How much to charge per therapy session: finding your number

Few questions paralyze the self-employed psychologist like this one. Charging too little exhausts and devalues you; charging too much, without criteria, empties your schedule. And clinical training rarely treats money as a legitimate part of the work.

The honest answer: there is no single right number. There is a method to reach your number — and it starts from your costs, not from what your colleague charges.

What the CFP says (and what it does not)

Brazil’s Federal Council of Psychology (CFP) does not set a mandatory session fee. What exists is a periodically updated reference table of professional fees that serves as a benchmark — not a rule. Check the current version on the CFP website before settling on your fee.

In practice, the Brazilian market has an enormous range: from social-rate sessions to highly specialized care costing several times the reference value. All of it can be legitimate — what changes is context, experience and audience.

Calculate your floor before looking at the market

Your floor is the fee below which seeing a client costs you money. The math is short and worth doing on paper:

• Add up your fixed monthly work costs: room (or platform), clinical supervision, professional dues, internet, accounting, retirement savings.
• Add the salary you need to take home — your cost of living is a cost of the practice.
• Divide by a REALISTIC number of sessions per month. A full schedule on paper holds 100+ sessions; real life, with no-shows, holidays and slots that never fill, is usually far less.
• The result is your floor per session. Below that it is not strategy, it is loss.

Adjust for your context

With your floor in hand, three factors pull the fee up or down: region and audience (a viable fee in a capital-city neighborhood differs from the countryside — and online work mixes both), experience and training (specialization, years of practice and a defined niche sustain higher fees), and format (in-person carries the cost of the room; online widens both your reach and your competition at the same time).

If you want to see clients who cannot afford your full fee, a social rate is a respectable ethical choice — as long as it is a conscious decision, with a limited number of slots, and not the default price your insecurity chose for you.

Talk about money without hedging

Hiding your fee until the first conversation protects no one: it creates conversations that die at "how much do you charge?" and attracts precisely the people who cannot pay your full fee. Transparency filters earlier — whoever arrives already knowing the range arrives closer to booking.

Stating your fee clearly is also a clinical message: it communicates that the frame is serious and that money is not taboo inside the process. A published range ("from R$ X to R$ Y, agreed in the first conversation") resolves most cases without giving up your flexibility.