How many coaches are there in the world?

The ICF defines a coach practitioner as “someone who provides an ongoing partnership designed to help clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives”. In practice that means life, business, executive, leadership, career and wellbeing coaching. Source: ICF Global Coaching Study 2023, final report.

The count is not limited to ICF members. The ICF surveys coaches through its own lists and asks members to pass the survey on to other coaches. In 2022, 23% of the 14,591 responses came from non-members. PricewaterhouseCoopers then scales the answers up to an estimate for every region. So 122,974 is a modelled estimate, not a list of names.

Many of the coaches in it work part-time. The average coach spent 11.6 hours a week coaching in the 2025 study, and in 2022 more than half earned under $30,000 a year from coaching. Most also offer other services, such as consulting or training.

The figure includes coaches employed inside companies as well as self-employed ones. It leaves out sports coaches, personal trainers, tutors and music teachers entirely, however skilled or well paid they are.

In this guide, a solo coach is someone who runs their own coaching or teaching practice and is paid by their clients, alone or with occasional help. Solo describes how someone works, not how many people they teach at once. A self-employed running coach leading a group session is still a solo coach.

That includes self-employed life, business, career and executive coaches; independent tennis, golf, padel, running and athletics coaches; freelance personal trainers; and private tutors and music teachers who teach their own students.

It does not include coaches employed by clubs, schools or companies, volunteers coaching a junior team, managers who use coaching skills at work, or people who have trained as coaches but have no clients. Those groups appear in some of the figures below, which is why the figures cannot be added together.

Many people sit in more than one group. A tennis coach can be employed by a club in the week and run private lessons at weekends. The same person can also hold an ICF credential and appear in a national employment survey. Counting them twice is the most common way published totals go wrong.

The ICF’s four most recent studies give comparable worldwide estimates of coach practitioners.

Between the 2016 and 2025 studies, the estimated number of coach practitioners rose from 53,300 to 122,974. That is an increase of about 131%, or roughly 2.3 times the earlier figure.

The 2025 executive summary describes the latest rise as 13%, from 109,200 to 122,974. The arithmetic gives 12.6%, which rounds to 13%. An ICF web page about the same study gives the rise as 15%, which does not match the published counts. If you quote the growth, use 13% and cite the executive summary.

Revenue has grown more slowly than headcount. Mean annual coaching revenue per active practitioner was about $51,000 in 2015, $47,100 in 2019, $52,800 in 2022 and $49,283 in the 2025 study. More coaches are sharing the market, rather than each coach earning more.

The ICF rounds its regional figures, so the regions do not always add up exactly to the world total. Growth below is calculated by us from those rounded counts.

No source counts life coaches on their own. The ICF figure of 122,974 covers life, business, executive, leadership and career coaching together. Its studies ask about coaching areas, but a coach can work in several, so the figure cannot be split cleanly into life coaches and business coaches.

In the US, life coaches have no government occupation or industry code of their own. They are spread across categories that also include consultants, counsellors and trainers. Any US figure for life coaches alone is an estimate by a private company and should be treated as one.

The nearest sourced number for North American professional coaches of all kinds is the ICF’s 34,200 for 2022.

Nobody publishes a sourced global count of solo coaches. The ICF separates external coaches from internal ones, but defines an external coach as someone “either self-employed or partners with other professional coaches to form a coaching business”. External therefore includes small partnerships as well as one-person practices.

The 2023 study also found that 16% of practitioners work as both internal and external coaches, spending on average 56% of their coaching time internally. Those coaches cannot be assigned cleanly to either group. Source: ICF Global Coaching Study 2023, final report.

What the evidence does show is that the typical professional coach runs a small practice: around a dozen clients and fewer than 12 hours of coaching a week. Any figure for “solo coaches” built by applying a percentage to the ICF total is an assumption, not a measurement, and should be labelled as one.

The 2023 study also reported average revenue of $85 per hour worked, against the $244 session fee. The gap reflects time spent on preparation, admin and finding clients, as well as unbooked hours.

The 2025 study found that 47% of coaches use digital coaching platforms, for tasks including scheduling and client management.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes employment counts that separate self-employed workers from employees. They are the clearest official figures anywhere for independent instructors. All three below are for 2025.

BLS counts a person by their main job. A school PE teacher who coaches tennis privately at weekends appears as a teacher. A salaried gym instructor who also trains a few clients independently appears as an employee. Many private instructors are part-time and work alongside another job, so the self-employed figures are a floor, not a ceiling.

The figures also leave out several groups entirely. There is no reliable US count of private music teachers, and the BLS musicians category is not a substitute. The US Census Bureau publishes Nonemployer Statistics, which count businesses with no employees by industry, including sports and recreation instruction, fine arts schools and tutoring. Those count businesses rather than people, and life coaches have no industry code of their own. Source: Census Bureau, 2022 Nonemployer Statistics.

IBISWorld estimates 75,590 US business coaching businesses in 2026, but its industry also includes management courses and seminars. It measures something different from the ICF count and the two should not be compared directly. Source: IBISWorld.

UK Coaching and YouGov surveyed 30,990 adults between May and June 2024. A coach in the survey is anyone who gave coaching, instruction, training or tuition in any sport or physical activity outside school, including fitness and dance. That includes parents running a junior team and other volunteers. Source: UK Coaching, Coaching in the UK 2024.

Paid coaching is rising quickly. The share of active coaches paid for any of their coaching rose from 38% in 2022 to 53% in 2024, and the share for whom coaching is their main occupation rose from 9% to 12%.

Applying those rounded percentages to 3.1 million gives about 1.6 million UK adults paid for some coaching, and about 370,000 for whom coaching is their main job. These are our calculations, not published counts. Paid does not mean self-employed, and the survey does not say how many run their own practice.

For the paid workforce, CIMSPA’s 2023 report counted 586,000 jobs across UK sport and physical activity in 2022, and said 12% of that workforce works freelance. That covers the whole sector, including roles that are not coaching. Source: CIMSPA.

For UK private music teachers, the Incorporated Society of Musicians publishes a fees survey each year. Its 2024 to 2025 edition had 1,037 respondents. That is a survey sample, not an estimate of how many private music teachers there are. Source: ISM.

In June 2020, the Council of the European Union stated that “there could be as many as 5 to 9 million coaches operating across Europe”, reaching between 50 and 100 million sport participants. Source: Council of the European Union, conclusions on empowering coaches, 2020.

The Council made the point while noting that employment figures do not reflect volunteer coaches, and that volunteering is a large part of European coaching. The range is a historical estimate covering paid and unpaid coaches, not a recent count, and it says nothing about how many run their own practice.

Jobs and Skills Australia publishes unusually detailed occupation profiles, which count people by their main job. Three are relevant to solo coaching.

UNESCO’s 2025 report on private supplementary tutoring, written by Mark Bray, describes a 2021 information request to 205 countries and self-governing territories. No figures at all on private tutoring were provided by 143 of them, or 69.8%. Source: UNESCO, Whose visions for what learning?, 2025.

The same report cites an estimate that the tutoring industry was worth $159 billion in 2023. That is spending, not a headcount, and it cannot be turned into a number of tutors. If an international education agency cannot assemble a world count of tutors, a world count of every independent coach and teacher is out of reach for now.

We used official employment statistics first, such as the BLS and Jobs and Skills Australia. Next came large surveys with published methods, such as the ICF studies and UK Coaching’s YouGov survey. Government statements and United Nations reports came after that, each with its date. Commercial estimates, such as IBISWorld, appear only as context.

For each figure we recorded the country, the year it describes, whether it counts jobs or people, whether volunteers are included and whether it separates the self-employed. Where we calculated a number ourselves, such as growth rates or the UK paid coach estimate, the guide says so.

We left out any figure we could not trace to its original publisher, and we did not build a worldwide total, because the sources measure different groups of people.

For professional coaching: “The International Coaching Federation estimates about 123,000 professional coach practitioners worldwide in 2025, of whom about 110,000 had active clients.” Link to the ICF 2025 executive summary.

For independent instructors, name the occupation and country: “In 2025, 57,600 US exercise trainers and group fitness instructors were self-employed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

For UK sport: “About 3.1 million UK adults coached sport or physical activity in the past year, and 53% of them were paid for some of it, according to UK Coaching.”

You are welcome to link to this page as a summary, and to quote our calculations with a link back. We will update it when the ICF or the statistics agencies publish new figures. Sources were checked on 27 October 2026.

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