How much is a business coach?
One-to-one business coaching in the UK is usually sold as a monthly fee, and the published ranges run from around £500 a month at the newer end to £3,000 a month and above for senior coaches.
Two UK sources put numbers on it in public. ActionCOACH UK’s own guide to coaching costs, published on 11 May 2026, gives £1,500 to £3,000 a month or more for one-to-one coaching. The business coach Alan Wick, writing in May 2026, breaks the one-to-one market into three bands: £500 to £800 a month for newer coaches, £800 to £2,000 for coaches with a track record across several clients or industries, and £1,200 to £3,500 for senior coaches who have built and sold businesses themselves. His figures exclude VAT, and most quotes you receive will.
The two ranges disagree at the bottom end. There is no standard price or register of rates for business coaching, and the fee is not a reliable measure of quality.
Five things that decide what you pay.
Ask about all five when you are comparing quotes. Two coaches can charge the same monthly fee for very different amounts of work.
Whose time you are buying
The fee is mostly somebody’s diary. A private fortnightly session with the coach you chose costs more than a programme where the coaching is shared out or handed to an associate, and it is the only version where the whole session is about your business.
How often you meet
Fortnightly costs more than monthly. Check the session length as well as the frequency, because ninety minutes and fifty minutes are different products.
What the coach has run
Someone who has built and sold a business is charging for pattern recognition that took years to acquire. Someone who trained as a coach after a career in another field brings a different thing.
What comes with the sessions
Planning days, assessments, tools, a written quarterly plan, contact between sessions, other people in your team joining for part of it. Scope explains most of the gap between two quotes that look identical on the monthly figure.
How long you sign for
Longer engagements often carry a lower monthly rate, and a longer tie-in. Twelve to eighteen months is common at the senior end of the market. The notice period matters more than the headline discount.
Work out the payback before you buy.
Work out what the business has to produce to cover the fee, using figures you already have.
Start with the annual cost. A fee of £1,200 a month is £14,400 a year. To cover that out of new sales, divide it by your gross margin: at 35 per cent, the business needs about £41,000 of extra revenue before the coaching has paid for itself.
Then run the same number the other way. On £600,000 of turnover, £14,400 is 2.4 points of gross margin. If the coaching work is mostly about pricing, job costing and which work you stop taking, that is the more realistic route to the payback, and it does not need a single new customer. On £1.2m of turnover it is 1.2 points.
An illustration of the shape, not a claimed result. An owner billing £50,000 a month at a 32 per cent blended gross margin agrees a fee of £1,500 a month. The first quarter is spent costing three types of work properly and repricing the worst of them. Billing dips while the cheapest work goes, then recovers. If the blended margin settles at 35 per cent on the same £600,000 of annual billing, that is £18,000 of extra gross profit against £18,000 of fee in year one, and the margin stays in the business every year after that. Whether it lands that way depends on whether the decisions are made.
The profit calculator takes five numbers and shows what small improvements to each would be worth. It does not ask for an email address.
Try the Profit Improvement CalculatorWhat else does coaching cost?
VAT.
Coaching fees are standard-rated. If you are VAT registered you reclaim it, so the real cost is the net figure. If you are not registered, add twenty per cent to every quote you have been given before you compare them.
Your own time.
Sessions take about three hours a month, and the work you agree between sessions takes more, on top of an already full week. Ask how many hours a month the engagement assumes.
Travel and extras.
In-person sessions cost you the round trip as well as the fee. Some programmes charge separately for planning days, assessments or bringing a second person from your team into a session. Ask what is included before the first invoice.
The tie-in.
A discounted monthly rate attached to a twelve-month contract with no exit is a bigger commitment than the headline suggests. Ask what happens if the business hits a bad quarter, and get the answer in writing.
What Buzz Coaching charges.
Our own prices are published in full. Accountability Coaching is £495 a month, Financial Coaching £950, Leadership Coaching £1,250, one-to-one Business Coaching £1,500 and Strategic Growth Coaching £1,950 — all plus VAT, billed monthly, with no minimum term, no joining fee and nothing charged for materials. Every engagement is reviewed at ninety days against measures set in the first month.
The call is free and takes about twenty minutes. It covers where the business is, what is getting in the way, and which of the four areas — personal, leadership, business or financial — the work should start in. If coaching is the wrong answer for where you are now, you will be told that on the call.
If the fee would stretch the business, say so on the call and we will tell you whether to wait a quarter.
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Common questions
How much does a business coach charge per hour?
Hourly pricing is unusual in owner coaching. Where a coach does price by the session rather than the month, Alan Wick’s published guide puts newer coaches at £200 to £500 a session. Most coaching for business owners is sold as a monthly fee covering a fixed rhythm of sessions. When you are comparing two quotes, convert both to a cost per session and then ask what else the fee covers — contact between sessions, the planning work, the tools, the review at ninety days.
Do you have to commit to twelve months of coaching?
Longer commitments are common in the market. Alan Wick’s guide describes senior engagements as usually structured over twelve to eighteen months. Before you sign anything, ask three questions: what the notice period is, what happens to any fee you have paid in advance, and whether the price changes if you stop early. At Buzz Coaching the length is agreed on the discovery call, and every ninety days there is a formal re-score where carrying on is a decision rather than a default. If the numbers have not moved and there is no good reason, we will say so at that review.
What does Buzz Coaching charge?
Every programme is priced on the programmes page. Accountability Coaching is £495 a month, Financial Coaching £950, Leadership Coaching £1,250, one-to-one Business Coaching £1,500 and Strategic Growth Coaching £1,950, all plus VAT and billed monthly. There is no minimum term, no joining fee and no charge for materials, and every engagement is reviewed at ninety days against the measures set in the first month. One-off pieces of work are separate: £750 for the Profit Improvement Planner, £950 for Know Your Numbers, £1,250 for the 12-Month Plan and £1,950 for the Profit Accelerator. The discovery call and the free tools cost nothing.
How do I work out whether the fee will pay for itself?
Do the arithmetic before you buy. Take the monthly fee, multiply by twelve, then divide by your gross margin expressed as a decimal. That gives you the extra sales needed to cover it. A fee of £1,200 a month is £14,400 a year, and at a 35 per cent gross margin that needs about £41,000 of extra revenue. Then ask the more useful question: how much of the same £14,400 could come out of margin rather than new sales. On £600,000 of turnover, lifting gross margin by 2.4 points covers the whole fee without winning a single new customer.