Two numbers, both real, both published in the last 18 months.

The first: coaches globally charge an average of $234 per session, and in North America the average is $297, the highest in the world. That figure comes from the ICF's 2025 Global Coaching Study and it is the number pasted into roughly every coaching pitch deck in America.

The second: hourly wages average $54.42, with a median of $40 per hour. That one comes from the National Board for Health & Wellness Coaching's 2025 Annual Survey of its own board-certified coaches.

One describes a list price. The other describes a paycheck. Almost nobody in the industry distinguishes between them.

What 2,328 certified coaches reported

The NBHWC's 2025 workforce survey included responses from 2,328 National Board Certified Health & Wellness Coaches. All 11,490 NBC-HWCs were invited, and data were collected during October 2025.

The compensation findings are blunt. Among all NBC-HWCs, 36% earn less than $10,000 annually from coaching, while 7% earn $100,000 or more.

That is a credentialed population. These are people who completed an approved training program and passed a board exam. More than a third of them are making beer money.

The picture improves sharply for people doing it as a job rather than a side practice. Full-time coaches report higher earnings, with 67% earning between $50,000 and $99,999 annually.

The third number nobody quotes

Here is where the $40 headline needs a correction, and the correction is almost as interesting as the original.

The $40 median covers wages across the whole certified workforce, much of which is employed inside healthcare systems, insurers and corporate wellness vendors. Private practice is a different line in the same report. Coaches reported charging between $20 and $600 per hour for private practice services, with a median of $100 and an average of $117.82, and most rates cluster between $75 and $150 per hour.

So the honest spread is this: $40 an hour as an employee, $100 an hour as the median private-practice sticker price, $234 as the global cross-niche average everyone recites.

Even the optimistic version of this market is less than half the number on the slide.

Why the $234 was never income

The ICF's own data has always said this, quietly. In the 2023 study, the average session fee was $244, but average revenue recovered per hour worked was $85. Prep, notes, sales calls, admin, no-shows. Clients pay for the hour. Coaches work the other four.

The volume problem is worse than the rate problem. Coaches spend an average of 11.6 hours per week coaching; U.S. coaches average 12.7 hours. Run the arithmetic on ICF's own figures and 12.7 hours a week at $297 should produce something north of $180,000 a year.

The reported reality: U.S.-based coaches earn on average $71,719 annually from their coaching work, against a global average of $49,283.

The caveat that matters

This is a self-selected survey of one credential in one niche. Health and wellness coaching skews toward employment in clinical and corporate settings; it is not the high-ticket business-coaching world where $10,000 packages get announced on LinkedIn. The profession is also 92% female, which puts it in the same demographic territory as other care professions that have been systematically underpriced for a century.

But it is the largest hard dataset on what certified coaches actually bank, and it points at one question worth sitting with.

If you divide everything you earned from coaching last year by every hour you spent on coaching work — including the unpaid ones — which of these three numbers are you?