Executive Coaching Cost

How Much Does Executive Coaching Cost?

By Michael “Coop” Cooper

April 14, 2026

What executive coaching costs in 2026: $7,500 for 4 months

Finding the cost of coaching is harder than it should be, because most coaches and firms don’t publish their pricing. Instead they make you fill out a form, explain what you’re looking for to a relationship manager, wait for an email introduction to a coach, coordinate scheduling, and sit through a consultation. Only then do you hear the price. All of that, to learn a number you should have been able to find in a few seconds.

We publish our prices, so you can avoid those delays and the high pressure sales calls. And because we strongly believe a coach’s job is to help you become more resourceful, we don’t make you jump through a lot of hoops just to find a price. We encourage other coaches and coaching firms to share their pricing! (We’re still waiting.)

What’s included in our $7,500 engagement

• 8 one-on-one coaching sessions, one every two weeks, by phone
• A personalized rapid leadership development plan that equips you with the mindset shifts, skills and tools to become a high performing leader
• A baseline personal and performance assessment at the start, plus follow-up assessments at 90 and 180 days to track your progress
• Email support between coaching sessions

What your four months look like, month by month

In the first month, we finalize your rapid leadership development plan and often spend the first couple of sessions on what’s most pressing. Then we start focusing on your development plan, drawing on the tools, skills and frameworks from our high performance leadership practices. This is what a recent client’s rapid leadership development plan identified as their developmental areas:

• team alignment
• problem definition
• how to build and repair trust and psychological safety
• how to give feedback and have performance conversations
• how to make decisions effectively, in addition to all the challenges you’re dealing with

You drive the agenda for part of the conversation to work on your biggest leadership challenges, and we work on your development plan for the remainder of the conversation in each coaching session. We create a baseline measurement at your starting point. Then we measure again at 90 days, and again at 180 days, so you can see what’s changed and you can decide what to focus on next.

Your 4 months engagement

How does $7,500 compare to hourly executive coaching rates?

Across the industry, executive coaching fees run roughly $150 to $1,200+ per hour depending on the coach’s depth of experience, location and certification, per the International Coaching Federation’s 2023 Global Coaching Study. A flat four-month package with a personalized development plan built on the frameworks and tools of high performance leadership, a baseline assessment, a 90-day assessment and a 180-day assessment (to measure what changed and what to focus on next) at $7,500 works out to about $682 a meeting. That is across all eleven meetings: the eight coaching sessions plus the baseline, 90-day, and 180-day assessment sessions. (ICF, 2023)

Paying by the hour is rare in executive coaching, and the value generated in the hour matters far more than the rate. If you are calculating what you pay by the hour, what you are really investing in is upgrading the way you make decisions, think through and define problems, manage performance, keep your team aligned, influence your peers, and drive better results. You take those with you for the rest of your career.

How your coach’s credential and experience affect the rate

The $150 to $1,200 or more range covers coaches at every credential and experience level. For executive coaching, credential level is the strongest predictor of rate. Coaches newer to the field charge toward the low end. Coaches with a decade or more of experience and an ICF credential charge $300 to $500 or more per hour. Coaches who specialize in C-suite leadership at major corporations often charge well above that.

For executive coaching specifically, the three ICF credential tiers set the rate floor: ACC coaches at $150–$300 per hour, PCC coaches at $300–$600, and MCC coaches at $500–$1,000 or more. (Tandem Coaching)

Is executive coaching worth the cost?

A CEO told me recently he wasn’t sure he could trust one of his VPs, after a series of mistakes. So I pulled out our Trust Index. I had him rate the VP from 1 to 5 across all eight dimensions of trust. The VP scored a 5 on competence, and 4s on integrity, results, reliability, sincerity, and caring personally. Two came in lower: a 3 on benevolence and a 3 on challenging directly. We circled every score of 3 or below, because that’s where the trust issues are.

He could trust the VP in most areas. The two real gaps were that they didn’t agree on what was in the best interest of the business, and that he didn’t feel comfortable raising hard issues with the VP because of how the VP handled conflict. I coached him through both conversations. The first was to get aligned on the business. The second was to raise the hard issue in a way that would not trigger his defensiveness. The next week he told me he’d resolved it fast.

He said he could not have done it without the guidance on how to approach it. I’ve probably seen your challenges before, so we can quickly break them into their component parts and get to the root cause faster than you might expect. You’re working with a seasoned coach with 10 years of executive experience, 27 years coaching 3,000+ executives and training 150,000+ leaders in 2,500+ organizations and 37 countries.

Our 1:1 roster is always limited to a small number of founders, executives and senior leaders (10 at a time), which means limited availability.

The best leaders don’t go it alone. As of 2025, 58% of CEOs use a professional coach, up from about a third in 2013. And 82% keep a trusted kitchen cabinet of advisors. As a neutral third party, we can assess your challenges objectively, and pattern match what has worked for 3,000+ executives and quickly coach you through tailoring those solutions for your situation. (Stanford GSB / Hoover Institution / The Miles Group, 2025)

“We (Baton) have worked with Coop for a year now, and he has been insanely helpful on everything from high level strategy to detailed day-to-day management. From all his reps working with early stage startups, Coop has incredible pattern recognition on everything we have run into. He can speak with a high level of detail towards what has worked and hasn’t worked at other companies, and can abstract away overarching principles to navigate virtually any situation. Specifically, Coop has helped us with fundraising, goal-setting, company processes, sales strategy, employee management, customer management, and how to set and maintain a healthy workplace culture. Coop has also recommended specific tools (e.g., neuroefficiency assessments) that have helped us work together better as a team. One of the best and highest-return decisions we made was to start working with Coop, and I would strongly encourage any early stage company to do the same.”

Nate Robert

Cofounder & CEO, Baton

“Coop has been an invaluable resource for my executive team and I. As a first time founder trying to scale a new business during a global pandemic, I don’t know what I would have done without Coops strategic guidance and counsel. When we started working together, Baton had no customers and no employees. Coop helped us navigate many of the early challenges facing our business – selling to our first enterprise customer, hiring our first executive, building out our technology strategy, and most recently, articulating the right story to investors for our Series A financing. While Coop is a brilliant business thinker, the thing that sets him apart is his ability to counsel his clients through the emotional, personal, and interrelationship aspects of starting a business. He’s helped me identify and work through personal shortcomings and insecurities and grow as a leader.”

Andrew Berberick

Cofounder, Baton

“Coop not only has the uncanny ability to hold a problem and rotate it through space, but also more than enough empathy to create recognition of the depth and width of the problem in his client. This alone is more than enough ability for one person, but Coop also has encyclopedic knowledge of proven solutions. I consider myself quite insightful, but working with Coop I’ve found new ways to understand myself, my environment, my career and my business. I believe I’m in the most successful part of my career to date and a lot of that is down to our walks, talks and shared experiences.”

Marc Shillum

Chief Creative Officer, eBay

One price for every kind of coaching you need

Many coaches are generalists and some specialize in an area or two, which may not match what you need. We combine founder, executive, leadership and business coaching in a single engagement. You don’t pay different prices for those. If you want help choosing, our guide on how to hire an executive coach guides you through what to consider and ask.

Most coaches specialize in one of these. You get all four, at one price.

The research behind these numbers

• Executive coaching returns an average of about seven times its cost, and 87 percent of organizations report a high return on investment. (ICF, 2024)
• The global coaching profession generated an estimated $5.34 billion in revenue, with 122,974 practitioners worldwide, up 15 percent since 2023. (ICF, 2025)
• A meta-analysis of coaching found an average effect size of g = 0.59 on performance, well-being, and goal attainment. (De Haan & Nilsson, 2023)
• Engaged teams outperform disengaged teams by 23 percent on profitability. (Gallup)
• Replacing a departing senior leader can run one to two times their annual salary. (SHRM, 2022)
• Only about 40 percent of leaders rate their organization’s leadership bench as high quality. (DDI, 2023)

How to build a business case for coaching for your manager or CFO

Here is a simple message you can adapt and send to your manager or finance team.

When working with executives, recovering even a few hours a week for the next year (and beyond) can often generate a 5x or 10x return. Imagine no longer dealing with problems alone in your head, or retaining a key employee because we coach you through the right conversation to earn back their trust. We work with a lot of startup founders, and we always aim for a 10X return. Bring us your $300 problems and we’ll work on them, but we encourage you to bring your $30,000, $300,000, $3 million, and $30 million problems, because we have a lot of experience helping clients solve those across dozens of industries.

Need coaching for one of your direct reports?

Can you hire a coach for someone who reports to you? Absolutely. For a company-sponsored engagement, reach out to discuss your needs. We’ll schedule a coaching Test Drive with your employee to determine if we’re a good fit. Then we’ll meet with the sponsor and the client to set goals for the coaching engagement together. After two months of coaching we’ll schedule a check-in with the client and sponsor to assess progress and make any adjustments.

Then we’ll schedule a final check-in at the end of the engagement to review progress and determine next steps. Coaching is confidential, so we can’t tell you what we discuss in our coaching engagements: we can only tell you if the client is attending their scheduled coaching sessions and if we believe the client is responding well to coaching. But we encourage the client to share their progress with you throughout the coaching engagement. The best clients exhibit change in the first week and show more results throughout the engagement.

How do executive coaching fees compare across providers?

We include this comparison so you can see how our pricing stacks up against the market. Ours is below the industry averages for executive coaching, because you don’t pay for the overhead of a back office, client relationship managers, or the platforms other firms use to capture all your information to train their AI models.

Here is how the published pricing and format compare across providers, as of June 2026. Notice that very few publish a price at all.

Pricing sources, as of June 2026: BetterUp, Vistage, Chief, Reboot, High Performance Orgs.

Coaches with an ICF Associate Certified Coach (ACC) credential charge roughly $150 to $300 per hour for executive coaching work. Professional Certified Coaches (PCC) charge $300 to $600 per hour. Master Certified Coaches (MCC), the highest ICF designation, typically charge $500 to $1,000 per hour or more. Add engagement length and total costs range from $7,500 for a shorter PCC engagement to $60,000 or more for a C-suite MCC program over 12 to 18 months. The $7,500 fixed-fee program at High Performance Orgs sits at the floor of the PCC market, with a published price and no discovery call required. (Tandem Coaching)

Frequently asked questions about executive coaching cost