Practice economics, answered · updated 2026-08-05

What is a fair share of overhead per clinician?

No dollar figure copied from another practice can be fair, because overhead per clinician is a ratio of two things that vary enormously: what the practice spends and how much clinical capacity shares it. The fair share is computed, not quoted: take only the truly shared costs (rent, admin staff, practice-wide software, marketing), split them in proportion to each clinician's clinical hours, and charge clinician-specific costs like their benefits, license seats, and supervision to that clinician's own seat rather than socializing them across the roster.

Why hours, not headcount

A flat per-head charge makes a 10-hour clinician subsidize a 25-hour one or the reverse, depending on which costs dominate, and both clinicians can usually feel it even when nobody has done the math. Hours are the fairest available proxy for how much of the shared machine a clinician uses: rooms, scheduling, billing attention, admin time all scale closer to sessions delivered than to names on the roster. It is not perfect, but every simpler rule is more wrong, and every fancier one needs data most practices don’t keep.

Keep seat costs out of the shared pool

The most common fairness failure is not the split method but the pool: costs that belong to one clinician (their 401k match, their EHR seat, their supervision, their CE stipend) get dumped into shared overhead, where every OTHER clinician pays a slice of them. Pull those out first and assign them to the seat they belong to. The shared pool that remains is usually noticeably smaller, and the split of it stops generating quiet resentment.

What the share is for

The share is not a bill you hand a clinician; it is the number that makes seat-level economics honest. Whether a comp plan works, whether a split is sustainable, whether a new hire clears breakeven, all of it runs on each seat carrying its real share of the practice around it. The split arithmetic that consumes this number →

Where these numbers come from. The hours-based split and the seat-cost separation are the same rules Keystone’s engine applies in every group Snapshot; the overhead share tool runs them on your numbers and includes a guided builder if you don’t yet know what your overhead total should be. Published per-clinician dollar benchmarks are not repeated here because a number without its practice’s rent, roster, and hours attached cannot transfer.

Run this on your own numbers, free, nothing leaves your browser: the overhead share calculator →

Want the whole picture at once? The free Snapshot reads your practice in about five minutes: see your numbers →