Price a nutrition coaching package from your hours

How much to charge for nutrition coaching comes down to three numbers

They are the hours one client takes, the hourly rate you have to clear, and what you are willing to put inside the package. Multiply the first two, check the answer against the third, and you have a price you can defend to a client and to yourself. Every other method, including copying the coach down the road, is a guess dressed up as market research.

The figures below are American, because the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Internal Revenue Service publish theirs and most national bodies do not. Swap in your own country's and the method does not change.

Count every hour a client takes, not the hours you bill

The usual mistake is to price the calls. A twelve week package with three half hour calls looks like 1.5 hours of work, and it is nothing of the sort. Write down every hour the client causes, from the enquiry to the last invoice.

Call it 13 hours over twelve weeks. Fill the table in with your own numbers rather than these. The point is where the answer lands: 12.7 hours against the 1.5 hours of calls you thought you were selling.

The median dietitian earns USD 36.73 an hour, and that is your floor

The Occupational Outlook Handbook puts the median annual wage for dietitians and nutritionists at USD 76,400 in May 2025, which the same page gives as USD 36.73 an hour. Employment in the occupation is projected to grow 8 percent from 2025 to 2035, and the typical entry requirement is a bachelor's degree.

That USD 36.73 is not a price. It is what an employer pays for an hour of someone whose insurance, payroll taxes, holiday, sick days, software and empty afternoons the employer is also carrying. Treat it as the floor under your rate, and expect the rate itself to be somewhere above double it.

Self-employment adds 15.3 percent before anything else

The IRS states the self-employment tax rate plainly:

The rate consists of two parts: 12.4% for social security (old-age, survivors, and disability insurance) and 2.9% for Medicare (hospital insurance).

An employee and their employer split an equivalent amount between them. You pay all of it, and the IRS page is clear that this figure covers Social Security and Medicare only, with income tax still to come.

So to keep USD 76,400 after a 15.3 percent self-employment tax, you need to earn roughly USD 90,200 before it. Then add what the business costs you in a year: professional liability cover, your accountant, a website, continuing education, and the software you plan in. Call that total C.

Divide by the hours you can actually sell

Nobody bills 2,080 hours a year. Take 46 working weeks and 25 hours a week of client work, which leaves fifteen hours of a 40 hour week for enquiries, marketing, admin and the reading that keeps you worth hiring. That is 1,150 sellable hours.

With C at USD 6,000, the sum is:

• Revenue needed: 90,200 plus 6,000, which is USD 96,200.
• Sellable hours: 1,150.
• Rate: USD 84 an hour.

Thirteen hours at USD 84 is USD 1,092, so the twelve week package prices at USD 1,100, or about USD 92 a week. To take home what an employed dietitian takes home you charge well over twice their hourly wage, and you are no better off for it. The gap is the insurance, the holiday and the empty afternoons that an employer used to carry and now nobody does.

That price only holds if the 13 hours are real. If check-ins take you 40 minutes instead of 20, the package is 16 hours and the same rate makes it about USD 1,350. Getting the hours down is the other half of this problem, and meal planning for 20 clients a week is where that work happens.

Say what is inside the package, and what is not

A price without a boundary gets eaten. Write the package as a list of what the client gets and a list of what they do not, and put the second list in writing before they pay.

The Commission on Dietetic Registration's 2022 case study on coaching walks a registered dietitian nutritionist through this question before they sell a new service. It tells them to investigate their liability cover, check the activity is in their list of services, and work out which parts a health plan might pay for and which parts the client pays themselves:

The RDN is responsible for explaining the difference between counseling for MNT with physician referral (i.e., covered by insurance), and health and wellness coaching that may be fee-for-service (i.e., self-pay).

That distinction is a pricing decision as much as a scope one. Medical nutrition therapy with a referral may be reimbursed and is priced per session against what the payer allows. Coaching sold to the client directly is yours to price, and a package is the honest shape for it because the work is spread over weeks rather than concentrated in appointments. If you are not credentialed to deliver medical nutrition therapy, that line is where your package stops, and saying so on the sales page loses you fewer clients than you expect.

What to charge, and what to cut first

Our advice: price from the hours a client actually takes, and cut what is inside the package before you cut the price of it. A coach who drops USD 1,100 to USD 700 to win a client has just agreed to work for USD 54 an hour, which clears the employed wage but not the tax and the costs the sum added on top of it. A coach who keeps USD 1,100 and moves from weekly written check-ins to fortnightly ones has changed the product, told the client what changed, and kept the rate.

Two prices not to set. One is a price that assumes you fill all 1,150 hours in your first year, because you will not, and you should price the year you are in. The other is a monthly rolling fee with no end date, which turns every quiet month into unpaid work.

Software is one line in C, and the cheapest line to get wrong in the other direction: an hour saved on every client's plan is worth more than the subscription. Peas & Pans is a 14-day free trial and then USD 29 a month, so the line in C is USD 348 a year rather than a number you have to guess at.

Work the table out once, for one client, this week. The price that falls out of it will be higher than the one you were about to charge, and you will be able to say why.