What we found
- Prices vary about 7.6-fold. A complete adult ADHD diagnostic pathway ranged from £275 to £2,100, median £995.
- Geography barely explains it. Region accounts for 9.1% of the variation. The widest price gap inside a single region (£1,705) is more than double the entire gap between regional medians (£795).
- London is not the expensive one. Its median (£875) sits below the national median. The North West was lowest (£700); the East Midlands highest (£1,495).
- Most registered clinics have never been rated. Of 112 England clinics currently on the CQC register, 25 hold a published quality rating.
- Half these companies are new. 51.8% of the 249 companies behind listed clinics were incorporated in 2020 or later.
September 2026 update, and two corrections
This report is dated 24 July 2026 and its figures are frozen there. Two later studies, published on 21 September 2026, re-examined the same market with more sources and revised two things said here. Both revisions are recorded below and in the published corrections file; nothing above has been edited.
- Correction: the devolved regulators do not apply the same diagnosis-only test. This report said the diagnosis-only distinction that keeps a clinic off the CQC register “limits what those registers capture too”. It does not, and the reason is that England’s carve-out is not in the statute at all: it is in CQC’s guidance on the scope of a regulated activity. The three devolved regimes define a registrable clinic in their own governing legislation, and each defines it by the profession of the person providing the service rather than by whether the service is treatment: a clinic “in which services are provided by medical practitioners” in Wales and Northern Ireland, and one “in or from which services are provided by a medical practitioner, dental practitioner, registered nurse, registered midwife, registered pharmacist, registered pharmacy technician or dental care professional” in Scotland. So a diagnosis-only ADHD clinic staffed by a doctor is inside their scope and outside CQC’s. Checking those registers clinic by clinic found 4 Welsh and 2 Northern Irish registrations, where a July name search had found none.
- Correction: the Right to Choose count came from our own field, not from clinics. The 40 of 332 figure here is our directory’s Right to Choose flag, which records what we had been told. Reading the clinics’ own websites instead gives 39 of 342 that state they accept Right to Choose referrals, each with a quote and the page it was read on, plus 2 that say their service is paused or closed and 30 that say they do not accept them. The quoted count supersedes the flag. Right to Choose applies in England only and needs a GP referral.
- The CQC figures moved because the method did, not because the market did. July: 112 currently registered and 25 rated, of 286 clinics with an English location. September: 128 registered and 39 rated, of 304 searched. The later pass searched a larger directory, matched on location identifier as well as name and postcode, and counted a rating at any currently registered location rather than only at the matched one. The two pairs are not a before and after, and the difference between them is not growth.
How many people this site reaches
Visits to this site ran at 42.4 a day in Jan 2026 and 200.6 a day in Sept 2026, and between 2.6 and 3.2 people a day completed the questionnaire that matches them to clinics. These are one website’s figures. They measure this site’s reach, which grew partly because our own visibility in search grew, and they are not a measure of how many people across the UK are seeking an assessment. The official series is NHS England Digital’s ADHD Management Information, published quarterly.
View the reach figures as a table
| Month | Visits | Visits a day | People | People a day | Days counted |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 2026 | 1,315 | 42.4 | n/a | n/a | 31 |
| Feb 2026 | 1,885 | 67.3 | n/a | n/a | 28 |
| Mar 2026 | 3,493 | 112.7 | n/a | n/a | 31 |
| Apr 2026 | 2,945 | 98.2 | 81 | 2.7 | 30 |
| May 2026 | 3,643 | 117.5 | 80 | 2.6 | 31 |
| Jun 2026 | 5,578 | 185.9 | 87 | 2.9 | 30 |
| Jul 2026 | 5,897 | 190.2 | 95 | 3.1 | 31 |
| Aug 2026 | 6,188 | 199.6 | 93 | 3 | 31 |
| Sept 2026 | 4,213 | 200.6 | 68 | 3.2 | 21 |
The questionnaire and the listing enquiry form count people, not visits: one row per distinct email address per month. A person can appear in both, and in more than one month, so the two series must never be added together. The enquiry form opened part-way through the period and has only 2 months of figures, so they are given as figures and not drawn as a trend.
View the listing enquiry figures as a table
| Month | People | People a day | Days counted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 2026 | 77 | 2.5 | 31 |
| Sept 2026 | 47 | 2.2 | 21 |
How the reach figures were counted
- Months are Europe/London calendar months, cut off at the end of 21 September 2026. The latest month is a part month, so every series is shown as a daily average over the days it actually covers, and the day count travels with it in the table above and in the published file.
- Visits are visits, not people. Our analytics is cookie-free and holds no personal data, which also means it cannot tell a returning reader from a new one. It is a floor in a second way too: a browser that blocks the script is not counted at all.
- No month with fewer than 10 people is published (not the count, not the daily average) and no total of either series appears anywhere, because a total minus the published months would hand back the month we held. No month fell below it.
- An anonymous cross-check sits under the questionnaire series. A visitor reaches the questionnaire’s results page only after giving a valid email and the consent the form asks for, and our analytics counts visits to that page while holding no personal data. Across the 6 months where both can be compared, the two never differ by more than 13.6%. The comparison is in the published file and is not plotted: two things counted two different ways do not belong on one axis.
- 9 rows were excluded as our own testing, 6 questionnaire and 3 enquiry, each looked at by hand and logged by row identifier, never by address. Traffic from our own domain is excluded from the visit series.
- What is deliberately not here. No answer anyone gave the questionnaire is counted, summarised or published, in this release or any other. Click-outs, clinic page views and matched-lead counts are left out too, because each was changed by work we did mid-period and the series either side of that change are not the same measurement.
- The figures behind this block are published in full: site reach and first-party volumes (CSV).
The later work: who checks private ADHD clinics, what clinics publish about how they assess, how clinics say they assess children and every chart with its data.
Chapter one
How much does a private ADHD assessment cost in the UK?
Across 161 clinics publishing a price, an adult ADHD assessment cost a median of £995, ranging from £275 to £2,100. Half of all prices sat between £750 and £1,395. Figures are as of 24 July 2026 and cover a complete diagnostic pathway, not an initial appointment.
An ADHD assessment is a defined clinical process. NICE guideline NG87 sets out what one involves: a clinical interview, a developmental history, and evidence of impairment across more than one setting. Two clinics following the same guideline can charge £275 and £2,100.
Half of all prices sat between £750 and £1,395. The median was £995 and the mean £1,051 . The gap between the two reflects a tail of higher-priced multidisciplinary assessments rather than a broadly expensive market.
View as a table
| Assessment type | Clinics | Lowest | Median | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adult ADHD | 161 | £275 | £995 | £2,100 |
| Child ADHD | 52 | £595 | £1,250 | £2,875 |
| ADHD + autism combined | 50 | £695 | £2,600 | £4,625 |
Clinics operating entirely online published a median of £680 against £1,000 for clinics with a physical site: a difference of about 32%.
Chapter two
Does the price depend on where you live?
Barely. Region accounts for about 9.1% of the variation in adult assessment prices. Regional medians span £795 from lowest to highest, while inside a single region prices differ by up to £1,705. Which clinic you approach matters more than where you are.
The obvious hypothesis is a postcode lottery: London expensive, everywhere else cheaper. The data does not support it. Region accounts for roughly 9.1% of the variation in adult assessment prices, and London's median sits below the national one.
View as a table
| Region | Clinics | Lowest | Median | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| North West | 17 | £289 | £700 | £1,660 |
| London | 28 | £395 | £875 | £2,100 |
| Scotland | 12 | £785 | £925 | £1,950 |
| South West | 10 | £595 | £972 | £1,700 |
| West Midlands | 15 | £500 | £995 | £1,845 |
| East of England | 8 | £675 | £1,000 | £2,095 |
| Yorkshire & Humber | 6 | £595 | £1,150 | £1,650 |
| South East | 35 | £275 | £1,200 | £1,950 |
| Wales | 6 | £795 | £1,288 | £1,745 |
| East Midlands | 17 | £395 | £1,495 | £1,995 |
Look at the width of each bar rather than where it sits. Regional medians span £795 from lowest to highest. Within a single region, the gap between the cheapest and dearest clinic reaches £1,705 , more than double. The variation that matters to someone paying for an assessment is almost entirely within their own area.
Two people in the same city, both following the same clinical guideline, can pay £1,705 apart. Nothing about where they live predicts which one they will be.
Provision is a different story. Clinic numbers cluster heavily in the South East and London, which between them hold 153 of the 332 clinics in the study, while Northern Ireland has 7 and the North East 10.
View as a table
| Region | Clinics |
|---|---|
| South East | 78 |
| London | 75 |
| North West | 36 |
| South West | 33 |
| West Midlands | 33 |
| East of England | 32 |
| East Midlands | 30 |
| Yorkshire & Humber | 27 |
| Scotland | 27 |
| Wales | 14 |
| North East | 10 |
| Northern Ireland | 7 |
Chapter three
Are private ADHD clinics regulated by the CQC?
Only those that treat. CQC guidance updated 26 March 2026 confirms that providers offering ADHD or autism diagnosis alone need no registration; clinics that prescribe or manage medication do. Of the England clinics we matched to the register, 112 are registered and 25 hold a published quality rating. England only.
On 26 March 2026 the Care Quality Commission updated its published guidance to state that a provider offering only ADHD or autism diagnosis, with no treatment, does not need to register with it. The reasoning is that CQC does not treat diagnosis as treatment, so a diagnosis-only service falls outside the regulated activity. A clinic that also prescribes or manages medication does need to register.
A clinic being absent from the register is therefore often correct and lawful, not a warning sign. But it does mean the register cannot be used to survey this market, and it puts a limit on what a patient can check before booking.
We matched 117 of the 286 England clinics in the study to the CQC register, of which 112 are currently registered. Of those, 25 carry a published quality rating: 22.3%.
View as a table
| Current CQC rating | Locations |
|---|---|
| Never rated | 87 |
| Good | 20 |
| Requires improvement | 3 |
| Outstanding | 2 |
| Inspected, not rated | 1 |
CQC covers England only. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are regulated by Healthcare Improvement Scotland, Healthcare Inspectorate Wales and the RQIA respectively, and the same diagnosis-only distinction limits what those registers capture too.
Correction, 21 September 2026. The last clause of that sentence is wrong. Each devolved regulator defines a registrable clinic by the profession of the person providing the service rather than by whether the service is treatment, so the diagnosis-only distinction does not limit those registers in the way it limits CQC’s. Full correction above.
A separate route exists in England: 40 of the 332 clinics here were flagged in our directory as accepting NHS Right to Choose referrals, where the assessment is NHS-funded rather than paid for privately. It does not guarantee a shorter wait. Some local NHS areas now limit the number of Right to Choose assessments they fund and have set minimum waits, so an NHS-funded wait can be much longer than the private wait shown for a clinic. Right to Choose applies in England only and needs a GP referral.
Note, 21 September 2026. That figure is our own directory flag. Counted instead from what each clinic publishes on its own site, 39 of 342 state that they accept Right to Choose referrals: each with a quote and the page it was read on. The quoted count supersedes the flag.
Chapter four
How many private ADHD clinics are there in the UK?
We have identified and verified 332, across 527 locations in 12 regions. No public register of UK private ADHD providers exists, so this is a floor rather than a total. Most of the market is new: 51.8% of the 249 companies behind these clinics were incorporated in 2020 or later.
332 clinics is a lot of provision for a service that barely existed as a private market a decade ago. Companies House records for the 249 companies behind these clinics show 129 (51.8%) incorporated in 2020 or later.
View as a table
| Year | Cumulative companies |
|---|---|
| 2,010 | 30 |
| 2,011 | 39 |
| 2,012 | 48 |
| 2,013 | 50 |
| 2,014 | 58 |
| 2,015 | 67 |
| 2,016 | 72 |
| 2,017 | 88 |
| 2,018 | 105 |
| 2,019 | 120 |
| 2,020 | 143 |
| 2,021 | 156 |
| 2,022 | 176 |
| 2,023 | 203 |
| 2,024 | 225 |
| 2,025 | 242 |
| 2,026 | 249 |
That caveat cuts one way only: a snapshot of surviving companies will always look younger than the market really is. The concentration after 2020 is still striking.
Methodology
- Sample
- All 332 clinics listed on ADHD Private as of 24 July 2026, covering 527 locations across 12 regions and 4 nations. This is the set of providers we have been able to identify and verify; it is not a register, and no complete register of UK private ADHD providers exists.
- What counts as a price
- The total published cost of a complete adult ADHD diagnostic pathway. Where a clinic charges a mandatory screening or initial appointment before the assessment, both are added together. Prices for initial or triage appointments alone are excluded, as are combined ADHD-and-autism assessments, which are reported separately. Where a clinic publishes no fee, no price is recorded.
- Verification
- Every price was read from the clinic's own website on 24 July 2026 and stored with the URL it came from. 161 clinics published an adult assessment price; the remainder either publish none or publish only an initial consultation fee.
- Prior work
- This is not the first attempt to price this market, and it is not the largest. In June 2024 myTribe contacted 401 private ADHD clinics and reported an average assessment cost of £1,267 overall: £1,200 for adults and £1,361 for children. Two things make the figures hard to compare directly. Those are means, where the headline figure here is a median (£995); the like-for-like adult comparison is their £1,200 against our mean of £1,051. And the instruments differ: they asked clinics what they charge, while this study records only what a clinic publishes on its own page. Published and quoted prices need not agree, so the two should not be read as a time series or as evidence that prices have moved.
- Regulatory data
- Read from the CQC public register via its syndication API. Clinics were matched by stored location ID, or by exact postcode plus a shared distinctive name token; weaker matches were rejected rather than guessed, so 117 of 286 England clinics are matched. England only.
- Company data
- Incorporation dates from Companies House for the 249 clinics with a recorded company number. Sole traders, partnerships and non-UK entities are absent by nature.
- Known limits
- The 9.1% figure is a one-way eta-squared on 157 clinics with a primary location; 35 clinics operate in more than one region on a single national price, which pushes that figure down, and clinics without a primary location are excluded. Regional breakdowns are shown only where at least five clinics published a price. Clinic counts are not population-adjusted. Wait times are not reported at all, because our own wait data is too incomplete to publish.
Sources
- Care Quality Commission
Scope of registration: treatment of disease, disorder or injury. Guidance updated 26 March 2026, stating that providers offering only ADHD or autism diagnosis do not need to register.
cqc.org.uk - CQC syndication API
Registration status, regulated activities and current ratings for every England location, read from the public register.
api-portal.service.cqc.org.uk - Companies House
Incorporation dates, company status and SIC codes for the 249 companies behind listed clinics.
find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk - NICE guideline NG87
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: diagnosis and management. The clinical standard an assessment is expected to follow.
nice.org.uk - ADHD UK
National waiting-time research on NHS ADHD assessment services.
adhduk.co.uk
Using this research
Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You may reproduce the charts and figures, including commercially, with credit.
How to cite: ADHD Private, The UK Private ADHD Market in 2026, 24 July 2026. https://adhdprivate.co.uk/research/uk-private-adhd-market-2026
Download the aggregate dataset (CSV): every chart on this page, as numbers.
Clinic-level data is published openly with our 2026 assessment-standards study: one row per clinic, with the quote and the source URL behind every value. For a cut of this price study for a particular region, ask through our press page. Clinics can ask us to correct a price through contact; corrections are made to the underlying data and reflected here.
Questions
How much does a private ADHD assessment cost in the UK?
Does where you live change what you pay?
Are private ADHD clinics regulated?
Why do some clinics show no price?
How much does a child ADHD assessment cost?
Is an online ADHD assessment cheaper than an in-person one?
Why do private ADHD assessment prices vary so much?
How much does a combined ADHD and autism assessment cost?
Does NHS Right to Choose cover a private ADHD assessment?
Can I reuse these figures?
Also from ADHD Private
How private ADHD clinics say they diagnose
This study asks what an assessment costs. The other asks what it contains: what 337 clinic websites publish about their own procedure, read against NICE guideline NG87, the CQC register and Companies House. The clinic-level data is published with it, free to download.
About this research and how we are funded
ADHD Private is a comparison directory for private ADHD clinics. Patients use it free. We make money from clinics: new clinics pay a one-off fee to be listed and then a monthly listing subscription, and some pay for a clearly labelled "Featured" placement. We take no commission on bookings or referrals. The listing fee and the listing subscription buy a listing, not a position. Paid placement is always labelled. It can lift a clinic's position in the lists on our site, which say so wherever it does, but nothing a clinic pays changes its rating or reviews. No payment played any part in this study; every clinic we list was included, and prices were taken from clinics' own pages without contacting them.
This note was corrected on 22 September 2026. It said paid placement never changes a clinic's position in organic listings or matching results, which was not true: some of our lists place Featured clinics first, and say so. No figure in this report changed.
This note was corrected again on 8 October 2026. It named Featured placement as the only way clinics pay us. Clinics also pay a one-off fee to be listed, and a few of the clinics in this study had paid one. No figure in this report changed.
This note was updated again on 22 October 2026. New clinics now pay a monthly listing subscription as well as the one-off fee, and the note names it. No figure in this report changed.
Informational only: not medical advice. Prices and clinic details change; verify with the clinic before booking.
Figures as of 24 July 2026. Compare clinics and current prices.