Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 49: What’s Actually Working for Premium Fees in 2026

Released: 08/12/2026

Show Notes:

Amanda makes the case that premium therapy fees in 2026 have almost nothing to do with certifications, credentials, or years of experience. What’s actually driving higher rates is positioning and access, and most therapists are missing both. She walks through how therapy intensives work as a catalyst not just for adding income, but for raising your weekly rate, rebuilding confidence in your clinical work, and shifting the way your entire practice reads to potential clients.

3 Key Takeaways:

1. Premium fees in 2026 are not driven by certifications or credentials but by how confidently and specifically you talk about the problem you solve, and whether clients can actually access you when they need help.
2. A therapy intensive is not just an add-on service; it is one of the most powerful sales tools a therapist has for their weekly practice because it lets clients experience the depth of your work before committing to anything long term.
3. Going through the process of pricing and selling intensives almost always forces therapists to raise their weekly rate too, and that ripple effect is often where the biggest income growth actually happens.

Connect with Amanda:

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

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. (If you can’t attend live, register to get the replay!)

The Back-to-School sale for the Therapy Intensives Academy is happening NOW! Join by 8/19 to get $500 off and 6 months free inside the VIP Community and SEO for Therapists membership. Check it out here!

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Transcript:

Amanda Buduris (00:00)
Hey, welcome back to this episode of the Happy, Healthy, and Wealthy Therapist Podcast. Depending on what time you are listening to this podcast today, it is either right before my free training called the Premium Therapy B method, or maybe you’re listening to it afterwards if you’re listening to this in the evening. We are dropping this episode on a Wednesday, even though normally our episodes come out Friday, because we’re going to do a couple extra releases of podcasts.

just related to things that are on my mind when it comes to what it really takes in 2026 to not even just like book private pay clients because I’m not in the Facebook groups. So I can’t say like, I see what’s happening in the Facebook groups, but I hear what other people say is happening in the Facebook groups. And there’s just so much worry around people not being willing to use anything outside of their insurance benefits that people

quote unquote only want to pay for therapy with their in-network benefits, but I do not see that true. So in the webinar that I am either doing or did today, again, depending on when you’re listening to this, if you registered and can’t make it, there will be a replay. So even if you sign up after the fact, you will still get the replay. Cause I don’t want you to miss that. I want to tell you exactly what you’re gonna miss if you don’t make it, if you do not sign up.

For the either live or recorded copy. And why it really matters because, you know, I this is my first time actually doing this version of this webinar. I like to take different spins on each webinar that I do so that it’s not the same content over and over again. And we only host our webinars for about five days access. And then after that, we close it down and you can’t access it anymore. So you don’t want to miss this. But the problem I see in almost

Every call I have with a therapist, every DM that I get from a therapist, every can I pick your brain conversation that people, you know, approach me with, you might think the reason that you are not charging more currently as a therapist, whether that is because you’re in network and you’re scared of going out of network, or you have been private pay forever, but your fee is like $150 and you’ve never raised it and you definitely need more than $150 per session. A lot of people think they

Can’t charge more until X happens. So maybe it’s because I’m missing that credential, right? I’m only a master’s, I don’t have my PhD, or I’m trained in EMDR, but I’m not certified in EMDR. Or I just think I need to narrow down my niche even more. And so therapists keep collecting trainings, they keep waiting to feel qualified enough, and they keep charging the same rate or staying on insurance panels way longer than they intend to and way longer than.

I mean, literally they can afford to. But meanwhile, therapists with your exact same license, your exact same training, and sometimes less experienced than you are charging 1.5, 2, or maybe three times what you charge. And it is not because of what’s on their website under their little credential section of their About Me page. It is because of something else entirely.

And that is what this episode and the live and/slash recorded training that I’m doing are all about. So let’s start with the thing that therapists get wrong most often. You are assuming that clients pay for that they pay more for a therapist with more letters after their name, right? They have a specialized certification, a fancy modality, a credential that took two years and $4,000 to earn.

That’s not actually what’s driving premium fees in 2026. What’s actually driving it is positioning and access. Clients are paying more for therapists who are confident about the exact problem they solve, who feel confident and specific instead of generic, and who they can actually get in front of without a three-month wait list. And that last part is super important because we have to talk about.

We talk about accessibility the but the way I see it in social media is from the standpoint of pricing, right? Of X amount for your sessions is inaccessible. If you charge that, you’re inaccessible. But access is becoming its own premium when a therapist can say, I have an opening this week, while everyone else in their specialty has a two, four, six month wait list.

That alone does justify a higher rate. You don’t need another certification. What you need is a way to open capacity without burning yourself out and a way to talk about your work that makes people stop scrolling or, you know, stay on your website for longer if they found you organically. And this is the part that really surprises therapists every single time. So I’m gonna say it very clearly. I just want to lay it out. The therapists I work with inside my therapy intensive academy, they are not.

just using intensives to save time or to clear some kind of backlog of a wait list that they have themselves. They are using intensives to actually sell their weekly slots at a higher rate than they’ve ever charged. Right? Okay, so here’s how this plays out. Someone books an intensive because it’s fast and it can solve an urgent problem. During that day or those few hours together, the client really experiences a level of depth and attention

they’ve never gotten in a standard 15-minute session. And they feel the difference, right? You would feel the difference too. And when that same therapist mentions that they also have weekly openings at a re a rate that reflects the same caliber of work, the client’s gonna say yes without blinking because they’ve already felt what they’re paying for. And the intensive is not just this product that you’re offering. It’s not just this service or this offer, whatever word you want to use to describe it.

It is the best sales tool a therapist has for their weekly practice because it lets a potential client experience the value before they commit to it long term. Right? You’re not actually trying to describe or prove your worth through your copy anymore. You’re actually demonstrating it. And there are a lot of therapists I know who like that is just their standard of how they work with clients. It might not just be that they have an intensives-only practice.

But they start all of their clients with an intensive, especially of the seeing a lot of trauma therapists, a lot of couples therapists who do this of let’s kick start some work together. Let’s have a longer first session. And I’m not talking about a 90-minute session, but let’s have a longer session initially so that we can really make momentum in this session. And then we get a lot more clarity about what exactly are we working on from here on out. So to be really honest with you.

Because I’d rather you hear it from me than get disturbed g get discouraged three weeks in. Almost every therapist who goes through my Therapy Intensive Academy tells me the same thing. Their first intensive, it does not happen overnight. You do not just throw up your intensive offering onto your webpage and book the next night or the next day or night, whatever it is. Even when I booked, when I posted my first.

Intensive page. I don’t remember if I started with my couples intensest page or if I started with my trauma intensest page. But when I did it, it took about a month for me to book my first one. And that still felt really fast. But it does take a bit of marketing, a bit of repositioning, a bit of getting comfortable saying this really big number that you really want, but also part of it really terrifies you. You have to say that out loud so many times that you are not scared of it.

That you do not apologize for it, that you’re not saying it and like already expecting backlash, right? So all of these parts are so real. I’m not gonna pretend otherwise. But here’s what happens next, consistently over and over. Once someone inside my program books their first intensive and then they run it, something in them shifts, right? They start to have new weekly clients start showing up.

and they’re paying the increased rate without hesitation. And that is not because the therapist discounted anything, but because the whole practice now reads as premium. The website, the intake calls, the way the therapist talks about their own work, it all catches up to the new number. The slow part of getting started is very, very real, but so is what comes after it.

And I want to tell you a story about a former coaching client of mine because her story is the clearest example of everything I just described. When she first started, when we first started working together, her fee was about $150 per hour. And she was like, I want to make more than that. I need to make more than that. It’s exciting to me to think about making more than that. So she started adding intensives in, and she did a lot of, we did a lot of like SEO.

work on her website together because that’s a lot of what I teach, but she was also really, really good at community marketing and networking and doing all that. So that’s a is a lot of how she filled her practice, I will say that. But when she first started running intensives, she would hit a 12K month while taking a bunch of time off. And then she would pretty consistently make 17K months. And all of that felt incredible to her at the time. And like I’m so celebrating all of that with her.

But here’s what happens next. And this is what’s really funny to me. Now, this client also joined my mastermind. And now she’s making closer to $18,000 to $20,000 consistent months. And she’s doing it almost entirely with weekly clients. And she was like, I kind of forgot about intensives. And that’s huge because, right, going through the process of pricing and selling your therapy intensives, typically what that does is it

Forces therapists to come to terms with, well, where is my weekly session at and how do I match that? And obviously I have to usually raise it to have it look like my intensive fee. We can’t just say I have a $5,000, three-hour intensive and my weekly 50-minute sessions are $150. That doesn’t make sense. If you want to sell a $5,000 intensive, if that’s three hours or who knows how long.

your weekly rate has to make sense and match, not dollar per dollar, dollar per hour, but it has to make sense. So this client who, you know, started, she knew she wanted to do intensive. She knew I have to raise my weight from 150. So she raised it to 200. And then she pretty quickly raised it to 250. And I don’t even know what it’s at at this point. I think she’s closer to like 275 for her couple sessions. But any clients who

Came to her website and they started to see her offers. They, whether it was recommended, whether they found her more easily from SEO, they could see now how confident she was talking about her work. And she could start booking her weekly clients at her new higher rate. So she was booking new high-rate premium fee clients. She was booking premium fee therapy-intensive clients. And somewhere in that process,

Right. She refound her passion for the work itself. It is not the marketing. It’s not the sales calls. The, you know, it’s so funny because we call them consultation calls, but they are sales calls, right? But the actual clinical work that she went to grad school to do, that’s what helped her get more excited. She made more money. She took an advanced training that she now loves and is super passionate about. She’s traveling to go to different conferences for this training. She’s not

Resentful of her caseload. She’s not worried about making more money. She’s not stressed about taking time off. She is excited about it because it finally reflects what she knew she was worth and capable of. And this is not a fluke story. That’s the pattern I see happen over and over again inside the therapists who go through my therapy intensives academy program. The intensive is a little bit more of like the catalyst for all of these changes.

But so many people experience a huge change in their weekly income, which then, you know, results in their annual income. I had one therapist tell me she had a $40,000 increase year over year because yeah, she did a couple of intensives, but also she got the confidence to raise her rate to where she wanted it to be for weekly clients too. So if you haven’t registered for the premium therapy fee method or again,

Register for it if you’re listening to it before 9 a.m. Pacific, this podcast, or if you’re listening to this after the fact, sign up so you can get the replay. Because what I’m really talking through is how premium fees are actually earned in 2026. And again, it has nothing to do with certifications. I’m going to talk you through really the things that need to change with your mindset, with your marketing, with your pricing, and how you can

fairly easily with raising your rate and adding intensives, have a $250,000 a year practice. I’m also gonna break down the math of like, if you’re like, you know, $200 maybe feels good and exciting, or like maybe my cost of living in my area, I’m shooting for a $150 a year practice. All of this is so, so doable. But really, I think so much of this work comes down to the mindset work around our accessibility guilt and worth that almost every therapist.

needs before any of this sticks. And I’m gonna show you different examples of timelines of what I did in my practice, what helped work for me. And yeah, it’s just gonna be a really fun training. I’m putting the finishing touches on it this week. I’m recording this on Monday. I just got back from a trip from Montana where I recorded the last podcast in a closet. And my my OBM Holly who also helps

edit the podcast was like you’re not allowed to film in closets anymore. I had to do so much work with the audio. So I am happy to be home today. But yes, if you have not signed up for that training already, you’re gonna want to go ahead and do that and don’t miss it. And if you are listening to this podcast after the fact, you’ll hear that I announced a sale on the Therapy Intensives Academy, which is open for enrollment at a sale price for the next week only. So you’re definitely gonna want to see some of the bonuses that I’m offering this time around because I am

Actually, really, really excited about them. I haven’t offered these since I ran a version of this program that was like $8,000. So you’re getting it for a fraction of that cost. So if you are still charging what you charged years ago, if you’ve been telling yourself that you’ll raise your rate once you finish one more certification or get one more thing, or in the new year, if you’ve watched other therapists with less experience than you charge double what you charge.

And you’ve never understood why, this training is gonna answer all those questions for you. And the Therapy Intensive Academy is where you’re actually gonna implement the answer with support templates, community of therapists doing exactly this right now. So again, a little bit of a shorter episode today because we’re gonna release a few more than normal over the course of this next week. But I am super excited to really break down, you know, premium fees are working.

In 2026, people are paying thousands of dollars for therapy intensives, 200, 300, 400 for a 50-minute session. People are investing in their mental health now almost more than ever. It just takes a little bit, it takes a little bit more strategy, it takes a little bit more intention to know what they’re searching for, what they’re looking for, and how you make your marketing match that.

Because yes, just because you raise your fees doesn’t mean that people are going to magically find you and want to give you that money. You have to learn the foundations that I teach around SEO search engine optimization. And I’m also teaching AI optimization skills too. my God, this is actually really exciting. I’m actually bringing in an SEO marketing expert for routine calls inside Therapy Intensives Academy. I do not know any other program out there that does this.

I think this gives another really good touch point for you being able to stay in the know, you being able to have more access to what’s the up-to-date information. If you come to the calls live, obviously is a nice like accountability time for you to actually work on the thing, not just hear about it, but actually work on it. So that’s another really cool thing that I’m excited to add into TIA. So thanks so much for being here with me today for this shorter episode. What I want you to walk away with is

You can do this, you can do such amazing things. Therapists deserve to make money, they deserve to be successful. We are all doing amazing work trying to, you know, show up the best for our clients while also taking care of ourselves. And I truly see any of these support programs out there that are helping therapists help themselves. Like one of the best self-care strategies that we can do, and it’s tax write-off. The fact that I’ve had so many people leave my programs be like,

This was like group therapy for my business. I take that as a huge compliment because yeah, that’s kind of what we need, right? We need we need the therapeutic work in business because business is hard, but it is not impossible when you have the right support. All right, everyone. Thanks for listening today, and I will see you in the next episode.