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.
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.
A separate route exists in England: 40 of the 332 clinics here accept NHS Right to Choose referrals, where the assessment is NHS-funded rather than paid for privately. It does not guarantee a shorter wait, and some Integrated Care Boards restrict or pause referrals.
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 | 31 |
| 2,011 | 40 |
| 2,012 | 49 |
| 2,013 | 51 |
| 2,014 | 59 |
| 2,015 | 68 |
| 2,016 | 73 |
| 2,017 | 89 |
| 2,018 | 106 |
| 2,019 | 120 |
| 2,020 | 143 |
| 2,021 | 156 |
| 2,022 | 176 |
| 2,023 | 203 |
| 2,024 | 226 |
| 2,025 | 243 |
| 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.
Journalists and researchers can request the clinic-level dataset, or a cut for a particular region, via 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?
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: some pay for a clearly labelled "Featured" placement. We take no commission on bookings or referrals. Paid placement is always labelled and never changes a clinic's position in organic listings or matching results, and it played no part in this study — every clinic we list was included, and prices were taken from clinics' own pages without contacting them.
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.