March 12, 2025
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Robin has a friend who works as a digital fundraising expert. A national charity approached her about a contract she was not especially keen to take on. Robin asked her two questions: do you actually want to do it, and what would you need in return?
She said she wanted her mortgage paid off. Robin told her that was her price. The charity said yes, and the work took about three weeks.
Most coaches and consultants never get anywhere near that conversation, because they set their price by looking sideways at everyone else. The number ends up small, safe, and completely disconnected from what the work is actually worth.
What follows is a checklist: seven things to do when you price your coaching or consulting services, seven things to avoid, and real UK rate benchmarks so you can see where your fee currently sits. The goal throughout is a Fearless Business, double the income with half the clients.
Every pricing decision a coach or consultant makes falls into one of two columns. The table below pairs each do with the don’t that cancels it out. Read down it and you will see which side of the line your current pricing sits on.
| Do this | Not this |
|---|---|
| Price the outcome your client walks away with | Don’t sell hours, sessions or days |
| Let your niche and your client’s budget set the number | Don’t price off your postcode |
| Build prep, admin and follow-up into the fee | Don’t quote only for the time in the room |
| Hold your price and offer a payment plan | Don’t discount to close the deal |
| Raise your prices on a schedule and say so plainly | Don’t apologise for a rate increase |
| Justify the number with evidence and results | Don’t set your price by copying competitors |
| Offer three clear tiers, premium first | Don’t make people work out what they are buying |
The rest of this piece explains what each pair looks like in practice, and what it costs you when you get one the wrong way round.
Most UK coaches charge between £50 and £160 an hour, with corporate and executive work running from £250 upwards, according to Henley Business School. To find your own number, use Goal-Focused Pricing: divide your desired monthly income by the number of sessions you can realistically deliver, then package upwards from that baseline.
Those bands come from two places. Henley Business School’s Future Trends in Coaching 2021 surveyed almost 400 UK-based coaches and put the average UK personal coaching rate at roughly £160 an hour, with company-funded corporate coaching at roughly £256 an hour. A separate 2024 review of 50 UK life coaches listed on the Life Coach Directory found an average closer to £90 an hour, which is where less experienced coaches cluster.
The International Coaching Federation’s 2023 Global Coaching Study found the same pattern worldwide: the more experienced the coach, the higher the reported fee, with a global average of $244 for a one-hour session and Western Europe sitting at the top of the table. Experience is the variable that moves the number. Geography barely registers.
| Tier | Typical session or hourly rate | Typical 3-month package (12 sessions) | Who it fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry (0 to 2 years) | £50 to £90 | £600 to £1,100 | New coaches building a track record, self-funded clients |
| Established (2 to 5 years) | £125 to £160 | £1,500 to £1,900 | Coaches with a defined niche, a repeatable method, and results to point at |
| Premium (5 years plus, or specialist) | £250 and up | £3,000 and up | Executive, leadership and business coaching, company-funded work |
The package column is arithmetic, not survey data. It assumes twelve sessions delivered across three months at the hourly bands in column two, so read it as a floor rather than a target. Coaches who productise their work almost always charge well above that figure, because they are selling a defined result instead of a block of time.
There are four ways to structure the fee itself: an hourly or session rate, a fixed-fee package, a monthly retainer, or value-based pricing tied to the outcome you deliver. Performance-based fees and sliding scales exist too, though both hand control of your income to things you cannot influence. Robin compares all four in detail in his guide to how to charge what you’re worth.
Goal-Focused Pricing gives you the baseline. Work out how much income you want each month and how much work you can realistically deliver in that same month, then divide one by the other. Robin recommends this formula:
Desired Monthly Income ÷ Capacity (coaching or consulting sessions per month) = Baseline Price
Here’s an example. If you want to earn £8,000 a month and you can deliver 40 sessions, your baseline is £200 per session. That sits above the UK average and just below the corporate rate, which is roughly where a coach with a defined niche and a track record should be opening the conversation.
Baseline is the word to hold on to. It is the number below which the business does not work, not the number that goes on your website. The way you get above it is to stop selling sessions and start selling a packaged result, which is why it pays to build a coaching package that sells before you go near a price list.
Brand-new coaches are the one exception. Introductory pricing at the bottom of the entry band is a reasonable way to gather your first case studies, provided you set the exit in advance: a fixed number of clients or a fixed date, after which the price goes to the real one.
There are no hard and fast rules for setting a price, but these seven give you a structured way to arrive at one you can say out loud without flinching.
Your client is not buying sixty minutes of your attention. They are buying what is true about their business or their life once the work is finished. Price that, and the hour stops mattering.
Robin puts it bluntly: selling an hour of your time is like selling your soul. The moment you attach your income to a clock, your ceiling is fixed by the number of hours in your week.
Who you serve moves your price further than anything else on this list. The identical coaching programme sells at wildly different prices to a self-funded career changer and to a company buying leadership development for its senior team.
Robin calls this pricing bandwidth. Consultants feel it most sharply: a day rate signed off by a finance director is a different conversation to one paid out of somebody’s personal account. Decide which budget you are pricing into before you decide the number.
Capacity is not the number of hours you could theoretically bill. It is the number of clients you can serve properly while still running the business, and it is always lower than you think.
Work out how many clients you can hold at once without the quality dropping, then price so that number produces the income you want. Fewer clients at a higher fee is not a compromise. It is the entire point of a Fearless Business.
When a prospect says the fee is a stretch, the instinct is to shave a few hundred pounds off it. Robin’s position is firm: we don’t do discounts, the way we make it easier for people is split payments.
A payment plan protects the number and removes the cash flow objection at the same time. Robin covers deposits, instalments and the mechanics of splitting a fee in his guide to pricing your coaching packages.
Most coaches raise their prices when they are desperate, which is the worst possible moment to do it. Put it in the diary instead: review the fee every six or twelve months and increase it whether or not you feel ready.
Existing clients need notice and nothing else. Tell them the new rate, tell them when it starts, and give them a window at the old price if they are mid-programme. Raving fans do not leave over a price rise, and new prospects have no idea what you used to charge.
A premium price needs something to stand on, and the strongest thing available is other people’s results. Testimonials, case studies and hard numbers do more for your fee than any amount of explaining.
According to Joe Schaeppi, CEO & Co-Founder at Solsten, “The golden rule is show, don’t tell. Use testimonials, client success stories, and tangible outcomes to show why your price is justified. Where possible, set this out in hard numbers. If you’re working with small businesses, for example, being able to quantify how much profit you’ll help them make is a great way to get them to accept your pricing even if it's higher than your competitors’.”
Three options let clients self-select without freezing. Always present the high-ticket package first, because everything you say afterwards gets measured against it.
Group coaching typically prices at 40 to 70 per cent of your 1-to-1 rate, which is what lets a middle tier work without eating into the top one.
Whichever tier a client picks, aim to become the most expensive option in your niche and back it up with value. As Robin says, there can only be one who is most expensive in the market, so why can’t it be you?
This is the half where the money leaks out. Each habit feels sensible in the moment and quietly caps what the business can earn.
An hourly rate rewards you for being slow and punishes you for being good. Get better at your job and you get paid less for the same result, which is the wrong way round.
It also caps you. Forty billable hours a week at £125 is a hard ceiling, and it arrives long before the income you actually want does. The signal that it is time to stop is simple: the diary is full and the bank balance still is not where it needs to be.
Coaches in smaller towns routinely knock a third off the fee because “people round here won’t pay that”. Almost none of their clients live round there.
Online delivery flattened geography years ago. A coach in Gloucestershire and a coach in central London are selling into the same market, and the one who charges more is usually the one with sharper positioning, not the better postcode.
A one-hour session is never one hour. There is preparation, notes, the follow-up email, the rescheduling, the invoicing, and the reading you do between calls.
One 2024 review of UK coaching rates estimated that coaches spend around two hours on non-chargeable work, mostly marketing and admin, for every hour they actually coach. Price only the contact time and you have quietly cut your effective rate by two thirds. Consultants make the identical mistake on scoping calls and revision rounds.
Cutting the price to win a deal is the most expensive habit in this article. Every discount comes straight out of profit, and it tells the client your number was never real in the first place.
It also selects for the wrong people. The prospect who negotiates hardest before they have paid you a penny is the one who will negotiate hardest over scope, deadlines and everything after. Robin’s instruction to clients is to remove the word discount from their vocabulary entirely.
The apology is what creates the objection. Say “I’m so sorry, I’ve had to put my prices up” and you have told the client the increase is unreasonable before they have had the chance to decide for themselves.
State it plainly instead. This is the new rate, this is when it starts, here is what stays the same. Robin frames it as leadership: this is me telling you, not asking you.
You have no idea whether your competitors got their pricing right. Copy them and you inherit their mistakes, their capacity and their income goals, none of which are yours.
Laurence Bonicalzi Bridier, CEO at ArtMajeur by YourArt, says, “First-time coaches and consultants are particularly prone to selling themselves short as they may lack confidence in their ability to deliver value. However, setting your prices noticeably below your competition will only make potential clients question your value, and negative first impressions tend to be incredibly hard to change.”
Use competitor pricing as a map of the market, not as an instruction. Your price should come from your goals, your capacity and the outcome you deliver.
Tiers are useful. Fourteen add-ons, three set-up fees and a discount that only applies if you pay before the end of the month are not.
If clients need a spreadsheet to understand what they’re buying, your pricing may be working against you. Confusion does not produce a question. It produces silence.
Most pricing advice stops at the number. The harder part is saying it out loud to a real person, then not filling the silence that follows.
Robin teaches a practice for exactly this: get comfortable saying the big number. Say the fee cleanly, “the investment for this is £X”, then stop talking. Count to eight if you need to. The pause is doing the work.
The Pricing Auction is how you find the number in the first place. Write down your current price, then increase it in steps, using twos, fives and eights as thresholds, until you feel a knot in your stomach. That knot is the edge of your comfort zone, and Robin’s clients typically land at around 2.5 times where they started.
If price comes up as an objection every single time, that is not a pricing problem, it is a sequencing problem. Raise money early in the conversation rather than saving it for the end. Something like “a lot of the people I work with find the commitment feels quite significant at first” defuses it before it becomes a confrontation.
Getting this wrong has a name at Fearless HQ: the Sales Cycle of Doom. Sell, deliver, sell, deliver, with never enough margin to improve the product or draw breath. Raising the price is what slows the cycle down and buys back the time to make the work better.
The test is conversion. Present your offer to 100 people and aim for a conversion rate of around 40 per cent.
If conversion is significantly above 40 per cent, you may be undercharging. And if it’s significantly below 40 per cent, your pricing or positioning may need some adjustment. Nobody closes four out of ten at a price that frightens people.
Alongside the conversion figure, these are the signals worth watching:
Underneath all of it sits the money story: the belief about what you are allowed to charge, usually inherited long before the business existed. It is the reason a capable coach will quote £40 for work worth £400. Robin unpacks that in his piece on the mindset underneath your pricing.
Pricing is one of the strongest ways to communicate your value as a coach or consultant, and it is the fastest lever in the business to move.
Pick one item from the don’ts list, the one you recognised yourself in, and fix it this week. Then audit the rest against the table at the top of this page. If you would rather work through it with someone, Robin runs pricing strategy coaching for precisely this.
Henley Business School’s survey of almost 400 UK-based coaches put the average UK personal coaching rate at roughly £160 an hour, with company-funded corporate coaching closer to £256 an hour. A 2024 review of UK life coach directory listings found less experienced coaches averaging around £90 an hour. Experience, niche and who is paying move the number far more than location does.
Goal-focused pricing is a strategy where you set your prices based on your financial targets. You calculate a baseline price by dividing your desired monthly income by the number of coaching or consulting sessions you can realistically deliver in that month. This ensures your pricing structure supports your business goals.
Setting your prices too low can make potential clients question the quality and value of your service. It often attracts clients who are not a good fit. Instead, you should price based on the unique value and transformation you offer, positioning yourself as a premium choice.
You can justify a premium price by clearly showing the value you provide. Use client testimonials, case studies with tangible results, and success stories to demonstrate your expertise. Quantifying the outcomes, such as increased profit for a client's business, is a powerful way to prove your worth.
It's best to keep it simple. Offering three clear, tiered packages is a common and effective approach. This provides choice without overwhelming your clients. A typical model includes a high-ticket premium option, a mid-range choice, and a more accessible entry-level package.
When you present your offer to potential clients, a good benchmark to aim for is a conversion rate of around 40 per cent. If your rate is significantly higher, it could be a sign that you are undercharging. If it's much lower, you may need to revisit your pricing or how you communicate your value.
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