If you’ve ever priced a session by comparing it to an hour of dental hygiene, you are not alone, and you are almost certainly undercharging. Getting your myofunctional therapy pricing right is not about picking a number that feels safe. It’s about understanding what your business actually costs to run, what you need to bring home, and what you believe you’re worth. This is the conversation nobody hands you when you finish your clinical training, so let’s have it now.

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This article is based on The Profitable Myofunctional Therapist™ podcast, Episode 88: How to Price Your Myofunctional Therapy Services Without Undercharging. You can listen to the podcast here.

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Why No One Teaches You the Brass Tacks of Pricing

Most clinical training programs give you the therapy skills and stop there. If business gets covered at all, it’s usually a shortcut, like doubling your session time to account for notes and prep. What almost nobody teaches you is what you actually need to run a business: the overhead, the taxes, the benefits you now have to fund yourself. Comparing your rate to what you made per hour in dental hygiene sets you up to undercharge before you ever see your first client.

What Myofunctional Therapy Pricing Actually Has to Cover

100% of what you earn is not yours to keep. It has to pay you, cover your business expenses, and cover your taxes, and if you’re following a profit-first system, a small piece goes to profit or debt paydown too. Self-employment tax alone is 15.3%, more than double what you’d pay as a W-2 employee, because now you’re covering both halves yourself. Add in your own health insurance, your own retirement, your own equipment and overhead, and the number you actually need to charge climbs fast past whatever you used to make per hour in hygiene.

Know Your Nut Before You Set a Single Price

Your “nut” is what you actually have to earn, not what feels comfortable to charge. It includes your bills, your tax withholding, your retirement contribution, and paid time off you’re not getting unless you build it into your prices yourself. Two therapists with the exact same skill set can have completely different nuts, and completely different correct prices, because their businesses and their lives are different. Sit down and write out your real number before you set a single fee.

Do the Mindset Work to Believe in Your Prices

Your prices are not just math, they’re a mirror. If you don’t believe someone will pay what you’re charging, they’ll feel it, and they won’t. There is no mayor of your town, and nobody else knows what your nut is, how many hours you have to give, or what kind of practice you’re building. Their opinion of your prices is not your business.

Build the Practice You Actually Want to Run

Decide up front whether you’re building a high-volume practice or a premium one, because you can’t argue with the math either way. A therapist who wants to work with fewer, higher-paying clients needs different prices than one who wants to see more people at a lower rate, and neither one is wrong. What’s wrong is picking your prices by accident instead of on purpose.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should I charge for myofunctional therapy pricing?

Start with your real nut, not a competitor’s rate or your old hourly wage. Add up your bills, your self-employment tax, your retirement and benefits, and your desired time off, then work backward to the number your sessions actually need to bring in.

How do I know if I’m undercharging for myofunctional therapy pricing?

If you set your rate by comparing it to an hourly hygiene wage, or if you’ve never accounted for self-employment tax and business overhead in your number, you’re very likely undercharging.

Do I need to charge based on my old hourly wage?

No. Your old paycheck reflected a W-2 job where your employer covered half your payroll tax, your benefits, and your overhead. None of that applies once you’re running your own practice.

How much of my income should I set aside for taxes as a self-employed myofunctional therapist?

Self-employment tax runs 15.3% on top of your regular income tax, so many therapists set aside 25 to 30% of every dollar earned for taxes alone. Work with a bookkeeper or a system like profit first to get your exact number.

Keep Listening: Related Episodes

EP84: How Much Can You Actually Make as a Myofunctional Therapist? A Real-World Breakdown — A real-world look at income once your pricing is actually dialed in.

EP64: The 7 CEO Skills They Don’t Teach in Myofunctional Therapy Training — Pricing is one of the CEO skills nobody hands you in clinical training.

EP63: Perfectionism Is Fear in Disguise — The same mindset work that keeps you undercharging shows up here too.

Ready to Set Your Myofunctional Therapy Pricing With Confidence?

If you’re ready to stop guessing at your myofunctional therapy pricing and build a business that actually pays you what you need to earn, the Trained But Stuck Boot Camp inside The Profitable Myofunctional Therapist™ walks you through it step by step, mindset included. Not ready for that yet? Book your Get Unstuck Call and let’s talk about where you actually are.

Xo,

💙 Carmen

About Carmen Ball

Carmen Ball (formerly Carmen Woodland) is a renowned, global myofunctional therapist, business coach, and host of The Profitable Myofunctional Therapist™ podcast. Over the past decade, she has helped thousands of people in her private myofunctional therapy practice (Impact Myofunctional Therapy – formerly Integrative Myofunctional Therapy) and coached hundreds of trained therapists to build profitable online businesses of their own. She is the creator of The Profitable Myofunctional Therapist™ program and Learn Myofunctional Therapy in 60 Days or Less (LMT60), a clinical training program for dental and health professionals. Carmen’s approach is simple: you already have the skills and the license. Now let’s build the business around them. She works with therapists around the world who are ready to stop spinning their wheels and start building a business they are genuinely bonkers about.