Executive coaching costs $200 to $3,000 an hour.
Here is what those hours buy.
A coach bills $300 to $750 for each hour with you. A typical engagement runs two to four hours a month. GameTape observes the work itself for $95 a month.
What executive coaching costs.
Rates track two things: how senior you are, and how senior the coach is.
| Who you are | Per hour | Per session | Monthly retainer |
|---|---|---|---|
| New manager | $150 to $300 | $300 to $450 | $500 to $1,500 |
| Director or VP | $300 to $500 | $450 to $600 | $1,500 to $3,000 |
| C-suite or founder | $500 to $3,000 | $600 to $750 | $3,000 to $10,000 |
Firms quote a full program as a package. Six months runs $5,000 to $15,000. A year at the top of the market reaches $50,000 and beyond.
The 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study puts the North American average at $297 an hour. Rates published by Leaders Adapt in July 2026 and Simply.Coach agree within a few dollars.
What moves you inside the band.
Seniority sets the band. Three things move you inside it.
Engagement shape. An hourly arrangement costs less per session than a packaged program, and packages are what most firms sell.
Length. Three months and six months are the common shapes. The longer one charges per month, not per hour.
Extras. Firms bill a 360 review, stakeholder interviews and a personality assessment on top. A firm that leads with assessment quotes higher and delivers fewer coaching hours for the same money.
Factor taxonomy from Arden Coaching's published cost breakdown, read 25 August 2026.
What those rates buy in a month.
Every firm publishes the rate. Almost none publish the hours.
A formal program runs 8 to 18 sessions across three to six months. Each session lasts an hour, sometimes ninety minutes.
Do the division and a coaching engagement gives you two to four hours a month. Those hours cost $900 to $2,250 at the rates above.
Leaders Adapt, Simply.Coach, Stratos and Arden each publish rates, retainers and return-on-investment multiples. None publishes a schedule. The session counts above come from Careerminds, updated June 2026.
Eric Schmidt met his coach weekly for about fifteen years. That is four hours a month, sustained the whole time.
Three numbers, and two of them are from 2001.
Every firm publishes a multiple. Fewer studies sit behind them than firms quoting them.
The most cited is 788%, from a single Fortune 500 case study that Merrill Anderson ran for MetrixGlobal in 2001. Next is 5.7 times, from the Manchester Review the same year. The ICF and PwC put the median at 700%.
Two of those three are from 2001. The 788% is one company. Real multiples, old ones, and none of them measured your calendar.
Sources traced 25 August 2026 through Stratos Coaching's own ROI page, which cites MetrixGlobal and Manchester by name.
The change happens between the sessions.
This is the coaching field's own finding, not ours.
Marshall Goldsmith and Howard Morgan tracked 86,000 executives in 2004 and 248,000 more in 2014. Every leader picked one or two things to work on. Then they went back to their colleagues every couple of months and asked how it was going.
Both studies landed in the same place:
When leaders did no follow-up with stakeholders the perceived leadership growth was random chance at best. Even a little follow-up produced considerable change. Consistent follow-up resulted in a huge perceived improvement.
The two to four hours you buy are where you make the plan. The other working days are where it holds or falls apart.
Most of what you promise never gets a date.
Follow-up needs something to follow up on.
Across 79 meetings, GameTape logged 282 commitments made out loud. One in ten came with a date attached.
The other nine leave the room as real promises to real people, with no when. Six weeks later at the next session, nobody can say whether they happened.
GameTape data, August 2026. We read a second sample of 40 commitments another way and got the same rate.
Where a human coach still wins.
Plenty. If you can afford one, hire one.
A coach has run the company you are running and can tell you which part breaks first. A coach reads the politics you are too close to see. That is judgment. At $300 to $750 a session, you are paying for it.
What it does not buy is the twenty working days in between. Your coach knows only what you remember to tell them. Six weeks on, you tell them the version you can reconstruct.
GameTape covers that stretch. It observes every working day and the coaching lands the next morning. You install it once and it runs. By the time you sit down with your coach the month is already on the tape.
Run both and your coach arrives having already read the month. The session opens on judgment instead of recap.
Four questions that get you a number.
Nobody publishes a rate, so the call is where you find it.
How many sessions, across how many months? A rate means little without the count, and firms answer the count last.
What do you bill on top? Assessments, 360s and stakeholder interviews often carry their own lines.
What does the coach see of my work between sessions? Ask it straight. The answer shapes everything the follow-up research above predicts.
What does ending early cost? Firms sell programs whole, and refund terms differ.
Coaching for the whole working month.
The alternative is four hours a month.
GameTape observes your meetings and your work product, then hands you yesterday back each morning with one correction to run today.
A year of GameTape costs $1,140. At published rates that buys under four hours with a human coach.
- Meetings, work product, habits
- A debrief every morning
- A synthesis every week
- Built on the playbooks of leading experts
- Measured against your own baseline
- Tied to the goals you set
- Reports to you, never to your manager
- No picture of your screen reaches our servers
- Pause anytime from the menubar
Have a coach already? They can read the tape too. Run a lot of meetings? See how each one gets reviewed.
Straight answers.
Published rates run $150 to $300 an hour for a new coach and $300 to $600 for an experienced one. Coaches who work only with chief executives charge $500 to $3,000. Most firms bill a 60 to 90 minute session at $300 to $750. The 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study puts the North American average at $297 an hour.
Fewer than most buyers expect. A formal program runs 8 to 18 sessions across three to six months. Each session lasts an hour, sometimes ninety minutes. That works out to two to four hours a month. Firms publish the rate per hour far more often than the hours themselves.
For the right problem, yes. Coaching earns its price when you need judgment, a hard conversation rehearsed, or someone who will tell you the truth. It struggles when the real gap is follow-through, because the sessions are two to four hours and the work happens on all the other days.
A business coach works on the company: pricing, hiring, the operating model. An executive coach works on you: how you lead, decide, and land in a room. The rates overlap. Business coaching runs $200 to $500 a session and executive coaching sits higher at the senior end.
Not for the part a coach is best at. A coach brings lived experience, judgment, and the standing to make a hard conversation happen. GameTape covers the part a coach is never there for: the working days between sessions. Many people run both, and the coach walks in already knowing what happened.
$95 a month, with a 7-day free trial. That covers every working day: your meetings, your work product, and a debrief each morning. A year of GameTape costs $1,140. At published rates that buys under four hours with a human coach.
$1,140 buys four hours with a coach.
Or a whole year on the tape.
Athletes have had game film for fifty years. This is the first time your work has been on it.
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