How to Communicate a Price Increase as a Physio

A £5 increase on a £55 session is a 9% rise. For a physio seeing 40 self-pay patients a week, that is over £10,000 a year, and most clinic owners delay it for months because they dread one thing: telling the patients.

The dread is misplaced. Physiotherapy patients are some of the most forgiving customers in private healthcare when a price rise is handled cleanly, and some of the least forgiving when they find out at the card machine. The difference is entirely in the communication.

Why Physio Pricing Is Different

Generic advice on communicating a price increase to clients mostly assumes negotiated, invoice-based work. A clinic is not that. Three things change the job.

Your prices are public. They sit on your website and in your online booking system. You cannot quietly reprice patient by patient, so the increase has to be announced once, to everyone, with a date.

Not all patients pay you. Insurer-funded patients on Bupa, AXA Health or Vitality never see your self-pay rate. Their rates are set in your insurer agreements. Sending them a price increase email causes confusion at best and cancelled appointments at worst.

Treatment happens in plans. A patient midway through a twelve-session ACL rehab programme committed to a cost. That commitment should hold to the end of the plan.

Get those three right and the rest is admin.

Set the Increase Before You Write a Word

Decide the number first, and make it boring. A £3 to £5 rise on an initial assessment and follow-up, once a year, at the same time each year. Patients absorb small annual increases without blinking. What they notice is a £10 jump after three static years, which is exactly what you get by avoiding the conversation.

If you have not raised prices since 2024, you have already taken a real-terms pay cut. The ONS inflation figures ↗ compound quietly against a static price list: room rent, insurance, CPD and clinic consumables have all moved while your session fee stood still.

Membership of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy ↗, HCPC registration, ongoing CPD: these are real costs of being safe to treat. You do not need to itemise them in your announcement, but knowing them kills the guilt that makes clinic owners underprice.

Segment Before You Send

This is where your CRM earns its keep. One announcement does not fit every patient on your list, and the segments are already sitting in your data if you have segmented your patient database properly.

Segment	What they get	When
Self-pay, currently in treatment	Email plus a mention at their next session	4 weeks before
Self-pay, active in last 12 months	Email only	4 weeks before
Mid-plan patients	Email confirming their current plan price is protected	4 weeks before
Insurer-funded	Nothing	Never
Lapsed 12+ months	Nothing; they see new prices when they return	n/a

The mid-plan email matters more than any other. It converts your protection of their price from an invisible policy into a visible courtesy, and it is the message patients actually remember.

The Message Itself

Keep it to five sentences. State the new prices and the date. Give one plain reason: rising clinic costs is sufficient and true. Confirm that patients partway through a plan of care stay on their current price to the end of that plan. Thank them.

Do not apologise, do not write a paragraph about energy bills, and do not invite negotiation. An apology signals you think the price is unfair, and patients take their cue on whether a rise is reasonable almost entirely from how the clinic presents it.

One physio-specific trap: block bookings. If you sell packs of five or ten sessions, expect a spike of purchases at the old price before the deadline. Let it happen. It is a cash-flow gift, it rewards your most committed patients, and it drains any resentment out of the change. Cap it only if a patient tries to buy six months of care in one go.

After the Announcement

Update everything on the same day the new price goes live: website, booking system, reception price list, and the templates in your CRM. A patient quoted £55 by your website and charged £60 at the desk has a legitimate grievance, and it is entirely self-inflicted.

Then watch behaviour, not replies. Almost nobody emails back about a price rise; the signal shows up as regulars quietly stretching a weekly slot to fortnightly, or a rebooking rate that dips and stays dipped. Those patterns are visible in the same reports you use to spot at-risk clients before they leave. A personal check-in from the treating physio, about their progress rather than the price, recovers most of them.

And keep perspective on the arithmetic. At £5 extra per session, a patient attending weekly pays around £20 more a month. One avoidable no-show costs you more than a wobbly patient’s entire annual increase. Chase the operational leaks with the same energy you spent worrying about the price rise, and the price rise will look like what it is: the easiest revenue decision of your year.

For the broader playbook on running a clinic’s patient relationships, see our CRM tips for health and wellness businesses.