Free tool
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.
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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.
A ninety minute visit is rarely a ninety minute commitment. Add the round trip drive, the charting that follows, and the fuel and parking, and a visit that looked like a good hourly rate can land well under what you would accept from a hospital shift. That gap is the single most common reason a private lactation practice feels busy and thin at the same time.
This calculator makes the gap visible. Put in the fee you charge families, the real time each part of the visit takes, and what the trip costs you in gas, tolls and parking. The result is the effective hourly rate for that visit, plus what a normal week of them produces before taxes and business overhead.
Your result
Total minutes the visit costs you
165
The real clock for one family, from leaving home to closing the note.
Net collected per visit
$236
Your fee after the direct cost of getting there and back.
Effective hourly rate
$86
What the visit pays per hour once the road and the charting are counted.
Net from a normal week
$1,888
Before taxes, insurance, scale replacement and everything else the practice pays for.
This is revenue against time, not profit, so subtract your liability insurance, licensing, equipment and self employment tax before you decide the fee works.
Cut the number that is easiest to cut
Of the three time blocks in this calculation, the visit itself is the one you should protect. Families need the full assessment, and shortening it is how consultants end up with return visits they do not get paid for. Drive time and charting time are the honest targets.
Drive time responds to routing rules more than to speed. Clustering visits by zip code on set days, holding one urgent slot rather than three, and declining a visit that sits forty minutes outside your service area will move this number more than anything else you can do.
Charting time is a fee input, not an afterthought
If charting takes forty minutes a family, you are working an unpaid hour and a half across a four visit day. Consultants routinely price a visit as though charting were free, then absorb it at night after their own children are asleep.
Cutting charting from twenty five minutes to ten, by writing the note and the parent plan in the home rather than after it, changes the effective hourly rate in this calculator immediately. Try it: drop the charting figure and watch what the hourly rate does without touching your fee.
Questions about this calculator
Should I use my full rate or the contracted rate?
Use what actually lands in the account for that visit. If you are in network and the allowed amount is lower than your posted fee, the allowed amount is the honest input. Run it twice, once cash pay and once contracted, and the difference tells you what network participation is really costing per hour.
How do I count mileage properly?
The out of pocket entry here is gas, tolls and parking. Track your business mileage separately for the standard mileage deduction, because that is a tax matter rather than a cash cost. Consultants who lump them together tend to overstate the trip cost in this calculation.
What effective hourly rate should I be aiming for?
There is no universal number, but it should comfortably beat what you could earn per clinical hour elsewhere, because you are also carrying insurance, equipment and unpaid administration. If the result is close to a staff hourly wage, either the fee or the drive radius needs to change.
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.