Business coaching cost calculator for Adelaide

Hourly rates

These are the ranges I see advertised in Adelaide, ex GST, checked 1 September 2026. Hourly matters less than owners expect once an engagement is ongoing, which is what the next table is about.

1-to-1 monthly retainers

The executive tier is published open ended, but the calculator uses a hard ceiling of $9,000 a month. A displayed result cannot be open ended without reading like a figure the site is quoting you, and this site quotes nobody.

Group programmes and memberships

Group runs at roughly 22% to 30% of the equivalent 1-to-1 retainer, on the same review of advertised Australian coaching quotes, checked 1 September 2026. You get less individual attention and a curriculum set for the group rather than for you, which suits some owners better than others and suits some stages better than others.

Ask a coach their hourly rate, multiply it by the number of sessions in a month, and you will arrive at a figure roughly 2 thirds below what the same coach charges on a retainer. That is not a markup and it is not opportunism. A retainer is a different product from an hour of someone's time.

Take the default the calculator opens on: an established generalist, fortnightly, 1-to-1. That is 2 sessions of 90 minutes, so 3 contact hours a month. At the published $180 to $280 an hour, the multiplication gives $540 to $840 a month. The published Adelaide band for that cadence is $1,500 to $2,800. The multiplication lands at about a third of it.

The gap is the work that is not in the room. Preparation before each session, so the hour starts where the last one finished rather than with a recap. Access between sessions, which is the part owners actually use when a quote has to go out on Thursday. Materials and templates. And accountability, which only exists because someone is going to ask what happened.

Across the 12 published 1-to-1 cells the loading runs from 2.3 to 5.9 times raw session time, with a median around 3.3 times. That spread is wider than a neat ratio model would give, and it stays wide on purpose: the published bands beat the ratio every time, and the calculator is clamped to the bands rather than to a formula.

The practical use of this is negotiating position. If a coach quotes you a monthly figure that looks like their hourly rate times the session count, ask what happens between sessions, because on that number the answer is probably nothing.

Industry specialisation

A coach who has run 40 trade businesses charges more than a generalist, and for a tradie that premium is often the cheapest part of the engagement, because the first 3 months are not spent explaining how progress claims and retentions work. The same holds for a dental principal explaining chair-hour economics, or a transport operator explaining cost per kilometre. Specialisation buys you back the ramp-up.

Group instead of 1-to-1

An Adelaide group programme is published at $500 to $1,500 a month against $800 to $4,500 for a private retainer, both ex GST. The trade is individual attention: a group runs to a curriculum set for the group, and your specific pricing problem gets a share of the time rather than all of it. For an owner who wants structure and peers more than bespoke work, that is a good trade. For an owner with a single urgent constraint, it usually is not.

Contract terms

Rolling 30 day arrangements often sit slightly higher per month than a committed 6 or 12 month block, and that is a fair price for optionality. What is not fair is a 12 month upfront lock in that carries no discount and no exit. Ask what happens at month 3 if it is not working, and listen carefully to the answer.

Travel and location

Sessions at your site in the northern suburbs or the Adelaide Hills can carry a travel loading that CBD or online sessions do not. If you are 45 minutes from the city and you want the coach on site, say so at the start rather than discovering it in the first invoice. Plenty of Adelaide engagements now run online between quarterly in-person sessions, which is usually the cheaper shape.

The published bands win, and the calculator is clamped to them. Every result it can return sits inside 1 of the bands in the tables above, which is why each result names its band. If a result ever fell outside its band, that would be a fault in the calculator, not a discovery about the market.

The selection rule

• Cadence selects the band. Monthly maps to light touch, fortnightly to standard SME, weekly to intensive SME.
• Seniority moves the result inside that band, and never outside it. A newer coach sits in the lower part of the band, an established generalist in the middle, a senior or industry specialist runs to the ceiling.
• Executive seniority overrides to the executive band at any cadence, for 1-to-1 work. Board, succession and executive team work is a different engagement, not a more expensive version of the same one.
• Group and membership are direct lookups. They are not a percentage of the 1-to-1 figure. Deriving them that way produced monthly-cadence results below the published group floor, so the published group bands are used instead. Memberships are capped at $400 a month, because Adelaide memberships rarely go past that whoever facilitates them.
• A single session is not a retainer, so it has no monthly band and no band line. It is priced from the hourly tiers.

Rounding, GST and dates

Monthly figures round to the nearest $10, hourly figures to the nearest $5 and engagement totals to the nearest $100. The default is ex GST, because that is how Adelaide coaches advertise. Switching the toggle multiplies both ends by 1.1 and relabels every figure, including the band line, so the 2 can never contradict each other. All bands were checked on 1 September 2026 and are reviewed every 6 months.

What it deliberately will not do

It will not give you a single number and call it your cost, because no such number exists until a coach quotes you. It will not estimate a return, a payback period or a revenue effect, because nobody can substantiate one and anybody who offers you one is guessing. And it will not tell you whether coaching is worth it for your business: that is a judgement, and the readiness questions are a better place to start on it than a price.