How Do I Research What Other Coaches Charge?

Market research on pricing is useful — as one input. It becomes a problem when it becomes the primary input, because what other coaches charge doesn’t answer the most important question: what is the right price for your specific work with your specific clients.

That said, understanding the landscape is worthwhile, and there’s a better and a worse way to do it.

What to Look For

The goal of pricing research isn’t to find the average and price there. Why market rates are only one input is because the market rate reflects a wide range of practitioners, a wide range of client types, a wide range of service scopes, and a wide range of positions in the market. The practitioner who looks at “average coaching rates” and sets their price there is averaging across things that aren’t equivalent.

More useful research looks at specific comparisons:

What do practitioners at a similar level of experience and specialization charge? Not all coaches, but coaches who serve a similar client type, with a similar depth of background, in a similar format (sessions vs. packages vs. groups). That population is a more useful reference than the broad market.

What do practitioners who serve the specific client population charge? The relevant comparison set shifts based on who you’re serving. A coach who works with executives operates in a different pricing context than one who works with early-career professionals, even if the methodology is similar.

What do the practitioners at the higher end of the range offer and communicate? This is often more useful than the average. How to read pricing signals in the market includes looking at how premium practitioners position their work — what they emphasize, how they describe outcomes, what the offer structure looks like. This is information about positioning as much as pricing.

How to Find the Data

Most practitioners don’t publish their rates publicly, which makes research harder than it sounds. Useful sources:

• Websites and booking pages. Some practitioners list rates; many more list packages without prices (which tells you they have packages worth listing, which is its own information).
• Discovery calls. If you’re genuinely considering referring clients to other practitioners or exploring collaboration, a discovery call with a peer practitioner in your space is a reasonable way to have a direct conversation.
• Community conversations. Peer communities for coaches and practitioners often surface rate conversations more directly than public research.
• Professional directories. Some modalities have directories (therapy, nutritional consulting, somatic work) with rate ranges posted.
• Public testimonials and case studies. High-level transformational work practitioners sometimes reference investment ranges in client stories or public posts without full rate cards.

What the Data Can’t Tell You

What nobody explains about pricing is that market research tells you what others have charged — not what they were worth charging, not whether clients got results at those rates, and not whether those practitioners are financially sustaining their work. Knowing that practitioners in your space charge $200–$800 per session doesn’t tell you which end of that range is appropriate for you or what justifies the difference.

How positioning affects the relevant comparison set means that how you position your work determines who you’re being compared to. A practitioner who is clearly positioned as a specialist in a specific problem type is not competing on the same pricing basis as one who presents as a generalist. The research that’s relevant to them is different.

After the Research

Research provides a floor and a ceiling — a sense of what exists in the market — but the right price comes from what to build after researching the market: a clear articulation of what the work actually produces and why it’s worth the number you’re considering. That articulation, not the market data, is what the client actually responds to.

Research informs. The reason why is what sells.

Getting clear on pricing research and what to do with it is part of the ongoing work the Abundance GPS Skool community holds space for. Join us here.