Coaching Stats
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Only a third of it is coaching

The average coach delivers 11.6 hours of sessions inside a 26 to 35 hour week. That is about 38% billable. Every rate calculation that ignores this produces a number that looks fine and pays badly.

Coaching sessions11.6 hrs
Session preparation and notes3–5 hrs
Marketing and content5–8 hrs
Administration4–6 hrs
Sales calls and follow-up2–4 hrs

ICF 2025, Estimate

  • Coaching sessionsHours11.6 hrs
  • Session preparation and notesHours3–5 hrs
  • Marketing and contentHours5–8 hrs
  • AdministrationHours4–6 hrs
  • Sales calls and follow-upHours2–4 hrs
  • TotalA full-time coaching weekTotal26–35 hrs

The arithmetic that catches everyone

A coach charging $150 an hour with ten clients at two sessions a month bills $3,000 a month. Against thirty working hours a week, roughly 120 a month, the effective rate is $25 an hour.

That is not a pricing failure. It is what happens when a session rate is mistaken for an income rate. The gap is the fifteen to twenty-three hours a week nobody pays for directly.

Two things close it. Raising the session rate helps linearly. Removing administrative hours helps without touching your prices at all, which is why the report notes coaches on integrated systems recover six to ten hours a week compared with fragmented tool stacks.

That last point is, transparently, also the argument for the kind of software our publisher makes. The underlying figure comes from the report rather than from us, and the hours are worth checking against your own week either way.

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