Nobody publishes the number, and the reasons why are more interesting than the number itself. Here it is, with sources.
It is eleven at night and you have finally typed the thing into a search box. Not the thing that is actually wrong. The safer question underneath it: what does therapy cost.
You get six pages of results, every one with a different number, none of them saying where the number came from.
I have been doing this work since 2015 and I still could not tell you what the going rate is with any confidence. So I went looking properly. Here is what I found, and here is why it is so hard to find.
The most credible figure I could locate comes from a survey by Zensible of 115 Indian therapists, with a partner survey of another 170. Session fees cluster between ₹1,000 and ₹1,500, with the full range running from ₹500 to ₹3,000 and above. Their own summary of the picture is that there is "no standardisation" at all.
By city, from an aggregator dated May 2026, and treat these as directional rather than exact:
City / Counsellor / Clinical psychologist
Mumbai · ₹800 to ₹2,875 · ₹1,200 to ₹4,025
Delhi NCR · ₹1,000 to ₹3,000 · ₹1,500 to ₹4,500
Bengaluru · ₹1,000 to ₹3,000 · ₹1,500 to ₹4,000
Chennai · ₹800 to ₹2,500 · ₹900 to ₹3,220
Pune, Ahmedabad, Jaipur · ₹700 to ₹2,500 · ₹1,000 to ₹3,000
Smaller cities · ₹500 to ₹1,500 · ₹700 to ₹2,000
The platforms are their own category. Manastha lists ₹1,299 for forty minutes and ₹1,799 for an hour. TalktoAngel starts at ₹400. MindPeers is around ₹599. Amaha reportedly runs from about ₹1,400 for a therapist with a year or two of experience up to ₹3,500 for someone with eight, though Amaha does not publish per-session rates on its own site at all. YourDOST offers a ₹99 first session.
Notice what happened there. To find most of those numbers you have to create an account.
Three reasons, and only one of them is about money.
There is no fee schedule. No body sets or publishes rates for counselling in India. Compare that with a lawyer's tariff or a hospital's rate card. There is nothing to look up because nothing has been written down.
The platforms would rather you didn't compare. A rate that appears only after you have signed up is a rate that cannot be put in a table next to a competitor's. This is deliberate and it is not unique to therapy.
And then there is the part I recognise. That same Zensible survey asked therapists what stops them earning properly. The answers were not market conditions. They were emotional discomfort around discussing fees, guilt about charging people who are struggling, and rate increases put off for years at a time. It also found the profession is rarely a single income: most of the therapists surveyed were seeing ten to fifteen clients a week, well below what a full caseload would be.
I know that discomfort from the inside. It is much easier to write this paragraph than to say a number out loud to someone who has just told you what their week has been like.
The hour is not the hour.
You are paying for the session, and for the twenty minutes before it spent reading back over where we left off, and the writing up afterwards. For supervision, which means a therapist paying another therapist to check they are not getting something wrong, and which is not optional. For training that carries on long after the first qualification.
And for a piece of arithmetic nobody explains: a therapist cannot see forty people a week, because the work does not survive it. Twenty to twenty-two hours of actually sitting with people is the ceiling most of the literature lands on.
None of that makes a fee affordable if it isn't. It is just where the money goes.
This is the part most articles get wrong, so it is worth being precise.
Section 21(4) of the Mental Healthcare Act 2017 requires insurers to cover mental illness on the same terms as physical illness. The IRDAI made it compulsory from 2018 and reinforced it with a circular on 31 October 2022: mental illness cover is mandatory and non-excludable on every policy issued or renewed after that date, with parity on sum insured, co-pay and waiting period.
That sounds like it solves everything. It does not, because that parity is about hospitalisation.
Regular weekly therapy is outpatient care. Outpatient care is covered only if a policy separately includes an OPD rider, and most Indian health policies do not include OPD cover for anything at all, mental or physical. A 2024 study of 235 policies found only 37.5% covered mental illness in any form, and 51% had none. Separately, only around 17% of insured people have any outpatient counselling access through their policy.
So the law changed and, for the specific thing you are trying to pay for, almost nothing did. Assume you are paying out of pocket.
You are not stuck, and this list is short and real.
Tele-MANAS is free. 14416, around the clock, across India, in multiple languages. It is a government service and it is not a lesser version of help. If tonight is bad, this is the number.
Government hospitals charge very little. NIMHANS in Bengaluru works on a screening slip that costs about ₹100. An OPD card at AIIMS Delhi is ₹10. The waiting is real and so is the care.
Ask the therapist directly. Many of us hold a small number of reduced-fee slots and most of us do not advertise them, which is a failure on our part rather than yours. The question "do you have anything at a lower fee" is a normal question. I have never once thought less of someone for asking it, and I do not know a colleague who has.
Be careful with very cheap packages. An eight-session bundle at ₹500 a session sounds like a bargain and sometimes is one. Ask what happens to the sessions you do not use, and whether you can stop.
I do not put my fee on this website, and I want to say why rather than leave you guessing.
Fees come up on the first conversation, which is free and twenty minutes long, before you have committed to anything. By then I know something about what you are bringing and you know something about whether you can stand talking to me. That seems a better moment for the number than a price list you meet before we have spoken.
I hold a few reduced-fee places. If cost is the thing stopping you, say so when you write in. It does not count against you and it does not change how I work with you.
Full citations with links are in the research file behind this piece.
Written by Satlaj Sachan, a counsellor in Bengaluru working Book a first conversation.