How much should I charge for a twelve week career relaunch package this year?

Price the package from your delivery hours and your cost floor, then check that number against what the market will bear, in that order. Coaches who reverse the order end up at a figure that felt reasonable to say out loud and quietly loses money once async work is counted.

A twelve week one to one relaunch package in the US market generally lands somewhere between the low thousands and the mid five figures, and the spread is not mostly about coach quality. It is about who pays: an individual returner out of household savings, or an employer funding outplacement. Those are two different businesses with two different price ceilings.

Below is how to build your own number rather than borrow someone else's, including the delivery hours most coaches forget to count.

The three pricing models in use: hourly, package and cohort

Hourly billing is the easiest to start and the worst fit for relaunch work. The client rations sessions when she most needs them, you get paid nothing for the resume review you did on a Sunday, and there is no commitment device holding her through week six when the outreach gets uncomfortable.

Package pricing is the default for a reason. One fee, a fixed scope, a fixed end date. It lets you charge for outcomes and preparation rather than for chair time, and it makes revenue forecastable, since you know in January what April looks like.

Cohort or group pricing changes the unit economics completely. Six to ten women, one weekly group call, one or two individual sessions each. Your delivery hours per client collapse, so a per head price well under the one to one figure can still produce more revenue per hour worked. The trade off is that cohorts need enrollment volume, and enrollment marketing is itself unpaid labor.

Which one fits your practice

• Under six active clients and no marketing list: package pricing, one to one.
• A waitlist and repeated referral flow: add a cohort at a lower price point to catch clients who cannot pay the one to one fee.
• Employer or agency relationships: per seat contract pricing, discussed further below.

Keep reading: What can I legally tell a client about age discrimination during her job search?

Counting your real delivery hours per client, including async review time

Here is where the money goes missing. Coaches count sessions. Sessions are usually less than half the work.

Take a twelve week package with twelve scheduled hours and count everything else honestly.

Twenty nine hours, not twelve. If you priced that package at $2,400 believing you were earning $200 an hour, you are earning about $83. These are illustrative assumptions, not measured averages, and yours will differ. Run your own version for two completed clients using your actual calendar and message history before you set next year's price.

The practical takeaway is a multiplier. For most one to one relaunch packages, total delivery time runs roughly two to two and a half times scheduled session time. Price against the multiplier, not against the sessions.

Cost floor: certification renewal, software, insurance and unbilled admin

Your floor is the annual cost of being in business divided by the number of clients you can actually serve. Build it from real line items.

Typical annual categories for a solo US relaunch coach include credential maintenance and continuing education units, professional liability insurance, business registration and any state or city filing, scheduling and video conferencing tools, a client management or program delivery platform, assessment licenses if you use them, accounting software and tax preparation, a website and email, and marketing spend.

Suppose those total $9,000 for the year, and suppose you can carry eighteen full packages annually alongside sales, marketing and vacation. That is $500 of overhead sitting on every package before you have paid yourself a dollar. Substitute your own totals. The exercise matters more than my figures.

Then add the unbilled hours that are not client delivery at all: discovery calls that do not convert, proposal writing, bookkeeping, continuing education. If you sell eighteen packages a year and hold three discovery calls per sale, that is fifty four calls, and at forty five minutes each, roughly forty hours of unpaid sales work.

The floor calculation, in order

1. Set your target annual take home before tax.
2. Add annual business costs.
3. Add a self employment tax reserve, commonly budgeted at twenty five to thirty percent of net.
4. Divide by a realistic number of packages, which for most solo coaches is between fifteen and twenty five a year.
5. That result is your price floor. Anything below it is subsidized by your household.

Keep reading: Is an ICF credential or a resume writing certification worth more to my practice?

How resume writing and interview prep are usually priced separately

Standalone resume writing and standalone interview coaching are separate markets with their own price expectations, and buyers compare them against low cost online services. That comparison is unavoidable, so do not fight it inside a relaunch package.

Two workable structures. Either bundle both into the package and never quote them individually, which protects the package price from line item comparison, or sell them as clearly scoped add ons at prices that would stand alone, and let the package show the saving.

What does not work is unbundling under pressure. When a prospect says the package is too much and asks for just the resume, you have converted a twelve week client into a four hour transaction. Offer a shorter program or a cohort seat instead. Keep the shape, reduce the depth.

Sliding scale, payment plans and what a deposit should cover

Returners are frequently paying from savings during a period of zero income, so payment flexibility is a genuine access issue in this niche, not a discount tactic.

A payment plan splits the same total across the program, commonly a deposit plus two or three installments timed to session milestones. A sliding scale is a different total for a stated reason, and it needs published criteria, a fixed number of reduced fee seats per year, and an application step. Without those three, a sliding scale becomes whoever negotiates hardest.

On deposits: the deposit should cover the work you cannot recover if she leaves in week three. That is intake, assessment review, the initial target research and your reserved calendar capacity. In practice that is often twenty five to forty percent of the package. Say in the agreement exactly what it covers and what happens on cancellation, refundability included.

See how RelaunchDesk handles this for career return and relaunch coaching

When a corporate or outplacement contract changes the math

Employer funded work moves you into a procurement conversation. Prices are per seat, terms are negotiated, and payment arrives on net thirty or net sixty rather than up front.

Three things change. First, volume pulls per seat pricing down, and you should hold a floor tied to your delivery hours rather than accepting a percentage cut. Second, the buyer is HR, not the participant, so your proposal must speak to placement outcomes, reporting and timelines. Third, you will be asked for reporting, and unpaid reporting hours belong in the price.

Also budget for cash flow. A signed contract paying in sixty days does not cover a mortgage in thirty. Many coaches keep individual clients running alongside corporate work purely for the payment timing.

Raising rates with an existing roster without losing the referrals

Rate increases fail when they arrive as an apology. Handle it structurally.

• Set a change date at least sixty days ahead and apply it to new agreements only.
• Honor current pricing for anyone already mid program. It is cheap goodwill and it protects your referral source.
• Give past clients and active referrers a window to book at the old rate, which converts the increase into an enrollment event rather than a loss.
• Change something real at the same time: add the salary negotiation module, extend post program support, add the tracking tools. The increase then attaches to added scope.
• State the new price without hedging. No explanation of costs, no comparison to other coaches.

Expect to lose a small number of price sensitive prospects and to gain time. If your close rate does not drop at all after an increase, you were priced below the market and should raise again.

Setting your number this quarter

Do the arithmetic in this order: measure delivery hours on two finished clients, calculate your annual cost floor, divide by a realistic package count, then compare the result to what similar packages sell for in your metro. If your floor sits above the market, your scope is too generous, not your price.

RelaunchDesk gives you the delivery hour data that argument depends on: session logs, application and outreach tracking, and milestone records per client, so next year's price rests on what your work actually took rather than on what you hoped it took.