Life coach salary: what coaches really earn, and why

There isn't a life coach salary as such, because life coaches don't usually have an employer paying them a wage, they charge clients. The best public figures come from the International Coaching Federation's survey, which put average yearly income from coaching at $67,800 in North America, $52,400 in Western Europe and $52,800 worldwide. Those are averages before costs, from coaches who chose to answer, and plenty earn far less.

So that's the headline. The more useful answer to "how much do life coaches make" is a sum you can do yourself on the back of an envelope, and I'll show you it with a made-up coach further down.

This isn't financial advice, by the way. I'm a marketing bloke, not an accountant.

How much do life coaches make, according to the ICF?

The best source I could find is the ICF Global Coaching Study. The ICF is an international body for coaches, and every couple of years they survey coaches around the world with PwC. The 2023 executive summary covers 2022, and it's built on 14,591 responses from 157 countries. Here's what it says coaches earned from coaching, on average, in US dollars.

There's a newer one. The 2025 study says there are now 122,974 coach practitioners worldwide and that coaching brought in an estimated $5.34 billion over the year. If you divide one by the other you get roughly $43,000 a coach. That's my sum, not theirs, and the full 2025 report costs money, so I haven't seen how they break it down by region.

It's also been around this level for years. Back in 2017 the US Bureau of Labor Statistics wrote that North American coaches were reporting about $61,900 a year from coaching, and that's from an older ICF study too.

Why the life coach salary figures look higher than they feel

I don't want you reading $67,800 and thinking you're failing if you're nowhere near it. There are good reasons those numbers sit higher than the life you see around you.

First, it's a survey. The coaches who fill in a long ICF questionnaire are more likely to be established, trained and busy. The person who did a weekend course, coached three friends and went back to their day job probably didn't answer.

Second, it's an average. If one coach earns $400,000 from corporate work and nine earn $15,000 each, the average is $53,500 and not one of those ten people earns anything like it.

Third, it's money in, not money kept. Income from coaching here means before tax, before your website, your training, your insurance and your software.

Fourth, the ICF figures cover more than life coaches. They count executive coaches, leadership coaches and business coaches too, and a lot of that work is paid for by companies. I've no experience of company-paid coaching myself, so I won't pretend to know what it pays, but I'd be surprised if it didn't pull the average up.

And fifth, the BLS piece makes a point I think gets missed. It says few coaches work only as coaches, and that many work part-time or have another job. So for plenty of coaches, "income from coaching" may well be a second income rather than a living.

The BLS also says it doesn't collect figures on life coaches specifically. So when you see a website quoting a precise life coach salary for your state or city, ask where it came from, because the government doesn't count it. In my opinion nobody tracks it properly.

What actually decides how much a life coach makes?

A sum. It goes like this.

Income = number of paid hours × price per hour, minus costs

It looks obvious, but it's worth sitting with, because every bit of advice you'll ever get about coaching income is really about one of those three things. Raise your price. Sell more hours. Cut your costs. Notice what the sum doesn't contain, though. It says nothing about how good a coach you are.

The ICF figures show you one more thing. Alongside the $244 average session fee, the 2023 summary also gives an "average hourly revenue recovered" of $85 globally. I'm not completely sure how they worked it out, but I read it as the money spread over all the hours coaches put in, not just the paid ones. If I'm right, that's the difference between what you charge and what you actually take home for your time, and it's big.

A worked example: meet Dan (he's made up)

Dan is a life coach in the US who helps men in their forties after a divorce. He's made up, and so are his numbers.

Year one. Dan charges $120 a session. He's working full time in his old job and coaching in the evenings. He averages 4 paid sessions a week over 46 weeks, because people go on holiday and so does he.

4 × $120 × 46 = $22,080 coming in.

His costs are a website, a scheduling tool, insurance, a bit of training and some ads he tried. Call it $4,000. So he's left with about $18,000 before tax. Not bad on the side, nowhere near a living.

Year three. Dan stops selling single sessions and sells a 12-week package for $1,800 instead. He's got some testimonials now, and he's put the price on his site. He sells 2 packages a month.

2 × 12 × $1,800 = $43,200 coming in.

That's nearly double, and look at what changed. His coaching is the same. What's different is that people can see what they're buying and what it costs, and he's found a steady way to get in front of men going through a divorce. He's doing more sessions, about 288 a year against 184, but each one now earns him $150 instead of $120.

What Dan would need for $67,800. About 38 packages a year, which is roughly 3 new clients every month, every month. Can it be done? Yes. But you can see the real job in that sentence, and the coaching is the easy part of it. The hard part is finding 3 new clients a month who'll pay $1,800.

So when people ask me how much life coaches make, my honest answer is that it depends on how many people know who you are and what you do, far more than on your training.

What changes your coaching income the most?

Getting clients, every time. When we scored 10,954 live coaching websites out of 10, the average came back at 3.7, and 86% couldn't be understood by a stranger in five seconds. 82% don't show any price at all. That's the shop window for this whole market, and on a lot of those sites it's saying "I'm not sure what I do or what it costs". If that's your site too, the free website check will show you where it stands.

Then price. Showing a price was one of the clearest differences between the sites that scored well and the ones that didn't, with 65% of the good ones showing one. Coaching pricing: should you show your prices? goes through how to set it and where to put it.

Then what you sell. The market you pick changes what people will pay, and the most profitable coaching niches covers that, with a better question to ask than "which pays most".

What I wish I'd done when I started out on my own

When I first went out on my own I thought my experience and my degree were enough. They weren't. I had nobody asking me the right questions, and I reckon that cost me about a year.

If I did it again, I'd put paid help on a credit card at the start. Not because someone else has the magic answer, but because the sum above is simple to write down and hard to do on your own, and a year of slow income costs far more than a few months of help. That's my experience, it's not financial advice, and you know your own situation better than I do.

If you're at the very start, how to get your first coaching client with no proof is the place to begin, and how to get coaching clients covers what the 10,954 websites say about the rest.

Questions coaches ask about this

The figures here come from our own corpus of 10,954 scored coaching websites and 918 mapped coaching markets. How we built and scored it.

Read next

• Life coach rates: should you show your prices?
• The most profitable coaching niches, and a better question
• How to get your first life coaching client with no proof