What we publish, and who pays for it

Why this exists

The coaching industry has very little hard data and a great deal of confident writing about it. Most articles about coaching rates cite nothing at all. Most advice about getting clients is one person’s experience generalised into a rule.

The Tribune publishes dispatches grounded in the published figures that do exist, each one carrying its sources, and says plainly where the evidence is thin. There are 18 of them.

The conflict

We sell coaching software. We therefore have a commercial interest in coaches running better businesses, in the fragmented-tool-stack problem being visible, and in the profession growing. Those interests shape which stories we find interesting, and no disclosure removes that.

Where a figure we publish happens to support our own product, the dispatch says so in the piece rather than letting it pass as neutral. The clearest example is the six to ten hours a week the research attributes to coordinating a multi-tool stack, which is both a real finding and an advert for what we sell.

The rules we hold ourselves to

Every figure names its source. Where a sample size exists, it is published. Where a number comes from practitioner reports rather than a study, it is labelled an estimate. Where no data exists, we say so instead of filling the gap.

The 2026 Coaching Business Report that most of this draws on aggregates third-party research: the ICF Global Coaching Study 2025, PayScale, Salary.com, ZipRecruiter, Glassdoor and others. It is not a Coachful survey of coaches and we do not present it as one.

How to hold us to it

Our software directory lists products alphabetically and picks nothing at all. Our buyer’s guide states its criteria before every recommendation, and our own product loses most categories. Both of those ratios are published so they can be checked rather than trusted.

If a future version of either has Coachful winning everything, they have stopped being worth reading, and so has this.