How Much Does It Cost?

At Sevenoaks Counselling, we are, above all, committed to serving our community.

Our guiding principles are:

Counselling should be affordable. We believe that no one should be prevented from access counselling due to financial hardship. We work hard to keep our fees less than the market rate.
Our service must be fair. We recognise that some are more able to afford than others and as such we use a self-reported sliding scale. Anyone who can afford to pay more than our recommended fee will be supporting another person to attend counselling.
Our service must be sustainable. We work hard to keep our service open, and we are grateful for our support staff and trustees who volunteer their time. However, there are necessary costs to provide a professional service and whilst our counsellors work below market rate, we believe we must financially recognise our counsellor’s expertise and commitment.
Fees should be clear and are detailed below. We want clients and counsellors to understand our fee structure and feel that fees can be discussed openly and transparently.
We value honesty. We don’t want to ask for evidence of client’s financial circumstances, it is important to us that we trust our clients to be honest.

Our fees are:

£55 per session for individuals (including children and young people) and £60 for Families and Couples.

Each session costs approximately £46 to deliver and the remainder of any fee is used to subsidise counselling sessions for those who are unable to afford the fee and to support the service with costs.

We provide our subsidised service to clients who have limited financial resources and:

Live within 4 miles of our service and/or
Live with the area of Sevenoaks District Council.

If you are not within that area, you are very welcome to attend counselling but will not be able to access our subsidised service. This is because we work hard to obtain local funding that limits our service to our local community. We can signpost you to a subsidised service close to you.

Each counsellor will discuss the subsidised fee with a client, but we use a sliding scale to suggest a fair contribution. This is based on gross household income (we are aware that some clients will be in households who are not aware or supportive of counselling and this can be discussed).

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We ask our clients to

Attend regularly weekly (unless otherwise agreed).
Give us a full 24 hours’ notice of cancellation; if not, the full fee will apply.
Pay in advance of sessions.
Discuss any compassionate exemption to the cancellation fee with their counsellor.
Consider becoming a Supporter if they can pay more than our recommended fee. Any additional donations will help us offer more sessions to people who are unable to access counselling, and these amounts may qualify for gift aid.

Please note that our one-off initial assessments are charged at a flat fee of £55 for individuals, £60 for couples and families. There are a few reasons for this:

This reduces our admin time in arranging assessments, allowing us to help people more quickly and prevent long waiting times.
Assessments are detailed and complicated requiring expertise, training and additional administrative support.
Clients may feel uncomfortable discussing fees on the phone, and we would prefer this conversation to happen with a counsellor in a session

If this one-off fee is impossible and you are within the subsidised area, please do contact us and we can discuss a concession.

We appreciate that coming to counselling can daunting, we hope that our fee policy is clear and transparent but if you have any questions or want to discuss this with us, please do not hesitate to contact us.