The Practitioner Who Has Never Raised Rates: What to Know

The first rate increase is different from every subsequent one. Not because it’s harder mechanically — the communication process is the same, the logistics are the same — but because it carries something the others don’t: the accumulated weight of all the time the rate wasn’t raised.

Every year a rate stayed fixed is a year in which the implicit message was: this is what the work is worth. Raising the rate for the first time is, in part, revising that message — and that revision goes in two directions at once. To the clients. And to the practitioner’s own sense of what is appropriate.

What Not Raising Has Created

What not raising has revealed in the rate history is a pattern. That pattern has a set of beliefs underneath it — about what is acceptable to ask for, about what happens when you ask for more, about whether the work warrants it.

The first raise doesn’t automatically update those beliefs. In fact, it often surfaces them most clearly. A practitioner who has held the same rate for four years will likely notice, when finally changing the number, that the internal resistance is higher than the situation seems to warrant. The resistance isn’t about this increase — it’s about all the years of not increasing, and what that pattern encoded.

What nobody explains about the first increase is that it requires navigating not just the external communication but also the accumulated inner negotiation that produced the long-deferred rate in the first place. Getting clear on what that pattern was about — without self-judgment — is part of what makes the first increase more sustainable.

The Size Question for a First Increase

Why the first increase is psychologically different is not only about inner work. It also creates a practical question: how much should the first increase be?

The temptation for a practitioner who has held a low rate for years is to make the first increase modest — to ease into it, reduce the shock, avoid the full magnitude of the change. This is understandable. It’s also worth examining.

If the rate is genuinely significantly below what it should be, a modest increase gets closer but doesn’t arrive. The practitioner will still be at a rate that underrepresents the work, and they’ll still need to have subsequent conversations. Sometimes a more meaningful first increase — one that actually moves the rate to an appropriate level — is more honest than a series of small ones that take years to close the gap.

The right size depends on what “appropriate” actually is. If the gap is large, multiple increases over a defined timeline — not years, but months — may be more practical than a single jump. The key is having a plan that actually arrives somewhere appropriate, rather than an indefinite series of small adjustments.

The Communication Consideration

How to communicate the first increase is the same as for any increase: in writing, with adequate notice, clearly, without excessive explanation. For practitioners who have never raised rates with their client base, there may be a temptation to over-explain or apologize at length. This usually doesn’t help. Clients can read the apologetic tone — and it signals that the practitioner doesn’t fully stand behind the change.

What the communication needs is: clarity about what is changing, when, and what options exist. It doesn’t need a comprehensive justification of why the rate was low before, or why it’s changing now.

The Work That Follows

The identity work the first increase requires doesn’t end when the communication goes out. The weeks after the first rate increase, when clients are responding, the practitioner is holding the new number in conversations, and the first session at the higher rate happens — those weeks are when the inner work either holds or doesn’t.

The practitioner who has prepared for that period — who has done some of the inner work before the increase rather than only after — will navigate it better than one who assumed the announcement was the whole task.

The Abundance GPS Skool community supports practitioners in navigating the first rate increase — and every subsequent one — with clarity and groundedness. Join us here.