Contracting was probably one of the first things you were taught, and for good reason. The conversation at the start of the work, where you set out how it will run, what you will do and what falls outside it, is part of the work itself. It builds trust. It gives a client something steady to hold before anything difficult begins.
BACP's account of what complaints tell them puts it plainly. "Contracting is key to a successful therapeutic relationship. Many problems could be avoided if therapists were clear about what they are offering and clients clearly understood the terms of engagement." The failure they name will sound familiar: "relying on a verbal contract, with no proof of what was agreed".
UKCP tells its own members much the same, from its own complaints experience. "A written contract is a transparent basis for informed consent. It gives you a level of certainty. Expectations are set out clearly. This means that a contract reduces the likelihood of complaints."
So the conversation matters, and most people in this profession handle it well. My question is about the document sitting behind it.
Your client agreement builds trust at the start. Does it also protect either of you when something goes wrong?
Two documents, one piece of paper
BACP's guidance splits the contract in two. There is a therapeutic contract, covering the approach, the goals and the limits of what the work can achieve. Then there is a business contract, covering fees, availability, cancellation, records, the limits of confidentiality and how a complaint gets raised.
Whichever body you answer to, that second half is expected of you. BABCP's private practice guidance is blunt about it: "In your first session with a client you must agree on the terms of your work and make sure that these are captured in a contract". HCPC's standards of proficiency for Practitioner Psychologists include defining and contracting the work. UKCP's code requires a clear contract at the outset and an explanation of terms, fees and conditions. The International Coaching Federation's code opens on the agreement itself, and the joint code used by EMCC Global and the Association for Coaching asks for the same understanding of terms before work starts. And the British Psychological Society reduces the whole thing to one line in its Practice Guidelines: "all professional engagements are ultimately governed by the law of contract."
Most of the people I speak to have thought about the therapeutic half to one degree or another. A good number are working from an agreement that came with their training, or from a colleague, or from whatever looked reasonable online, and has not been read properly since. The gap is rarely carelessness. The training treats contracting as a relational matter and leaves the commercial side to someone else, and for a self-employed practitioner there usually is nobody else.
Six questions follow. You do not need to answer them for me. What matters is whether you can answer them at all.
Your cancellation policy: what happens when it is tested?
You almost certainly have one. Twenty four hours' notice, half fee inside that, full fee for a missed session. It is the most common arrangement in the sector and it is a sensible starting point.
Then there is the part that makes this work different from most businesses. Sometimes the reason a client cannot face the session is the reason they are seeing you in the first place. A bad week, a flare in anxiety, a morning where getting out of the house, or even firing up Zoom, was not possible. UKCP's own guidance records this from the other side of the desk.
"We often receive enquiries and complaints from clients who have been asked to pay for appointments when they have not been able to attend because of an emergency."
Most practitioners exercise discretion in those situations and are right to. The question is whether your terms give you room to do that on purpose. A stated discretion, where the client knows flexibility exists and roughly when you would use it, holds up. A policy you quietly stop enforcing stops meaning anything, for that client and eventually for everyone else.
Now the harder version. If a client disputed a charge, what would you point at? A cancellation charge is a term in a consumer contract, and consumer contracts carry rules about which terms bind a client and which do not. Whether yours holds turns on things like how prominently it was set out, whether the client saw it before booking, and whether the amount bears a real relationship to what you lose when a slot goes unfilled.
There is a practical version of this that has nothing to do with courts. Most fees now move through Stripe, PayPal or a booking platform, and each of those runs its own dispute process. A client can raise a claim that a service was not delivered without ever contacting you, and the provider decides it on whatever evidence each side can produce. If your terms were never set out anywhere the client could see them, you have very little to submit.
There is one more underneath all of that. If you agreed the work by phone, by video call or online, your client has statutory cancellation rights, and the clock on those rights starts when you agree the work rather than when you first meet. Conditions attach to starting sessions before that period has run. The exposure is commercial: a client can become entitled to a refund for sessions you have already delivered, and the window for asking runs a good deal longer than most people assume.
I am not going to tell you what your terms should say. I am telling you that this is a question with a real answer, and that almost nobody in this sector is asking it.
Read your own words back: what have you promised?
Does anything in your agreement read as a promise about an outcome, a result, or how a client will feel by the end? What have you said they can rely on, and what have you placed outside the work? Scope is where a complaint usually starts, and it is written long before the complaint arrives.
How does it end?
UKCP's code asks members to "make considered and timely arrangements for the termination of a therapeutic relationship", and planned endings are usually well covered. The awkward ones are not. What happens when a client simply stops replying, or when you judge the work should stop and they disagree? If they have paid for a block of sessions and cannot use them, what have you agreed?
If you cannot work, who tells your clients?
From midday on 3rd November 2026, the BACP Ethical Framework requires members to have a clinical will and a named executor who can contact clients if the member cannot do so. I would put the question more widely than membership of any one body, because the person it affects is the client.
Someone who has taken months to trust you with any of this has no way of telling the difference between a therapist who is ill and a therapist who has stopped replying. The silence is the whole of their information. For a client who came to you carrying difficulty with exactly that kind of absence, being left without word is a real harm, and it is an avoidable one.
Continuity here can be modest. It does not mean another clinician taking over the work. Someone who can make contact, explain what has happened and help with arrangements is enough, and that might be an associate, a trusted colleague or your supervisor. The point is that a client hears something from a human being rather than finding out by degrees.
There is a business reading of the same problem. A client who cannot reach you for a fortnight will often have found somebody else by the time you are back, and a diary rebuilt from scratch takes far longer than the illness did. My own view is that holding relationships of this kind without any arrangement for your own absence is difficult to defend, whichever body you belong to and whether or not anyone requires it of you.
Where the contract stops and the privacy notice starts
These are two documents doing two different jobs, and a term in your contract is not a lawful basis for holding anything. The ICO publishes its guidance for small organisations in plain language, and it is the right place to check. The BACP framework adds a requirement from November for informed consent before a client's personal data goes into any AI or digital tool, which is worth reading if you use anything that transcribes, summarises or drafts, whether or not that requirement reaches you directly.
What protection do you actually have?
Two parts to this one. Does your insurer know how you currently work, including any tool you have started using in the last year or so? And do you know which risks your terms can pass to a client and which ones no wording will move? Some liabilities cannot be limited by agreement at all, whatever a document says.
Where to take this next
None of that is legal advice, and I am not the person to give it. Drafting is a job for a solicitor, or for one of the small business legal services that provide properly drafted terms with real advice behind them. Your professional body sets the standards that sit on top of the law, and the ICO covers the data side.
What I can do is show you where you stand before you spend anything on it. The client agreement check takes about two minutes and gives you a straight answer on where the gaps are, so that when you do take advice you already know what you are asking for.
Take the client agreement check
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If you would rather talk it through, contact me at [email protected].
Brian Tancock founded Informing Minds Limited. As a career risk professional he worked in and advised several multinational and global businesses. His focus these days is developing and supporting mental health focused businesses, and he is also a consultant to i-Risk Group Ltd, an independent enterprise risk management company.