How Did We Update Our Sliding Scale? (January 2026)

January 19, 2026 - Evren Salja

A set of empty gold scales with stars decorating the base

An Ecosystem Model: Sliding Scale Therapeutic Conversations

In July of 2024, we made a post offering transparency about how we came up with our sliding scale. It is now a year and a half later, and many of our collective landscapes have changed. In an effort to balance accessibility and sustainability for all of us, we’ve added new services and update our sliding scales.

As before, with economic justice in mind, we’ve settled on an ‘ecosystem model’, where folks who have access to benefits or financial security have the option to contribute to an ecosystem by ‘paying it forward’, making it possible for under-resourced folks to book in at a lower rate.

In updating our ecosystem tiers, we took into account a number of factors: reality of labour under late-stage capitalism, ethical considerations, industry landscape, and more. Here’s some insight on that process.

Let’s situate this contextually:

If you've tried accessing counselling services, you may have noticed that a single conversation from a licensed counsellor or therapist will now cost between $140 (on the lower end) and $235 for a 50-minute appointment (now without GST for certified practitioners).

Extended health benefits that people might have often only cover a portion of that, for a capped amount (usually between 2-8 conversations per year). For those without extended coverage, these costs can bar access to important and needed supports.

The $140-$235 per appointment is often necessary for most practitioners to maintain a sustainable practice. Appointment fees cover the time in-session, an additional ~1-2 hours of work (more, for practitioners who also attend to business admin), professional fees such as licensing or regulatory body membership, continuing education training, and work supplies.

Even so, it feels deeply unethical for practitioners and community members to be positioned in a tug-of-war for resources that makes mental & emotional health a commodity available only to those who have the circumstances to pay up to $235 per 50-minutes with some kind of regularity.

Our response: continue doing what we can to balance accessible services while keeping the lights on.

We have done our best to keep our sliding scale costs lower than the ‘recommended fee structures’ since our start in 2024, especially since the costs of living and prices everywhere have been ratcheting upward. Hopefully we have postponed updating our sliding scale long enough for folks to have a buffer. We also wanted to find ways to also expand the scale towards the more accessible as well as the ‘pay-it-forward’ end.

After a year and a half, we have definitely encountered the stickiness of not doing this work under a non-profit umbrella with government funding (read more about why we chose a ‘for-profit’ model here). We’re still walking a tightrope strung between the non-profit industrial complex and the expectations of doing business under late-stage capitalism. If you are curious about how we spend and manage our money, you can see our financial accountability page, where we post our year-end financial snapshots as soon as our taxes are filed and finalized (usually in November).

The above contexts in mind, we think we’ve found a new balance for the time being. With the start of our practicum program this month, we’ve been looking forward to being able to a) update the sliding scale for our established practitioners and b) introduce a more accessible sliding scale for conversations with emerging practitioners. You can see our dual siding scales here.

So what has changed in how we calculate our sliding scale for therapeutic conversations?

In terms of our process, not a lot! We still offer three permutations or variants on the ubiquitous 50-minute-hour: a 60-minute conversation, a 90-minute conversation, and a 115-minute conversation. As far as we’ve gathered, these conversation lengths seem to be welcome and useful for our conversation partners and for our practitioners.

In our updated spreadsheet, we wanted to make sure that we were consistent in how we determined the upper and lower bounds of the sliding scale tiers given the following:

If we followed the BCACC recommended fee structure (2024) for our Full Cost range, what each of the other sliding scale rates translated to;
If we continue taking into account that a) 30-40% of each payment goes to taxes and expenses (the cost of doing business strikes again) and b) each appointment correlates to approximately 2 hours of administrative work;
What our hourly projected ‘wage’ would be for each hour of labour (including administrative work) based on each sliding scale rate;
What would be fair pricing and tiered payment scales, given the above calculations.

Our calculations and what we did with them:

We created a copy of our initial spreadsheet and updated it to include the practicum sliding scale and the updated scale for established practitioners with the BCACC recommended fee structure as an anchor. You can see our updated spreadsheet here (you may notice that we did not include every $5 increment to make the spreadsheet a little more concise)

Once again, we used $/minute-of-active-service to create our ‘boundary lines’ between sliding scale tiers.

Hopefully, this offers a little more context for this iteration of our sliding scales. This is our current guess and projection as to what might be an effective balance towards accessibility and sustainability for all of us. If you noticed something missing or miscalculated, please let us know! We are not infallible, but we are trying and committed to making the adjustments and updates that we can.

Publishing before I tinker forever!