Calculator
What one lactation home visit really pays per hour
Enter your fee and the true clock around the visit, and see the hourly rate the visit actually earns after the road and the notes.
Free tools
Calculators for a home visit lactation practice
Two free tools that answer the questions that decide whether a private practice holds together: what an hour on the road actually earns, and how many families you can honestly fit in a day.
Private practice lactation math is unforgiving in a specific way. The visit fee looks fine on paper until you count the forty minutes of driving on either side, the twenty five minutes of charting, the parking, and the two urgent texts from a family you saw on Tuesday. Consultants who set a fee from the visit alone usually discover the problem about six months in, when the calendar is full and the bank account is not.
These calculators use inputs you can check against your own week rather than industry averages. Change the numbers to your own metro, your own visit length and your own charting habit. The defaults are realistic for a solo IBCLC covering a suburban service area, but they are only a starting point.
Calculator
How many home visits actually fit in your day
Build the real slot length for a lactation home visit and see how many families a working day holds before the schedule starts breaking.
Working document
The home visit close-out checklist
A practical sequence for a private practice lactation visit that ends with the note closed, the plan sent and the referral out, before you turn the key.
Why both visit calculators are open to anyone
Every private practice IBCLC does this arithmetic somewhere already, usually in pen on the back of an intake form after a day of four families and ninety miles. Fee minus gas and parking, divided by the ninety minutes on the couch plus the round trip plus the twenty five minutes it takes to write the feeding plan. The arithmetic is not hard for anyone who can read a weight curve, but it is tedious enough that most consultants run it once in their first year of private practice and never again, which is how a fee set for a twenty minute service radius survives three years of driving forty.
So neither tool asks for an email address or an account. Run the visit fee calculator at your cash pay rate and again at a contracted allowed amount, or run the capacity planner once for first postpartum consults and once for follow up weight checks, and keep whichever pair of numbers tells the truth about your Tuesday. Nothing about your caseload is stored here and no newsletter follows the figures home. If the result tells you the service area is too wide or the slot you book is thirty minutes short of honest, the calculator has done its whole job whether or not a LatchDesk visit template ever opens on your phone.
If the hourly number came out low
When the effective hourly rate or the weekly road and notes figure lands under what you expected, the lever is usually not the visit fee. It is the charting that follows every family home and gets written after your own children are asleep. A demo shows what closing the note and texting the feeding plan from the driveway does to those two numbers without asking a single family to pay more.