At a typical fee this is a caseload most practices cannot sustain. Here is the honest number — and why the fee is the only lever left.
£50,000 take-home needs 26 clients a week at £60 a session — better than five a day, five days a week, every working week of the year. This is the point at which the question stops being about arithmetic and starts being about capacity. At £80 a session the same take-home needs 20 a week; at 14 clients a week it needs a fee of £110.
| Your fee | Clients needed | Gross fees | Actual take-home |
|---|---|---|---|
| £50 a session | 31 a week | £71,300 | £50,577 |
| £60 a session | 26 a week | £71,760 | £50,844 |
| £70 a session | 22 a week | £70,840 | £50,311 |
| £80 a session | 20 a week | £73,600 | £51,911 |
| £90 a session | 17 a week | £70,380 | £50,044 |
Over 46 working weeks that is 1,196 sessions a year, and the table assumes every one of those slots is filled every week. Real practices do not work like that: cancellations, DNAs and the gaps between clients leaving and starting mean the caseload you have to book is higher than the caseload you have to see. Then there are the hours the table cannot bill — notes, supervision, admin, invoicing, and the emotional work of holding that many people at once.
Which is why, at this target, the fee column matters more than the client column. Going from £60 to £80 a session takes the same take-home from 26 clients a week to 20 — the difference between a caseload most therapists would call unsustainable and one they would call full.
Getting to £50,000 in your pocket means £71,760 of gross fees and £68,160 of taxable profit, of which £17,890 sits above the £50,270 higher-rate threshold. Income tax comes to £14,696 and Class 4 National Insurance to £2,620 — an effective rate of 25% of profit, against 17% at the £30,000 target.
That is the part working back from a take-home figure hides. The gap between £30,000 and £50,000 in your pocket is £20,000, but the gap in gross fees behind it is £30,360 — you have to bill roughly £30,360 more to keep £20,000 more.
Your costs are not £300 a month and your fee may not be on this list. Put your own numbers in and see the answer for your practice.
Calculate my take-home →