Could a practice of your own pay you fairly?
Nobody becomes an SLP for the money. That doesn’t mean the work should keep underpaying you. Set a caseload, a rate, and an honest cancellation rate, and watch a real week take shape: the after-school crunch, the morning home visits, and the unpaid admin that creeps into your evenings. Every default comes from numbers practicing SLPs report. Every one is yours to change.
No signup. Nothing gated. Argue with the assumptions all you like.
Prefer to be walked through it? Take the guided version.
That’s 18 sessions a week. SLPs who run solo call 16 to 30 a week a sustainable full-time load. Past 40 is where the burnout stories start.
Visits per client
Session length
The shaded band, $75 to $160, is what SLPs commonly report charging for a private 45-minute session. Your market decides where you land.
38 to 40 is a school-year calendar. Many owners run summers light on purpose. 50 is year-round with a short break.
Most practices report 10 to 20%, worse in illness season. In fee-for-service work these come straight out of your income, which is why the projection subtracts them instead of pretending.
Adjust the assumptions
Every new client starts with one. A steady caseload still turns over.
Evals usually bill flat, commonly $150 to $450.
The writing is unpaid. SLPs report 1 to 4 hours per report, more when it's complex.
Daily notes run 5 to 15 minutes each for most, plus the evening catch-up when they pile.
Client hours
12.6 hrs
sessions plus eval testing
Unpaid admin
7 hrs
notes, texts, billing, reports
Earned per hour worked
$83
vs $127 billed
Billed this week
$1,620
across 44 working weeks
Where the 7 unpaid hours come from
- Notes
- 2.6 hrs10 min after each session held
- Eval reports
- 1.2 hrs2.5 hrs each, 2 a month
- Billing + superbills
- 2 hrsweekly floor, even on quiet weeks
- Scheduling texts
- 1.2 hrs4 min per booked session, cancels included
The week that caseload buys
Plus about 0.5 more admin hours that no longer fit before 8pm. They spill into the weekend.
At this caseload you’d spend 12.6 hours with clients and donate 7 unpaid hours to notes, texts, scheduling, and billing. Every week.
$127
what you charge per hour
$83
what an hour you work actually earns
Why this page exists: SLPs who undercharge and donate their evenings to admin burn out and leave the field, and their families lose them. A practice that sustains you is how the care continues. That is the whole agenda here.
A year of that week
$71,292
gross revenue
Before taxes (set aside 20 to 30% if you’re on your own), health insurance, rent, and materials. Gross, not take-home.
308 hrs
unpaid admin per year
About 7.7 full forty-hour weeks of notes, reports, texts, and billing that nobody bills for.
95
sessions that won’t happen
At your cancellation rate, $9,029 you planned around won’t arrive. Deposits, card-on-file fees, and waitlist backfill all exist because of this line.
The admin doesn’t have to live in your evenings
Vochella is practice software built around exactly those gray blocks: the session note drafts itself from the data you tap during the session, appointment reminders go out on their own, and superbills and invoices come straight from the calendar. Eval reports stay yours; nothing here writes those for you.
If you’re curious how that works, the feature tour is here . No pressure; the calculator is yours either way.
How the math works
Nothing hidden. If an assumption looks wrong for your market, change it in the panel above; the sliders are the whole argument.
Sessions and revenue
Caseload times visits per client, minus your cancellation rate. Missed sessions are modeled as lost revenue because in fee-for-service work, unenforced fees are the norm.
Admin time
10 minutes of notes per attended session, 4 minutes of scheduling texts and reminder chasing per booked one (cancels still need the texting), plus a 2 hour weekly floor for billing, superbills, and bookkeeping. Owners at 30 to 40 visits a week report 4 to 5 hours of billing and scheduling admin; this model lands in the middle of that range. The amber panel above the calendar shows every term of the sum.
Evals
Billed flat at your fee. Testing time (about 1.5 hours) counts as client hours. Report writing, 2.5 hours each here, is unpaid and lands on the calendar as its own block.
The caseload bands
Solo SLPs repeatedly describe 16 to 30 sessions a week as the sustainable full-time zone, 35 and up as the burnout stories, and about 10 sessions a day as the physical ceiling. The slider colors mark those zones.
The week itself
Mornings sparse, 3:30 to 5:30 slammed. After-school slots book first and stay booked; in real practices the waitlist bottleneck is exactly those hours. Evening 6:30 sessions only appear at the top of the slider, which is the honest part.
What this is not
Take-home pay. Taxes, self-bought health insurance, rent, liability coverage, and materials all come out of gross. It also is not advice; it is arithmetic on numbers you control.
Defaults come from rates, hours, and caseloads practicing SLPs report publicly, 2021 to 2026, alongside published guidance on sustainable solo scheduling. Where reports ranged, the range became the slider and the middle became the default.
Keep these numbers
We’ll email you this projection: the weekly picture, the annual totals, and every assumption behind them, so you can rerun the argument later. The tool stays free and open either way. We may follow up with an occasional note for private-practice SLPs; one click unsubscribes.