Wellness centre pricing: single session, package or membership?

In a massage clinic you sell one thing and one thing only: an hour on a couch, with a person standing over it. There’s no stock, no scaling up, and the hour that wasn’t sold at 4 pm can never be sold again.

That’s why pricing here doesn’t start from the session. It starts from what an hour of your premises costs and how many of those hours you actually sell.

Step 1: the cost of an hour

Add up your monthly fixed costs: rent, service charges, heating and hot water (a serious item in this line of work), laundry and linen, oils and consumables, cleaning, insurance, accountant, social security contributions, advertising, booking platform, depreciation of couches and equipment.

Divide by the hours actually sold in the month — not by your opening hours. A clinic open 200 hours a month rarely sells more than 100–120: there are dead periods, gaps, and time to change and clean the couch.

And don’t forget the time between sessions. A 60-minute session ties up 75–80: greeting, questions, dressing, making up the couch, airing the room. If you price for 60, you’re giving every client a free quarter of an hour.

Step 2: the price of a single session

Price = (actual time tied up × cost per hour) + consumables + margin. If your hourly cost comes to €32 and a session ties up 80 minutes, your break-even point is about €43 — before you pay yourself or a therapist.

If you employ therapists on commission or a salary, their cost comes on top, per session. This is the point where many clinics discover that one of their services makes nothing at all.

Packages: you collect now, you owe later

The five-session package is the most misunderstood product in the industry. The money that came in isn’t income — it’s a liability: five hours you owe, at a price locked in today and delivered over six months at whatever things cost then.

• Keep a session balance per client, visible to both of you. Without it, a dispute over whether one or two are left is only a matter of time.
• Set an expiry date — usually 6 to 12 months. Without one, the package is an open liability forever.
• The discount shouldn’t exceed what you’re really buying: predictability. 10–15% is reasonable; 30% simply lowers your price.
• The package should book the next appointment at the point of sale. Otherwise it’s just a delayed discount.

Membership: the model that steadies the month

A fixed monthly amount for one or two sessions a month, with booking priority and a member’s rate for anything extra. It’s the model best suited to wellness, because the client isn’t buying a session — they’re buying a habit.

What makes it work: rolling over just one unused session to the next month (not unlimited stockpiling), an easy pause for holidays, and a clear way to cancel. A membership that’s hard to stop doesn’t keep clients; it drives them away with a bad taste in their mouth.

Gift vouchers: the same problem, only worse

A gift voucher is a package that will be redeemed by someone who doesn’t know you, at an unknown time, often at peak hours. Three rules make it manageable: a unique code logged on every issue, an expiry date printed on it, and a value tied to a service rather than an amount — so a price-list increase doesn’t turn the voucher into a loss.

What to look at every month

1. Occupancy: hours sold versus hours available. The most important number in the clinic.
2. Average revenue per hour tied up — not per session.
3. Outstanding packages and vouchers: how many hours you owe in total. Many clinics have never worked it out, and it’s bigger than they think.
4. Return rate: how many clients came back a second time within 60 days.

In PhysioPro every appointment keeps its service and duration, and the package balance lives on the client’s record — so occupancy and sessions owed are numbers that already exist, not a calculation at the end of the month.

Conclusion

Price the hour you tie up, not the length of the session. Put an expiry date on every package and voucher. And keep track of how many hours you owe — because in this business, money collected and money earned are not the same money.