What Headway's $9.99 Per-Session Fee Means for Your Practice
By Steven Van ·
Oasys says the fee costs a full solo caseload about $5,200 a year, and pitches its flat $80 per clinician per month as the alternative.
Headway's Oasys Health says the new $9.99 per-session fee hits full, stable caseloads hardest. In a post on the fee, Oasys notes that it makes an EHR and so has a stake in the comparison. The facts about Headway come from Headway's own help center.
How the Headway fee works
According to Headway's help center, the fee is $9.99 per appointment, the same for every health plan, on insurance and private-pay sessions alike. It applies to every appointment with a client who searched on Headway and booked from the therapist's Headway profile, for as long as the therapist sees that client. It is deducted from the regular payout, is not applied retroactively, and does not change the contracted rate or what clients pay.
It starts October 8, 2026 for providers whose primary practice state is Virginia, Washington, Georgia, Ohio or Illinois, and later in 2026 for everyone else.
What is exempt
- Clients a therapist brings themselves
- Clients who book through the therapist's direct link (on a website, Psychology Today profile or email signature)
- Clients who found the therapist on Headway before the change
- Health system referrals
- Sessions that do not take place
Client source is set at the first booking and stays the same.
What it costs
A client seen weekly costs about $40 a month, or about $520 over 52 sessions. Oasys's examples:
- A solo therapist with 10 weekly marketplace clients pays roughly $5,200 a year, and 20 clients is roughly $10,400, before Headway's margin on the rate itself.
- In a group where 10 clinicians each carry 10 weekly marketplace clients, the fee comes to roughly $52,000 a year. It is charged per provider and per client, by each provider's primary practice state.
Where Oasys fits
Oasys is $80 per clinician per month, billed annually, with no per-claim, per-ERA or per-session fees and no charge that depends on where a client came from. Practices can choose fully managed billing, where the Oasys team handles claims end to end, or self-serve billing. Claims are coded from the signed note, and payment is blocked until the note is complete.
Oasys does not perform credentialing. It works with credentialing companies, which typically take three to six months for the major payers. Once a clinician is credentialed, clearinghouse enrollment for claims, ERA and eligibility is tracked per payer and has often finished within a couple of weeks. For out-of-network and private-pay clients, Oasys generates superbills from the same signed note.
Oasys also says that a practice contracting directly keeps the full contracted rate, but that the direct rate may be lower or not than Headway's negotiated rate depending on the payer, so the comparison should be run payer by payer.
