Free tool
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.
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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.
Overbooking is the most common scheduling error in private lactation practice, and it never looks like overbooking at the time. Four visits sounds reasonable until you count the thirty minutes between families, the twenty minutes of charting, and the ten minutes lost to a walk up, a dog, and a hand wash. The day runs long, the last family gets a rushed consult, and the notes slide to midnight.
This planner turns a visit into a slot, which is what your calendar actually consumes. Set your own numbers and the result is the honest number of families your day holds, along with how many hours a week you spend driving and charting instead of sitting with a mother and a baby.
Your result
Real slot length per family
150
What one family actually takes out of the day, not just the consult.
Visits that fit in a day
3
Whole visits only, because a half visit is a family you had to rush.
Visits per week at this pace
12
The realistic caseload ceiling before you add evenings or weekends.
Weekly hours driving and charting
10.0
Paid work that is not spent with a family, which is where a practice quietly leaks.
Hold at least one slot open on two days a week for the day four call that cannot wait, because that family is also your best referral source.
The slot is the unit, not the visit
Consultants book visits and then wonder where the day went. The calendar unit that matters is the slot: consult plus the road plus the note plus the friction. Once you schedule in slots, the day stops surprising you and the last family of the day stops getting your worst work.
A useful test is to compare the slot number this planner produces against how you actually book. If your slot is one hundred fifty minutes and you are booking families two hours apart, you are running a deficit of thirty minutes per family, paid for out of your evening.
Where the weekly road and notes hours go
The last output is the one worth staring at. Ten or twelve hours a week driving and charting is normal for a metro home visit practice, and it is a full working day and a half of unbilled time. Nobody pays you for it directly, so it has to be inside your fee.
There are only two real levers. Tighten the service radius so the hop between families shrinks, or close the note before you leave the driveway so charting stops being a second job. Most consultants can move both, and the combined effect on the weekly figure is larger than adding another visit day.
Questions about this calculator
Why does the calculator only count whole visits?
Because a partial slot is not a visit you can take, it is a visit you would rush. Rounding down is the honest answer for a day that has to end with every note closed. If the leftover time is substantial, use it for the urgent call slot rather than squeezing in a family.
Should follow up weight checks use the same slot?
No, and running the planner twice is the point. A follow up weight check is often half the consult time but the same drive, so its slot is dominated by the road. That is why clustering follow ups near a first visit on the same day is worth real money.
How should I plan for urgent day four calls?
Leave one deliberate gap on the days you drive rather than trying to absorb the call into a full schedule. A newborn who is not transferring cannot wait until Thursday, and the family that got seen that day is the one who tells her pediatrician about you.
More free tools and working documents
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.
Run it again with ten minutes of charting
Drop the charting figure to ten minutes and watch the result move without touching what you charge for a home visit. That is the number a written assessment template and a plan sent from the curb are built to produce. Book a demo, bring one weighted feed and the plan that came out of it, and decide for yourself whether ten minutes is an honest input in your practice.