Why Raising Your Rates Can Bring More Clients
Y’all know I am all about asking for what you need. And when I work with coaching clients who get clear on their numbers and raise their rates, something interesting tends to happen. Their caseload grows. Not always immediately, but consistently enough that I could not keep ignoring it. It made me want to understand the psychology behind it. So I did a deep dive.
Here is what I found.
Before a potential client reads a single word of your bio, your rate has already told them something. When people cannot easily evaluate quality on their own, they use price as a proxy. Therapy is exactly that kind of market. Someone scrolling a directory or landing on your website has almost no way to assess your actual skill. What they can see is your rate. A below-market rate communicates something, and it is usually not what you intend.
Then there is what happens once a client commits financially. When people make a real investment in something, they show up differently. They reschedule instead of canceling. They do the homework. They stay when it gets hard. Researchers at Stanford and MIT actually demonstrated that people who paid more for the exact same product got measurably better results from it. Same thing, different price, different outcome. The expectation that something is worth more changes how people experience it. That has real implications for our work.
And then there is the piece I think gets missed most often. When you raise your rate, you change who finds you. The person who chooses you at a sustainable rate has already decided this is a priority. They are not shopping for the most affordable option. That internal readiness matters enormously for how the work actually goes.
I also want to be honest about what this does not mean. Higher rates exclude people. That is real. But the research on sliding scale fees does not actually show that lower fees produce better engagement or better outcomes, which surprises a lot of therapists when they hear it. Excluding people is a systemic problem that your individual rate cannot fix. You can be intentional about building reduced-rate capacity into your practice without making your standard rate the solution to something much bigger than you.
Charge what you need. Let your rate do the work it is designed to do.
The rate calculator at privatepaypractitioners.com will show you what that number actually is. Free. Five minutes.
Further reading:
Shiv, Carmon & Ariely — Placebo Effects of Marketing Actions: https://ssrn.com/abstract=707541
Waber, Shiv, Carmon & Ariely — Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy (JAMA, 2008): https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.299.9.1016
Paying for Psychotherapy: Reframing an Antiquated Perspective — Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy: https://www.societyforpsychotherapy.org/paying-for-psychotherapy-reframing-an-antiquated-perspective
