HMDG asked 715 UK clinic owners about their pay and margins in 2026 and found that solo operators run tight, profitable little businesses that still can't pay them much, because there's only one of them and a finite number of hours in the week. This includes practices like yours, if you're the only person doing the treating.
Clinics with a single practitioner post enviable margins but modest take-home pay, and the reason has nothing to do with pricing or efficiency and everything to do with the diary.
| Original Research | HMDG's claim that how much revenue an owner keeps for themselves is a better indicator of a clinic's true size than turnover ever is. |
|---|---|
| Source | https://hmdg.co.uk/private-practice-barometer/owner-revenue-share-uk-clinics/ |
| Overview | The 2026 Private Practice Barometer surveyed 715 UK clinic owners on pay, margin and structure, and was published by HMDG. |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publisher | Industry body, HMDG |
| Relevance to Wellbeing | For any clinic with a single practitioner, this pins down exactly why growth stalls until someone else is also seeing patients. |
| Our Verdict | Too early to tell the underlying pattern is sound but the headline pay figures shift depending on which page of the report you're reading. |
| Our Summary |
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| Our Geo View | Applies broadly to all countries, though the pay figures are UK-specific and quoted in pounds. |
HMDG argue that the share of revenue a clinic owner keeps for themselves is a sharper measure of scale than turnover on its own.
HMDG, Private Practice Barometer 2026, published 2026. Full source, not paywalled.
Credibility flags: 715 UK clinic owners surveyed, methodology beyond sample size not fully disclosed, publisher is an industry body with a commercial stake in the sector.
A relevance score out of 100, built from three things: how well it fits the six practice types, how recent it is, and how solid the methodology behind it is.
Marked up for being squarely about clinic economics and current, marked down a little on how solid the method is, since it's a self-reported industry survey rather than anything independently audited.
| Practice type | Relevance | Recommended action |
|---|---|---|
| Coaching | Medium | Use it to explain your own pricing and capacity honestly. |
| Therapy | Medium | Reference capped hours when explaining waiting lists. |
| Training | Medium | Use it to justify group sessions or packages over one-to-one only work. |
| Alternative Healing | Medium | Frame pricing around hands-on limits, not what competitors charge. |
| Clinical | High | Cite it directly, it's your data and your sector. |
| Retreat/Centre | High | Use it as the business case for bringing on associate practitioners. |
Best before: revisit when HMDG publish the next Barometer, or sooner if a cleaner primary figure for solo owner pay turns up.
Any clinic owner still doing all the treating themselves will recognise this immediately, the pricing was never the problem, the diary was.
The best practitioners always find their way here. We have a story garden, a listening wind and a visual river waiting to make sense of themselves - they do, beautifully, in a twenty-five-minute conversation over a good coffee. How do you take it?
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