Atlacare
A UK allied health practitioner can start a private practice for under £1,000 in fixed costs. The expensive part is not the setup, it is the six months your diary takes to fill.
Most articles on this list the cheap, knowable items and stop. That produces a comforting number and a nasty surprise in month four. This one includes the invisible costs, because those are the ones that end practices.
The fixed costs, which are genuinely small
These are the ones you can look up, and together they are less than a decent laptop.
| Item | Typical year-one cost |
|---|---|
| Professional registration (HCPC) | £116.36 a year |
| ICO data protection fee (tier 1) | £52, or £47 by direct debit |
| Professional indemnity and public liability | £300–£800 realistic |
| Company formation, if incorporating | £50 or so |
| Accountant | £600–£1,500 |
| Subtotal | roughly £1,100–£2,500 |
Two notes on that table.
Indemnity "from" prices are marketing. You will see policies advertised from £57 or £84 a year. Those are the cheapest possible quote for the lowest cover at minimal turnover. Once you are treating a real caseload, with the scope of practice you actually have, expect several hundred pounds. Get a quote for your circumstances rather than budgeting from an advert. Your professional body's scheme is usually a sensible benchmark.
Registration continues whether you practise or not. It is not a setup cost, it is a permanent one, and it was already in your life if you were working in the NHS.
If you are unsure whether the ICO fee applies to you: it does, if you hold patient records electronically. Our guide to UK GDPR for physiotherapists covers what registration involves.
Space, which is where the real decisions are
This is the line that varies by a factor of fifty, and the one that decides whether year one works.
Mobile or home visits: £0 in rent. Your costs are a car, fuel, portable equipment and time between appointments. The trade is that you can only see self-paying patients who want a home visit, which is a narrower market, and travel eats the sessions you could have billed.
Renting a room by the hour: from about £20 an hour in London, less elsewhere. The maths that matters is not the hourly rate, it is what happens when a patient cancels. At £20 an hour and a £63 fee you keep £43 on a session that runs and lose £20 on one that does not. Book eight hours and fill five and the economics look very different from the brochure.
Renting a room on a fixed weekly or monthly basis is cheaper per hour and worse when you are quiet. It is the right move once your diary is predictably full, and a fast way to lose money before that.
Your own premises means a lease, a deposit, business rates, utilities, insurance, fit-out and a personal guarantee. This is a different category of commitment and almost nobody should do it in year one.
The general rule for a first year is to pay per hour and accept the higher unit cost, because you are buying the ability to be wrong about demand. Our guide to renting a room versus your own premises has the fuller arithmetic.
How much should I spend on equipment?
Wildly discipline-dependent, and the place where new practitioners most reliably overspend.
A plinth, couch roll, basic assessment kit and some exercise equipment will start most musculoskeletal practices. Second-hand plinths are plentiful because practices close and upgrade constantly. If you are renting a room, check what is already in it before buying anything at all, since many rooms come equipped and you are paying for it either way.
The discipline that pays for itself is buying equipment when a patient need appears, not in anticipation of one. A cupboard of unused kit is the most common form of year-one waste.
What does practice software and a website cost?
Historically this was a real cost. It mostly is not any more.
US practice management systems still advertise at $200 to $500 a month for a solo practitioner, and some UK products are not far behind. You do not have to pay that to start. Atlacare has a Free plan with no card and no time limit: one practitioner, 20 patients, online booking, clinical notes and a public clinic page. That covers the first months of most solo practices, and when you outgrow it, Solo is £25 a month.
The line worth spending on is not the website. A practitioner about to see their first patient does not need a £1,500 web designer. What they need is a page that says who they are, what they treat, what it costs, and has a working booking button. Atlacare includes a public clinic page with booking built in on every plan including the free one, largely because paying for a website before earning anything is a common reason people never start.
Budget £0 to £300 for software and web in year one and put the difference into indemnity and marketing.
What is the real cost nobody puts on the list?
Here is the number that actually matters, and it is not on anyone's setup checklist.
Your diary does not fill on day one. Referral routes build over months. SEO takes three to six months to produce anything. Reviews accumulate slowly because you need patients first. The UK Private Practice Barometer 2026, a survey of 715 clinic owners, puts median cost per patient acquisition at £25 and average diary utilisation, across established clinics, at 72.3%.
A new practice does not start at 72%. It starts near zero and climbs.
Model it honestly. If you reach half a full diary by month six, and the UK median follow-up fee is £63, you have earned meaningfully less in that first half-year than you would have been paid to stay employed. Call it three to six months of reduced income, and treat that as the largest single cost of setting up. It dwarfs the plinth.
This is why the part-time start is so common and so sensible. Keeping two or three employed days while building private sessions around them converts the biggest cost on this list into a manageable one. Our guide to replacing an NHS salary has the sessions-per-week maths.
What does year one cost in total?
Fixed costs plus space, excluding lost income and excluding your own drawings.
| Scenario | Fixed | Space | Equipment | Software | Year-one total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mobile / home visits | £1,500 | £0 (plus travel) | £400 | £0–£300 | ~£2,000 |
| Room rented by the hour, 10 hrs/week | £1,500 | £10,000 | £200 | £0–£300 | ~£12,000 |
| Own premises, small unit | £2,500 | £18,000+ | £3,000 | £300 | ~£24,000+ |
Estimate your own year-one cost
Edit any figure to your situation, and add your own lines. The total updates as you go.
'From' prices are marketing - budget several hundred for a real caseload.
£0 mobile · ~£10k renting by the hour · £18k+ own premises.
Atlacare's Free plan is £0; Solo is £25/mo.
Year-one total
Excludes lost income while your diary fills - often the biggest cost of all.
£1,918
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The mobile column is the honest answer to "can I afford to start?". For most practitioners, yes, and by a wide margin. The equipment and the paperwork are not what stands in the way.
What stands in the way is having enough runway to be quiet for six months without panicking into a decision you would not otherwise make.
What to do in what order
- Sort registration and indemnity. Non-negotiable, cheap, and quick
- Register with the ICO. £52, ten minutes, and a fine if you skip it
- Decide your space by the hour, not by the lease
- Set up your booking and records on something free, and upgrade when you have patients rather than before
- Claim your Google Business Profile. It does more early work than anything else you could spend money on
- Only then buy equipment, and only what a patient in your diary needs
- Keep your runway, and consider staying part-employed until the diary supports you
Most of the money in year one should go on the two things this list makes look boring: adequate indemnity, and the ability to survive a slow start.
Cost figures are indicative for 2026 and vary considerably by region, discipline, scope of practice and claims history. Registration and ICO fees are as published at the time of writing. Get your own quotes rather than budgeting from any article, including this one.
Sources: HCPC registration fees; ICO data protection fee; UK Private Practice Barometer 2026 for acquisition cost and utilisation benchmarks.
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