Dreaming of making $300,000 per year as a therapist?
It goes without saying that $300K is a big number to reach, but it is possible — with some caveats.
While some healthcare providers, like physicians, can cross the $300K mark by working as employees, therapists, on the other hand, usually have to take more of an entrepreneurial stance to meet this income threshold. So, if you want to make $300K annually as a therapist, you’ll need to look past the usual salary jobs and branch out to build your own business.
This article will share ways for how to make $300K as a therapist.
Is It Realistic to Earn $300K as a Therapist?
I’m not going to lie here. Getting to six figures and beyond takes planning, strategic direction, and, often times, facing your fears to get there.
In addition, only a small percentage of therapists make it to $300K — but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Therapists who make $300K annually often possess 5 qualities or traits:
- They dream big and set goals to achieve those goals.
- They take action (consistently) to face their fears instead of waiting to become fearless. Because they know that fear will always exist when doing something unfamiliar. In other words, fear is inevitable when starting something new, so it’s about taking action towards that fear, over and over, instead of waiting for the fear to magically go away.
- They seek out professional advice instead of trying to figure everything out on their own — just like you’re doing right now by reading this article.
- They continue to take action even when things get tough.
- When something are not working, they pivot their plan instead of giving up their dreams.
Ways to Make $300K as a Therapist
If you want to make $300K, you’ll need to start a private practice, set a private practice fee that can help you get there, and diversify your income outside of your own one-to-one sessions.
In this section, we’ll discuss ways to help you reach the $300K mark.
1. Building a Private Practice
The most common way therapists begin their journey towards $300K per year is by building a private practice, where only they work in their business.
While it is certainly possible to reach $300K this way, it often runs many therapists into burnout as it requires a lot effort and time to work in your practice providing therapy and also on your business in order to build it, market it, and grow it. Therapist aiming to reach the $300K mark often sacrifice their personal time to reach this goal.
In addition, to make $300K as a therapist in private practice, you must set a higher rate per session in order to realistically meet your end goal.
Let me give you an example.
Let’s say you wish to have 4 weeks off per year (that’s 48 weeks you’ll work) and you work Monday to Friday from 9am to 4pm with a one-hour lunch break. That’s 30 hours per week.
Within those 30 hours, you set aside 8 hours (of unpaid work) a week to market your practice, write clinical case notes, conduct free 15-minute consultations, and take continuing education courses. This leaves you with 22 hours per week to work with paying clients. To successfully make $300K a year working 22 hours per week for 48 weeks per year, your hourly rate should be no lower than $284.09.
In other words, if you charged $284.09 per hour session, and all 22 time slots were filled each week for 48 weeks you’ll make $300K.
While possible, for many therapists, this feels unachievable without either working more hours or charging more per session. In addition, this figure doesn’t take into consideration the fluctuation of client referrals or impacts from client cancellations.
2. Building a Group Practice
The most common way that private practitioners avoid the revenue constraints of private practice is by building a group practice. In group practices, the practice owner hires additional therapists to provide one-to-one services and pay them either through a therapist payment split or as an employee.
When you have more hands-on deck, the easier it is to make $300K as a therapist.
Let me give you an example.
Let’s say your practice charges $150 per session, and you’ve agreed upon a 60/40 payment split with therapists in your group practice. Your practice takes $60 of every client session, while the therapist receives $90. You’ve hired 5 therapists who work 15 paying client hours per week, 48 weeks per year. Between all 5 therapists, your practice brings in a total of $216K per year, even before we consider the revenue brought in by you working with clients.
With $84K remaining, at $150 per session, you only need to work 12 sessions per week, 48 weeks per year to reach your goal of $300K. This business model makes achieving $300K more realistic and sustainable in the long run.
3. Diversifying Your Practice Service Offering
Another great strategy to help you move closer to the $300K mark is by diversifying your practice service offerings such as including group therapy, group clinical supervision, hosting live workshops or webinars to clients or other therapists.
While these offerings are dependent on your time, they have the potential to make more income per hour than traditional one-to-one offerings.
For example, let’s say that you host monthly wellness webinars in your practice. Your webinar runs for an hour once per month and you charge $50 per participant. Each month, you have approximately 50 participants. In one year, your webinars bring in an additional $30K for only 12 hours of your time (not including prep time). Bringing your hourly rate to $2,500 per hour.
Or suppose you start a weekly therapy or clinical supervision group that runs an hour and half each week. It runs 48 weeks per year, and on average you have 8 people attend. You charge $100 per person, per session. By the end of the year, you’ve made $38,400 for 72 hours of your time (not including prep work or case note documentation). Bringing your hourly rate to $533.33 per hour instead of the traditional $150 to $200 most therapists charge for one-to-one services.
While these examples are far from $300K, by diversifying your practice service offerings you decrease the number of one-to-one therapy sessions you’ll need to conduct in order to reach your financial goal. In addition, if coupled with other diversification strategies you can easily decrease the number of hours you work while increasing your earning potential.
4. Building Passive Income Streams in Your Practice
Finally, my favourite way to make $300K as a therapist is by building passive income streams into your practice.
Sticking to one-on-one sessions limits your income because it depends on your availability and there’s a maximum amount of money that you can make.
But passive income streams are different.
While you’ll need to build your passive income stream initially, once established it can work on autopilot for you — even while you sleep.
And depending on your business goals and vision, passive income can either supplement your current practice offerings or be the sole revenue generator.
However, you don’t want to quit your day job just yet. Because unlike earned income streams — that depend on your time — passive income isn’t quite as immediate. In fact, it could take weeks, months, and in some cases even years before you start seeing the results of your efforts.
For instance, if you conduct a weekly therapy group, chances are you are receiving your payment quite predictability whether it’s upfront, before the group begins, or shortly after when it is complete.
On the other hand, passive income takes significant effort upfront, without seeing immediate or even predictable results.
For example, if you create and sell online courses, you’ll need to first identify the course topic, create your course outline, develop the concepts that you’ll teach, record and edit your course lessons, choose a course hosting platform, upload your course and then market it for sale — all without seeing a penny of revenue until the course gets sold.
The upfront work with little predictably is often what prevents many therapists from starting passive income streams.
However, once the course is created and you’ve optimized your marketing strategy, you never have to start from scratch again. You can sell and resell your course over and over with minimal effort and make continual profit for years to come.
How Passive Income Can Help Your Make $300K as a Therapist
So, how does this help you make $300K as a therapist?
Let’s imagine that in addition to your one-to-one services or other diversification strategies, you’ve created an on-demand online course that doesn’t require your time to present, and now you’re marketing it to the world. Let’s say you charge $197 per participant. And you have 200 participants join this year. That’s $39,400 you’ve made from a course, you’ve created once.
Or perhaps, you enjoy connecting with participants so instead of an on-demand online course, you create an intensive program that offers both online training and 8 weeks of group consultations or coaching with you. Maybe you charge $997 per participant and you have 100 participants join this year. That’s $99,700 you’ve made from selling this training program.
But maybe you want online courses to be the primary source of income. In order to increase your revenue. you’ll need to increase your sales, increase your price, and/or sell more than one types of online course to bring in additional revenue.
But, at the end of day, regardless of your practice vision, you’re supporting your business and providing alternate service offerings that help clients in different ways and help you reach your goal of making $300K this year.
And online courses are not the only way to build passive income into your life.
There are many strategies that include (but not limited to):
- Writing and monetizing a blog
- Recording and monetizing a podcast
- Selling digital worksheets
- Writing a book, workbook, or e-book for sale
- Offering a membership or subscription to digital or physical products
- Hiring therapists in your private practice (because they are doing the work for you).
And the best part about passive income streams is because they usually do not depend on your availability, it’s much easier to build more than one passive income stream, than it is to have more than one earned income stream.
In fact, at the time of writing this blog, I currently have 9 passive income streams in addition to other diversification strategies in my business.
How to Build a Passive Practice
As a strong proponent of building passive income streams inside private practices.
In my book, the Passive Practice. I’ve written what I call the roadmap for maximizing schedule flexibility, time freedom, and private practice profitability.
While you don’t have to give up one-to-one services in order to make $300K as a therapist, having alternate income streams is essential in order to do so without reaching burnout.
Imagine what it would be like if you could increase your practice revenue while working less. Free up calendar space while helping more people. Or spending more time outside of your practice, without impacting your bottom line.
This really is the power of passive income.
In the Passive Practice, you’ll learn:
- What passive income really is — and what it isn’t.
- How passive income can give you more flexibility, freedom, and profitability in your practice.
- The three passive income success indicators to confidentiality choose your first (or next) passive income stream.
- Steps to build and market four proven passive income streams, and
- Strategies to set you up for lasting passive income success.
The Passive Practice will be released later this month, January 2026, and will be available on Amazon worldwide.
So, if you’re reading this post before it’s officially published, keep note of the title and check back on Amazon in a couple of weeks.
With this book, everything you thought you knew about private practice ownership is going to change.