Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 48: How I Went from $125 to $500 Per Session

Released: 08/07/2026

Show Notes:

Amanda gets into her own fee history, from her very first client at $85 a session to charging $400 to $500 an hour for therapy intensives, and what actually made each increase possible. This isn’t a pep talk about charging your worth. It’s an honest look at the two myths keeping most therapists underpriced, how to know when you’re actually ready to raise your rates, and why staying too low for too long costs your clients something too.

3 Key Takeaways:

1. Raising your rates does not require a new certification, more years of experience, or some invisible finish line you keep moving further away; if you are getting consistent results, have a full caseload, and are saying yes to clients out of scarcity rather than fit, you are already ready.
2. Clients paying premium rates almost always require less of you outside of sessions, not more, because they came in financially committed and treat the work as serious rather than something they are casually testing out.
3. Staying underpriced does not protect your clients; it keeps you overbooked, under-resourced, and showing up with less energy per session than the people paying you actually deserve. of the fears around hiring are strategy problems, not mindset problems.

Connect with Amanda:

• Follow on Instagram: @amandakbcoaching
• Check out the Amanda KB Coaching website

Register for my upcoming live webinar – The Premium Therapy Fee Method – happening on August 12th at 9am PST. This free 60-minute training will show you exactly what to work on to charge premium fees, and exactly what clients are paying premium fees for in 2026. https://amandakbcoaching.com/august-26-webinar

Resources & Links:

• This episode is sponsored by:
  • Alma – learn more here
  • Jane – use code: AMANDA2MO for a 2-month grace period
• Therapy Intensives Academy
• Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapist Mastermind: https://amandakbcoaching.com/mastermind
• Free Guide: 3 Steps to Double Your Income

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Transcript:

Amanda Buduris (00:00)
Hello, hello, welcome back to the Happy, Healthy, and Wealthy Therapist Podcast. If you are watching this on YouTube, I know we have maybe like 50 views. I don’t know that that’s a month, but our podcast is primarily an audio, an audio only podcast. And yeah, we throw it onto YouTube for SEO purposes and stuff like that. If you’re watching on YouTube today, enjoy the fact that I am in a hotel closet in Great Falls, Montana.

I am in the closet instead of the room because when I last year when I was getting ready to launch my podcast, I literally was in a podcast mastermind to learn best tips, tricks, and skills and stuff like that. And they were like, if you can get in a closet instead of a room that’s gonna reverberate as much as possible, it’s gonna make the audio better. So here I am in a hotel closet. I also have my AirPods in instead of my normal mic, but hopefully everything’s still

Sounds all good because I’m committed to bringing you all weekly episodes. Next week I’m actually going to be doing multiple episodes per week on a few different topics related to therapy intensives and making money and all of the exciting things. But today I want to talk about money and specifically the number on your fee schedule as a therapist, because I think a lot of therapists are leaving that number too low for too long. So

I want to talk a little bit about my story. I know that I’ve talked about it in different bits here or there, maybe on some webinars, maybe on some previous podcasts, but I personally went from my university counseling center that I was working at as a staff as a staff therapist, and I got out into private practice. I did the traditional thing everyone said that you should do of look at what everyone else on psychology today is pricing. Price around what people are pricing in your area.

And most people were pricing maybe between like 150 to 200. So I said, okay, I’m do 185. I’m gonna do 185. And that felt terrifying for two days. And I decided, no, I am actually going to underprice myself so that I can get clients ASAP. Because that was ultimately my goal was prove to myself I can be successful in private practice. And so I thought by

undercharging what everyone else was charging, it would kind of guarantee that I would get clients. And that, you know, it certainly worked. But my story that I’m gonna tell is how I went from charging ultimately that $125 a session fee to up to $500 a session. On average my weekly clients, they are paying $350. I’ve got a couple of sliding scale clients who are at $200 and $250, which even though those are premium numbers,

Those are still a sliding scale from my full fee, but with my therapy intensives, they are anywhere between $400 to $500 an hour. So I want to walk you through like exactly what changed for me, what I got wrong along the way, and how to actually know when you yourself are ready for premium pricing. Because if you keep waiting, if you are ready, but you keep waiting, then it’s not just costing you money, it’s also costing your clients something too. So

When I started out again, I was charging $125 a session. I actually take took my first client for eighty-five dollars a session. They’re well, I can’t really pay that, but I can pay eighty-five. And I said, Great. and I think we even I think we were bi weekly, we weren’t even monthly we weren’t even weekly. So honestly, like even $125 started to feel like a stretch. Like if someone can’t even afford $125, can I make this work? So I remember

typing that number into my intake paperwork and putting it up on my website and still feeling like, you know, logically I know I am under most people in my area. And still, is that a high number? Can people afford it? And I was ultimately choosing between. I heard all the nightmares around insurance. so I did get on one EAP panel and their reimbursement rate was $100 a session. So I was like, well, at least $125 is higher than that. But

I got really stuck and I got really confused when it came to what exactly I wanted to do with my fee. When I then started to look at raising my rates, I did it in steps. I went 125 to 150, 150 to 175, 175 to 200, so on and so forth until I made my biggest leap from I went from 250 straight to, no, that’s not true. Maybe I had a couple people at 275. It was so much to keep track of.

but eventually I went from I think 275 to 350, and then I got my therapy intensive rates are between 400 to 500 an hour. So none of this happened all at once. I didn’t just wake up one day and decide I’m gonna be bold and do this. It took a while to do that, and it took a lot of scary things. It took a lot of pushing myself. Every single rate came with the same fear. If I raise my rate, then I kinda wait for that fallout, I brace for

Clients to leave or new inquiries to dry up. And almost every single time, that fallout never came. When I raised my rate to 350, literally within a week, two people reached out to work with me at that rate. So yeah, they didn’t reach out the same day as much as my brain would have loved that instant gratification, but it still happened pretty freaking quickly. So instead of a fallout,

what came was more of a full caseload of clients who were more invested. Sessions felt so different because these clients were treating the work like it really mattered, like it was really important to them. And me showing up with more energy because I wasn’t stretched across across twice as many sessions just to make the same income. Like yes, I talk a lot about intensives and how they can help you work fewer hours and either make the same amount of income or make more income.

But this even the change of, I mean, essentially at different points I doubled or tripled my own rate from 125 to 250 to, you know, upwards of 400, it’s a huge increase. So I do not have to work and see as many clients as I used to. By the time I got to, you know, the 300-ish range, I think my intensives used to be, they were like, I did some weird math.

And it was like $396 an hour to $478 an hour, something weird like that. By the time I was ready for my weekly therapy sessions to be 350, I was like, you know, the math, I don’t need it to be so high for those intensive fees. Like I didn’t want it to be a huge leap. Yes, I still want to show that the therapy intensives have higher value, and I also don’t want to

I don’t wanna outprice myself. I still wanted to make mathematical sense for people about how they’re getting more work done with less time for around the same amount of money that it would take if they did weekly sessions instead of an intensive. But five hundred dollars an hour ultimately stopped feeling like this wild leap. It didn’t feel crazy, it didn’t feel completely undoable. And again, it was this accumulation of a dozen smaller steps to stop pricing myself like I was trying to prove something, to stop just

I’ll just get another certification or I’ll just wait until blah blah blah to raise my weight till then. I remember being in private practice and again having that rate of $125, $150 an hour. The first business coach I hired, she was charging, I think at the time, maybe it was like $245, and I was like, one day I would love to get to $245. And I have my PhD, and my coach was and is a master’s level clinician, so I was like,

Well, if a master’s level clinician can do that, certainly I can do that. And I thought it was gonna take me forever. I was like, maybe that’s a five years from now, a ten years from now goal. But I ended up raising my rate to three fifty. I think that was in twenty twenty-five. I think it was like very early twenty twenty-five. It might have actually been like twenty twenty four though. so it didn’t take that long. It took about two years to make that goal happen because

Again, I’m I’m my I’m my own boss, so I get to decide what I want to do for myself. But here’s what took me the longest part to believe, because just because you want to raise your rates, that doesn’t just mean we raise them and you know, the whole you build a they will come situation. You have to do some work to market yourself to get out there. You do have to feel confident as a therapist to stand behind that fee. You can’t just be like,

Well, I don’t know what I’m doing, but that’ll be $500 an hour. Like, that’s not gonna build trust with clients, and that’s not gonna make you feel good either. That is more the rhetoric I see out there from therapists who are like, You’re just you are just in it for the money and you’re just trying to scam people out of money. Like, if genuinely all you care about is money, yeah, then I question whether you should be in the field. But most of us cared so deeply about our clients, and we care about money, right? It’s the dialectic. So what took

A pretty big shift for me was to realize that clients are not primarily looking for the cheapest option. They are looking for someone who can actually get them results and they read your price as one signal of that, whether we like it or not. So when I raised my rates, I didn’t lose the clients who valued the work. I lost the clients who were shopping on price. And honestly, those were rarely my best fits anyway.

What I gained from raising my rates was clients who showed up ready to do the work because they made a real financial commitment to it. They weren’t just testing the water. They weren’t just like, I should probably be in therapy. They were actually in it and they were like, let’s do this. What should we do today? Do you have homework for me? They they wanted results, but not in a way that were that was like putting too much pressure on me. I think that’s a big objection that comes up for a lot of therapists is

Well, I have to prove that I’m worth 200, 250 and beyond. Like it’s gonna demand more of me. Not necessarily. I actually think people who pay me more per hour require less of me outside a session. And again, clients aren’t looking for you to be the cheapest option in their search results. They’re ultimately looking for you knowing exactly how to help them and that you have confidence that you’re not gonna waste their time. Your price is a part of how you communicate that.

before you’ve even said a single word on the console call or in your first intake session. So let’s name two myths that I hear constantly that are keeping therapists underpriced because I used to believe both of them myself. Myth one, kinda mentioned this earlier, this like, I need to prove myself before I can charge more. I need more certifications, more years, more testimonials, some invisible finish line before I’m allowed

To raise my rate. And again, let’s just let’s be real here. That finish line does not exist. There is always another training that you could take. There is always another year you could wait. There is always some reason to kick that can down the road. So if you are getting clients real results right now, you do not need a permission slip to charge what that’s worth and

Ultimately, I need to say this too, because our field, I think more and more people are kind of getting on board with like charge what you’re worth. But I think it’s more complicated than even just that. A lot of us need to charge what we need. Like we are worth so freaking much. And some of us honestly need more than others. If you have a hundred thousand, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in student loan debt, if you have fifty thousand dollars in credit card bills.

If you are caretaking parents and are spending $2,000 a month on assisted living, like whatever it is, some of us need more money. So this is not just about what you are quote unquote worth, because I know that’s complicated, especially for those of us with CPTSD that we’re trying to heal from, but it is also okay to charge what you need and what you want. So myth number two, again, kind of started talking about this, but if I charge more.

Clients will expect more from me. And this one really convinces therapists that raising rates means suddenly they have to overhaul everything, they have to add in extra calls, extra worksheets, extra availability, be available for messaging in between calls, essentially working harder to justify the number. But clients aren’t paying more because they want more stuff from you. They are paying more because they trust the outcome.

You don’t need to add ten new things to your services. You need to stop discounting the thing that you’re already excellent at. I remember the very first client who paid me $150, I was like, Ooh, that I’m I’m kind of a good fit for this, but I wanna prove that I’m even better than that. So I bought like a twenty five dollar book on

dissociation and I’ve maybe made it like 15 pages into that book and that client didn’t come for very many sessions. So like yes, there is something to be said for wanting to do our best and wanting to show up more, wanting to learn more and investing in training and all of that. But ultimately some people just want quick information from you. Some people just want some space to be held. They

They just want to know that someone is there for them and someone gets them, right? You don’t need to be the absolute expert. I say this a lot for therapists in my mastermind who are looking at ad coaching, for example, like you don’t need to be a gazillion steps ahead of your ideal client, customer, whatever it is. You just need to be a couple steps ahead of them, right? Unless you are saying on your therapy website, I am a world-renowned therapist, I am the number one expert, I get clients the best results.

Well then yeah, you better live up to those things that you’re putting out there. But being two steps ahead of someone, right? If your ideal client, I market this a lot because I’m a therapist that specializes in working with CPTSD and I have CPTSD, right? I don’t know all the things, I don’t have all my shit figured out, but I’m pretty good at knowing what are the things that need to be worked on, what are the things that have been helpful for me, and my clients find that really helpful to hear.

Right. So I don’t need to be an expert to charge a giant amount of fees. In some ways, just being human allows me to feel good about charging those fees, feel like my clients are getting what they want out of the sessions and they are benefiting and they keep comeback for more. And we have great relationships. So how do you actually know that you are quote unquote ready versus just wanting a bigger number? Because I think that that’s a different conversation too, where

If you are the kind of person who’s like, I need, I need some kind of goalpost, I need some kind of checklist to know, okay, yes, you are in the space versus just like you just want the bigger number, not that it’s wrong to just want the bigger number, but if you feel like you need a little bit more permission or you need a little bit more justification, then here are some things to consider. If you are getting consistent, repeatable results with your current clients, you have results that you could clearly describe.

If someone asked you, right? Obviously, that’s what you put on your website, that’s what you talk about on your console forms. That’s a pretty good indicator you can raise your rates. If you have more demand, then you have space, you have a wait list, or you have inquiries you’re turning away because you are just not available, you are overbooked, not because your marketing is broken, but because you know your calendar is full, then that’s a pretty good indicator that you can raise your rates. If you can clearly articulate your process, you know.

why what you do works, not just that it works, right? That conveys to me like you know your stuff, you know what you’re doing, you feel good about what you’re doing, and you can build client trust that way. So you are ready to raise your rates. If you are saying yes to clients out of scarcity thinking rather than genuine fit, because you’re scared to say no at your current rate, that’s a sign that you also need to raise your rate.

Right. I have said yes to too many poor fit clients when I was early in my practice. And, you know, it it’s a different kind of cost when you start having thoughts around not looking forward to a client or feeling like you’re letting a client down. Or I’ve heard therapists say things like, I know I’m just bringing my C game or I I can’t wait for this client to graduate. Like if we have thoughts that we regret taking on a client, but the only reason we said yes was because we needed the money.

Well then we need to number one do better at marketing, do better at consultation calls, but we also need to raise our rates so that we’re not making decisions out of scarcity and just because we need money, but we’d rather have a really good fit client who is willing to pay $25 or $50 more or more per session. So if most of that is true for you, then right that it’s time to to to raise your rate. You you are behind, you are holding yourself back.

And you’re not going to able to move forward to whatever is next for you. If you do want to diversify your income, if you do want to have a smaller caseload, if you want to move abroad and have an all-virtual practice, there are changes that you need to make now to set yourself up for success. Here is the part that I really want anyone who’s listening to sit with. Waiting to raise your rates, it does not just cost you money, although, you know, obviously it does cost you money.

Every month you stay underpriced is money you will never get back. And over a year, that’s a real meaningful income you worked for and didn’t receive. If you even think about a $10 fee raise across your 15 to 20 clients a week, your 48-ish weeks worked, that is a lot of money. So with you know, rising cost of living and inflation and all the things going on, the fact that

most therapists I know do not save for retirement. We need to charge more. And whether again that is a $10 fee increase for you, whether that’s a $50 fee increase for you. I have raised my rate in one go anywhere between $25.50 and $100. $100 is definitely the biggest I’ve done. And it was when I was trying to get all of my clients who were at $200. I was charging $350, but I didn’t want to bring them fully up to that fee because $100

And $50 jump like that, that’s definitely huge. Not that $100 isn’t, but that at least felt a little different to say, like, you know, because you’re a current client, you’re getting a little bit of like a discount, sort of. and yeah, I kept a couple clients and I lost a couple clients because that is that’s a huge increase. But again, it is only holding you back to not do those increases, however big or small. Again, it also is costing your clients.

This is what I think most therapists miss. They think like, well, I’m doing this for the client, I’m doing this for them, I don’t matter, which I disagree with. But when you are underpriced, you are often overbooked. You are seeing way more clients than you can actually give full energy to because you are needing volume to make that income work. And that means less of you in each session, less capacity to keep learning and investing in your own growth as a clinician. Sometimes it even means

Clients take the work less seriously because the investment doesn’t match the value they’re receiving. And I know that is not fully black or white true. There are tons of people who get pro bono therapy or therapy through their insurance and really do show up to do the work, but that’s not true for all people. The experience I had with the clients coming to pay at 125 is very different than the clients who are paying me 250 and 350 an hour, and especially 400 to 500 an hour.

So staying underpriced, this doesn’t actually protect your clients. It is limiting what they get from you in ways that they never see. Raising your weight, your rate when you are actually ready for it, it is not selfish, right? Raising your rate, that’s what actually helps you show up as the clinician that they actually need because it protects your time, it protects your energy, it protects your capacity. And yeah, then maybe you do have.

the time and the financial plan and ability to invest in more trainings if that’s what you want to do. But do not put the cart before the horse and say, Well first I’m gonna get trained in this and then I’m gonna raise my rates because yeah you know what that’s just some people don’t even do that, right? They take all the trainings and they still don’t raise their rates. Or they raise the rates for new clients, but they have clients they’ve worked with for fifteen years who are still paying their seventy five dollar fee. So we have to stop tricking ourselves and we have to stop lying to ourselves about, you know,

When do I get to raise my rate? So if you are sitting there recognizing yourself in that readiness list, you know, you are getting real results. You’ve got a full caseload or near full caseload, you’re super clear on your process, you’re saying yes out of fear instead of fit, that is your sign, those are all of your signs that it is time to start charging the rate, not just that you think you’re worthy of, but the rate that you need and

dare I say, the rate that you want. And I want to show you exactly how to make that jump with confidence instead of guessing. And that’s what my live training, the premium therapy fee method, is all about. It is happening on August twelfth, and I am walking you through how to raise your rates, position yourself with the clients who are ready to pay it, and stop leaving money on the table just because a lower fee feels safer than a higher fee.

This is going to be the exact process I use in my own practice, and it’s going to work whether you are testing your first rate increase or you’ve been putting it off for years. So head to the link in the show notes to grab your seat before it fills up. Seriously, we use a webinar method now, and there are a limited amount of seats. So thank you for listening today’s episode of the Happy Healthy and Wealthy Therapist Podcast, and I will talk to you in the next episode.