Insight
The strange economics of coaching fees
Coaching pricing is one of the stranger things I have come across in my working life. And I have been looking at it for nearly twenty years. When I started this business, I wanted to understand one apparently simple thing: how much do coaches get paid, and why?
Author: Simon Coops
So I asked. I went to some of the largest users of coaching in the world and put the question to them directly. The rates they gave me ran from around $250 an hour to $1,000 an hour – a fourfold spread for what was, on paper, the same service.
A fourfold range is remarkable enough. What was more remarkable was the explanation.
When I asked why they paid a particular coach a particular rate, the answer was almost always the same: that was what the coach had asked for.
The interesting thing about that answer is what it reveals. In many cases, the coach’s fee was not being determined by outcomes, experience, scarcity, credentials or any clear measure of value to the organisation. It was being determined by the number the coach happened to name.
That was nearly twenty years ago. The market has grown up in some ways since then; coaching is more familiar now, and more firmly part of leadership development. But the underlying strangeness of the pricing has not disappeared. If anything, it has become more important, because more organisations are now trying to buy coaching at scale.
A coach is not a price. A coach is a portfolio
Once you understand how many coaches think about their own pricing, the range stops being quite so mysterious.
Most independent coaches are not working at one fixed rate. They are managing a portfolio of work. They have a blended average in mind – the number that keeps the practice, and the life around it, viable – and they make individual pricing decisions around that.
They may take a lower rate for a charity, a cause they care about, or a client they particularly want to work with. They may quote a higher rate to an organisation they would be quite content to lose. The same coach, in the same month, can be three or four different prices depending on who is asking.
Which means the rate was never really a property of the coach. It was a property of the negotiation.
There is a gentle irony here. The psychology that underpins good coaching – reading a person, noticing what is not being said, understanding what someone really wants beneath what they claim to want – is also the psychology that makes someone formidable in negotiation.
Coaches have the toolkit. Many simply do not enjoy using it on their own behalf.
It is not that they cannot sell. It is that they would rather not. They want to be appreciated for the work, not to haggle over the rate. They are often deeply serious about the craft and slightly uncomfortable about the commercial wrapper around it.
I say that with affection. The work matters to them, and the money can feel awkward. Frankly, that is part of what makes many of them good. But it also leaves the market without much discipline around price.
Buyers are not as rational as they think either
Now turn to the other side of the table.
Faced with a choice of coaches and no reliable way to tell them apart, a buyer will often reach for price as a signal of quality. Not always consciously, and rarely in those words. But the instinct is familiar enough.
Expensive must mean better.
It is the same logic that operates on a wine list.
I have felt the sharp end of this myself. Selling coaching is the only situation in my career where I have been told, more than once, that I am too cheap.
I have lost work by offering better coaches for less money. That is the part I still find odd.
Because the lower price did not read as good value. It read as a warning. The reaction was not, “What a find.” It was closer to, “If they are that cheap, something must be wrong.”
It is the one market I know where the better mousetrap can be harder to sell.
This is not because buyers are foolish. It is because coaching is hard to assess before the work begins. You can read the biography, look at the credentials and have the chemistry conversation, but you are still buying something intimate, relational and partly invisible. In that uncertainty, price becomes a substitute for judgement.
And once price starts masquerading as quality, the whole market becomes a little distorted.
So what should organisations do?
If you are inside an organisation trying to run coaching well, the most useful thing you can do is introduce structure.
Not bureaucracy for its own sake, but just enough structure to stop every coaching decision becoming a private negotiation.
A clear rate card is a good place to start: set banded rates by level or type of work, with tiers that are simple enough to explain and fair enough to stand behind. Decide what your organisation genuinely values and is prepared to pay for, rather than inheriting a random collection of numbers individual coaches have arrived at on their own.
The elegant thing is that this works with the grain of how coaches already operate, rather than against it.
You are not trying to abolish the portfolio; you are offering a band to slot into. For many coaches, a defined, predictable, repeatable rate attached to a steady flow of good work is an easy yes, even if it sits below their very highest number.
The organisation gets consistency, the coach gets certainty, and the coachee gets a panel where price is no longer doing the work of quality assessment, because everyone at a given level costs the same.
Nobody has to read the tea leaves of the rate to guess who is good.
That does not remove the need for judgement, but it makes judgement more honest. You still need to know which coach is right for the person in front of you, at that point, with that particular challenge. But you are no longer confusing “more expensive” with “more suitable”.
The most human part of all
The strangest part of coaching pricing is also the most human.
The people who set and accept coaching rates often sit in HR, talent, leadership development or learning. Many of them love coaching. A striking number are training to be coaches themselves, or quietly imagine coaching as a possible next chapter.
So the person on the buying side of the table is often someone who has real sympathy for the person on the selling side.
This explains more than it first appears to; rates do not always get interrogated because the buyer does not especially want them interrogated. This is not really carelessness or waste. It is because they care about the work, respect the people doing it, and often see something of themselves in the coach.
It is a soft conflict of sympathy.
That is why the coaching market can look irrational from the outside and still feel humane from the inside. The portfolio pricing, the reluctance to sell, even the buyer quietly rooting for the seller – it all comes from roughly the same place.
People want coaching to work. They want coaches to thrive. They want leaders to get help that feels serious and personal.
The only thing missing is structure.
Get the structure right – a rate card you can stand behind, and a way of choosing coaches that looks past price – and you no longer have to choose between sanity and humanity.
You can have both.
A market where people are trying to make the work worthwhile, and where the numbers finally make sense too.