How to set up a private therapy practice in the UK

You have trained for years to do the work. Nobody trained you to register with the ICO, choose between sole trader and limited company, or decide what to charge.

This is the full sequence, in the order it needs doing, with the actual numbers. It covers the legal requirements, the clinical prerequisites, what to spend money on and when, and roughly what the first two years look like.

What it costs to set up

The short answer is £500 to £1,200 in your first year, before room hire, directory listings, a website or any marketing.

That figure covers the four things you cannot practise without: professional body membership, ICO registration, indemnity insurance and clinical supervision. Supervision is the largest single line by some distance and the one most often left out of people's early budgeting.

A full diary takes three to six months to build. Plan your finances around slow early growth rather than around the caseload you eventually want. Full breakdown further down.

Before you begin

Five things need to be in place, or close to it, before you take a private client:

• Your full qualification, or near completion
• Registration with a professional body
• Clinical supervision arranged and starting
• Indemnity insurance active
• Enough financial runway for at least six months of slow client growth

If any of these is missing, that is the thing to do next, ahead of anything on this page.

Legal and compliance

Register with a professional body

BACP, UKCP, BABCP, NCPS or HCPC, depending on your modality.

Registration is not a legal requirement in the UK, because the title "therapist" is not protected. In practice it is close to essential. Directories require it, insurers price on it, and clients increasingly check for it.

Register with the ICO

If you keep any client records electronically, including appointment details in a digital diary or notes in a password-protected document, you are a data controller under UK GDPR and registration is a legal requirement.

Register at ico.org.uk. The fee is £52 a year, or £47 if you pay by direct debit. Fines for non-registration start at £400.

This catches out more newly qualified therapists than anything else on this list, usually because they assume paper notes are the trigger. It is the opposite.

More detail: GDPR for therapists: what you actually need to know

Get indemnity insurance

Required by every major professional body. Aim for £2 million of cover.

Therapy-specific policy wording matters. Generic professional indemnity policies can exclude claims for emotional or psychological harm, which is the main risk you are actually insuring against. Budget roughly £80 to £180 a year.

Register with HMRC

Register for Self Assessment as soon as you plan to take private clients, rather than waiting until you have income.

Most therapists start as sole traders. This is the right default. A limited company generally starts to make sense above around £50,000 of profit, and brings filing obligations that are not worth taking on before then.

Clinical foundations

Arrange clinical supervision

Supervision must be in place before your first client, not after.

Minimums vary by body: broadly 1.5 hours a month once qualified, or one hour per eight hours of client work while training. Check your own body's requirement rather than relying on the general figure.

Individual supervision runs £40 to £80 an hour. Group supervision costs less per hour and suits some practitioners well, though it gives you less time on your own cases.

Set your fee

Outside London, counsellors typically charge £50 to £80 a session and psychotherapists £60 to £100. London rates run higher.

Do not price at the bottom of the range. Clients read an unusually low fee as inexperience rather than as good value, and raising a fee later is considerably harder than setting it correctly now.

Build in two or three concession slots from the start, at a genuinely reduced rate. That lets you work with clients who could not otherwise afford you without discounting your whole practice.

Practical infrastructure

Consulting space

Room hire runs £15 to £35 an hour outside London. Working online removes this cost entirely, which is why many practices now start online and add a room later.

If you plan to work from home, apply a real privacy and soundproofing test rather than assuming it will be fine. Can conversation be heard from an adjoining room? Does the client arrive through family space? Is there somewhere for them to wait?

Client contracts and forms

A written agreement needs to be in place before the first session, covering fees, cancellation terms, confidentiality and its limits, data handling, supervision arrangements and the complaints process.

You also need a privacy notice to satisfy UK GDPR. This is separate from the contract and sets out what data you hold, why, for how long, and what rights the client has over it.

Secure notes and records

Clinical notes need to be GDPR compliant, which in practice means stored securely, accessible only to you, and retained for a defined period.

Standard retention is a minimum of six years after the last contact for adults. Records for clients seen as minors are usually held until they reach 25 or 26. Your system also needs to let you respond to a Subject Access Request, which means being able to locate and export one client's records without difficulty.

Cancellation and complaints policy

The common UK standard is 48 hours' notice for a full waiver, with the full fee payable for later cancellations. Set it in the contract and apply it consistently from the first client.

Your complaints procedure should name your professional body's escalation route, so a client who is unhappy has somewhere to go beyond you.

Finding your first clients

Most private clients arrive through directories, particularly in the first year before word of mouth and referral relationships have built.

Directory listings

• Counselling Directory. Around £245 a year. The highest traffic option in the UK.
• Psychology Today UK. Around £240 a year. Ranks strongly in Google for therapist searches.
• Your professional body's directory. BACP, UKCP and NCPS all list members, often included in your membership fee. Check before paying for anything else.

Write the profile properly. Most therapist directory profiles are near-identical descriptions of modality, which gives a prospective client no basis for choosing between them. Name who you work with and what they are struggling with.

More on this: How clients find a therapist online

Google Business Profile

Free, and the single highest-return thing you can do for local visibility. It puts you in the map results for searches like "counsellor near me" in your area.

Set it up under an account you own and control from the start.

More on this: Local SEO for therapists

A simple website

A website does two jobs. It confirms you are a real practitioner rather than a directory listing, and it lets you say something specific about your specialism that a directory template will not accommodate.

It does not need to be elaborate. One page covering who you are, who you work with, how sessions work and how to get in touch will do everything a new practice needs.

Clay offers a free single-page website for therapists, and a fully managed option for practitioners who would rather not do it themselves.

Local GP relationships

Two or three relationships with local GP surgeries become a reliable referral source once established, though they take time to build and are worth treating as a slow investment rather than an early win.

Year one cost breakdown

Item	Cost
ICO registration	£52 a year
Professional body membership	£86 to £216
Indemnity insurance	£80 to £200
Clinical supervision	£600 to £1,200
Total before room hire, directories and website	£500 to £1,200

Add roughly £485 a year if you list on both Counselling Directory and Psychology Today, and room hire on top if you are not working online.

Setting and reviewing your fee

Review your fee every year

A £5 increase once a year passes almost unnoticed. A £25 increase after five years of holding the same rate lands very differently, and often as a rupture rather than an administrative change.

Put the review in your diary as a recurring annual task. Write to existing clients six to eight weeks ahead of the change, and apply the new rate to new clients immediately.

Sliding scale or fixed fee

Hold two or three concession slots at a genuinely reduced rate, and protect your standard rate for everyone else.

A sliding scale applied across the whole diary erodes income faster than most people expect, and tends to be difficult to reverse once clients are established on it.

Admin, accounts and tax

Open a separate business bank account

Not a legal requirement for a sole trader, but it makes Self Assessment substantially easier and removes any ambiguity about which transactions are business expenses.

Monzo Business, Starling and Tide are all free or low cost.

Track income and expenses

Log every session fee, every room hire and every subscription as it happens, rather than reconstructing the year in January.

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax applies to sole traders above £50,000 gross from April 2026, which means HMRC-recognised software rather than a spreadsheet. Thresholds step down in later years, so building the habit early is worth doing even if you are below it now.

File your Self Assessment return

The deadline is 31 January for the tax year ending the previous 5 April.

Set aside 25 to 30 percent of every private fee for tax as it comes in. Allowable expenses include supervision, CPD, professional body subscriptions, room hire, insurance and a proportion of home office costs.

When to get an accountant

Worth it once you are consistently earning above £25,000 to £30,000 privately, or if you are considering incorporation.

Expect £300 to £600 a year for sole trader accounts. Ask other local therapists for a recommendation rather than searching, as therapy-specific expenses are easier to handle with someone who has seen them before.

Booking and practice tools

Add tools when the admin they remove is costing you more than the tool costs. Not before.

Months one to three: keep it simple

A diary and an email address are enough for your first handful of clients. Resist the pull to build a full system before you have the volume to justify it.

Months three to six: online booking

Once you are regularly fielding four or more enquiries a week, a booking tool starts to earn its cost. Look for a UK, GDPR-compliant option with calendar sync, automated reminders and intake forms.

Consolidate your stack

Separate tools for video, notes, booking and payments create both GDPR exposure and daily admin friction. Once you are established, a single practice management platform is worth comparing against what you have assembled.

Payment processing

Stripe or similar for card payments. Bank transfer works fine for regular clients.

Chasing unpaid invoices is a boundary question as much as an administrative one. Set the expectation in the contract and it rarely becomes an issue.

Marketing that compounds

In rough order of long-term return:

• Directory profiles. Refresh the copy and photo annually. Most therapists write theirs once and never look again.
• Your website. Update your specialisms as your focus sharpens. It should describe the practice you have now, not the one you started.
• GP surgery relationships. A letter every twelve months keeps you in mind.
• A therapist referral network. Refer out freely when someone is not a fit for you. It comes back.
• CPD and training. Deepens your specialism and generates word of mouth among peers. Choose it to shape a niche rather than to tick a requirement.
• Google Ads. Only once everything above is working. Paid traffic sent to a weak profile or a thin website wastes money.

Related: Why good therapy isn't enough to get you clients

A rough sense of timing

Months one to three: first clients and bedding in

Directories live. Supervision active. Two to four clients. Track every session fee from the first one. Notice where admin friction shows up, because those are the gaps worth solving later.

Months three to six: building caseload

Six to ten regular clients. Introduce online booking if admin is taking real time. Review your directory copy now that you know who is actually enquiring. Set up expense tracking before the volume makes it painful.

Year one review: fee and tax return

Raise your fee if you have not already. File Self Assessment by 31 January. Review which clients are a good fit, because this is the point at which you can start shaping the practice deliberately rather than taking whoever arrives.

Year two and beyond: consolidation

Consider an accountant, practice management software, and whether incorporation makes sense. Deepen your specialism. This is also the stage where growth stops being about getting clients and starts being about which clients, at what fee, for how many hours.

Common pitfalls at this stage: Setting up a therapy practice: the mistakes most people make

Where Clay fits

Clay Consulting helps therapists with the business side of private practice. It was built from inside the profession rather than sold into it.

• Just starting out? Build gives you a free single-page website, or Launch sets up and maintains the whole thing for you.
• Already in practice and plateaued? The Practice Health Check is a structured review of where growth is being held back.