out of step with that. Add in comparisons with more established colleagues, and it is easy to settle on a fee that feels safer in the moment.
But undercharging usually creates pressure elsewhere. It can mean taking on too many clients just to cover costs, with less time and energy left for each person, leading to burnout, reduced availability, and lower-quality care.
<div id="section-3">What a session fee is actually paying for</div>
It’s easy to look at a session fee and think of it as a payment for the hourly rate, but that hour is only part of the picture for private practitioners. The fee also needs to cover everything that allows the practice to keep running, including:
- therapy room hire or clinic costs
- professional indemnity and public liability insurance
- AHPRA registration
- clinical supervision
- professional development and training
- practice software, booking systems, and other subscriptions
- note writing and record keeping
- correspondence with GPs and other care providers
- bookings, invoicing, and general admin
- no-shows and late cancellations
- superannuation
Before you even start setting your session fees, spend a decent amount of time working out the financials of your private practice, including what all of the costs above actually add up to across a month or a year, and go from there.
<div id="section-4">Use industry benchmarks as a starting point </div>
The Australian Psychological Society's National Schedule of Suggested Fees puts the standard 46 to 60 minute consultation at $330 for 2026-27. The APS states that this figure is a suggestion only, and that the actual fee sits entirely with the individual practitioner.
That schedule also gets reviewed periodically, which is a fair signal that a fee is something to revisit rather than a decision made once and left for a decade. A psychologist two years out of registration and one fifteen years into private practice with a niche in trauma or perinatal work aren't doing the same job, and their fees shouldn't necessarily land in the same place either. Location also needs to be taken into account, given a therapy room in the inner suburbs of Brisbane carries different overheads than one further out, and it's reasonable for that to show up in the fee.
None of that makes the $330 figure meaningless. It's a genuinely useful starting point, particularly for anyone newer to private practice with no real sense of where they sit. But treating it as a ceiling, or sitting well under it to seem more affordable, tends to backfire.
<div id="section-5">How to work out what to charge</div>
Start with the income figure that would actually make the practice worthwhile, factoring in the lifestyle it needs to support, and work backwards from there rather than starting with a fee and hoping the math lines up afterwards.
Take that annual income figure and add the running costs worked out earlier: room rental, insurance, supervision, professional development, super, and the general cost of keeping the business going. That total is what the practice needs to bring in before anyone can call it sustainable.
From there, divide that number by a realistic number of client sessions across the year, not the number that assumes a fully booked diary every single week. Most established practices sit closer to 75% capacity once cancellations, no-shows, and quieter stretches are accounted for, and building a fee on the assumption that you’re at full capacity from the get go is one of the most common mistakes practitioners make when moving into private practice.
The number that comes out the other end is a general starting fee, built from what the practice actually needs rather than a guess pulled from a competitor's website or a comfort level. It won't always match the APS figure exactly, and it doesn't need to. What matters is that it's a fee someone can explain and stand behind, because it was worked out properly rather than picked to avoid an uncomfortable conversation.
<div id="section-6">Raising fees without losing your nerve</div>
Small, planned increases each year tend to land far better than one large, overdue jump. Giving existing clients some notice, four to six weeks in writing is a reasonable standard, and it gives people time to adjust rather than feel caught out. A concession or reduced-fee arrangement is worth having, but it works best as a deliberate, capped policy rather than something handed out in the moment out of guilt.
Fee increases rarely lead to the mass departure of clients that many practitioners worry about beforehand. Some movement is normal, and it is part of running a practice that remains workable for the people who stay. Linking the change to an external benchmark, such as an update to the APS schedule, can also give clients a clear reason for the increase without making the message sound apologetic.
<div id="section-7">Pricing well is part of running a practice properly</div>
None of this sits apart from the rest of running a practice. A fee that's published clearly rather than hedged around sends its own message: that the work on offer is worth what's being asked for it. Practitioners who present their pricing plainly, without caveats or apologies built into the wording, tend to find it easier to hold that fee, because the way it's communicated backs up the number itself.
Getting pricing right isn't really about the number on its own. It's about building something that can keep going, for the clients who'll need support well into the future and for the practitioner who has to sustain that work year after year.
