Coaching's seven-times return comes from 189 self-estimates

Two numbers carry most of the financial case for coaching: a return of 5.7 times the investment, and a median return of seven times. We opened both original reports. Neither figure was measured. Both are what a minority of coaching clients estimated they had gained, and the two reports do not even use the same definition of a return.

The first comes from 43 executives. The second comes from 189 survey respondents out of 2,165. Both were still circulating on vendor pages as the evidence for coaching's value when we checked on 29 September 2026.

The 5.7 times figure is 43 executives estimating their own gains

The source is a 2001 article in The Manchester Review, a reprint of which is held by the ICF research portal. Its authors were practitioners at Manchester Consulting, and they studied their own work. The 100 executives in the sample had completed coaching between 1996 and 2000, in the north-eastern and mid-Atlantic United States. Every coach had been through the firm's standardised internal training programme.

The authors state plainly that "a controlled experimental trial was not possible." There was no comparison group. Instead, trained interviewers phoned each executive for 25 to 45 minutes and asked them to name the business benefits of their coaching, then to put an annual dollar value on them, using their own calculation methods.

Forty-three of the hundred could give a dollar figure. The other 57 could not. Very few participants, the authors note, had kept records of the business areas their changed behaviour affected.

Each of the 43 estimates then went through three multiplications:

Before any of this, estimates above one million dollars were capped at one million. Two executives had estimated 5 million and 25 million dollars. Every input to the adjustment, the benefit, the attribution and both confidence levels, came from the same person being asked.

The result, "when calculated conservatively", was an average of nearly 100,000 dollars per executive, or 5.7 times the cost of the coaching. It is a mean, taken over the 43 who answered, after the two largest claims had been cut down.

The seven times figure is the median of 189 answers

The second figure is from the ICF Global Coaching Client Study, commissioned by the International Coach Federation and run by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Association Resource Centre. It was an online survey of 2,165 coaching clients in 64 countries, fielded between September and November 2008 and published in 2009.

Asked whether coaching had produced any financial change for them or their company, 40 percent said yes and 19 percent were unsure. Only 9 percent, 189 respondents, could state both how much had been gained or lost and how much the coaching had cost. The executive summary says the ROI results "should be interpreted with caution due to small sample sizes."

The company median of seven times comes from within those 189. The summary does not say how many of them answered for a company and how many for themselves. Among those who did give company figures, 19 percent reported a return of at least 50 times the investment and a further 28 percent reported 10 to 49 times.

The population behind it looks little like a corporate coaching programme:

Respondents could name more than one type of coaching, so the shares overlap, and life coaching led by a wide margin. The average engagement cost 4,353 dollars. Most of these clients picked their own coach, and half were in life, vision and enhancement coaching.

The two reports use different definitions of ROI

The Manchester study uses the formula from Jack Phillips's training evaluation work: benefit minus cost, divided by cost. Under that formula a programme that exactly pays for itself scores 0 percent. The ICF summary uses the opposite convention and says so: "An ROI value of 100% means that the investor earned their money back."

We ran the worked example printed in the Manchester article through both definitions. A senior manager estimated her benefit at 215,000 dollars, attributed half of it to coaching with full confidence, and was 90 percent confident in the estimate. That leaves 96,750 dollars against a coaching cost of 15,000 dollars.

One engagement, two numbers a full point apart. Translated into the Manchester convention, the ICF median of seven times would be a net return of 600 percent. Translated the other way, the Manchester average of 5.7 would be about 6.7 times. Quoted side by side as "5.7 to 7 times", the two figures look like independent studies converging. They are two different quantities, drawn from two different populations, with the gap between them partly produced by the arithmetic.

Measured with a comparison group, the effect is small

One large study compared coached managers with uncoached ones, using ratings from other people. Smither and colleagues followed 1,361 senior managers who all received multisource feedback, 404 of whom also worked with an executive coach. A year later, 1,202 were rated again. The coached managers improved more on ratings from their direct reports and supervisors, and the abstract calls the effect size, d = 0.17, small.

That is the same direction the pooled research takes. Three meta-analyses of workplace coaching find a positive effect that is small to moderate and shrinks as the studies get stricter, as set out in what the meta-analyses find about coaching.

None of this contradicts the claim that coaching can pay for itself. A small improvement in how a senior manager is rated may still be worth more than the fee. But no study we found converts a measured change into money, and no study compares what coachees estimate they gained with what was measured for the same people. The multiples in circulation cannot be checked against anything.

Researchers have questioned ROI as the measure itself

De Meuse, Dai and Lee reviewed the retrospective studies of executive coaching alongside a meta-analysis in 2009, and their abstract concludes that although the ROI index offers a straightforward overall measure, "its veracity and usefulness is questioned." Fillery-Travis and Lane argued three years earlier that organisations seeking evidence of a return were asking the wrong question, before they had established how coaching was being used. The sharpest statement came from the founder of the first university coaching psychology unit.

In this article, it is argued that financial return on investment (ROI) is an unreliable and insufficient measure of coaching outcomes, and that an over-emphasis on financial returns can restrict coaches' and organisations' awareness of the full range of positive outcomes possible through coaching.

Grant's abstract adds that coaching aimed narrowly at maximising financial returns may inadvertently increase job-related stress and anxiety. The general problem of putting a return on development spending, and why the results level of evaluation rarely works, is covered in how to measure whether a leadership programme worked.

The study nobody has run

Both reports printed their limits. The Manchester authors gave every adjustment and its average, and the ICF summary put its caution in writing. It was the retelling, over seventeen and twenty-five years, that dropped the 43, the 189 and the word "estimate".

The question underneath is answerable. Take a cohort of coached managers, ask each one to estimate the monetary value of their coaching in the Manchester way, and set those estimates beside measured outcomes and a comparison group. We found no study that has done it. Until one does, the multiples describe how satisfied clients value their coaching, and say nothing yet about what it returned.

Common questions

Where does the 5.7 times coaching ROI figure come from? From a 2001 article in The Manchester Review by practitioners at Manchester Consulting, who interviewed 100 executives their firm had coached. Forty-three of them could estimate the dollar value of the benefits. After adjustments based on the executives' own attributions and confidence levels, the average came to nearly 100,000 dollars, or 5.7 times the cost.

Where does the seven times or 700 percent coaching ROI come from? From the ICF Global Coaching Client Study, an online survey of 2,165 coaching clients carried out by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Association Resource Centre in 2008 and published in 2009. It is the median company return among the respondents able to give figures, and only 189 respondents in total could state both their gain and their cost.

Were these ROI figures measured? No. In both studies the monetary benefit was estimated by the coaching client. The Manchester study had no comparison group and says a controlled trial was not possible. The ICF summary itself warns that its ROI results should be interpreted with caution.

Why do 5.7 and 7 times not confirm each other? They use different definitions. The Manchester study subtracts the cost before dividing, so breaking even is 0 percent; the ICF survey divides the gain by the cost, so breaking even is 100 percent. The same engagement comes out as 5.45 times under the first and 6.45 times under the second.

Was the ICF survey about executive coaching? Mostly not. Half of the current clients in the survey were in life, vision and enhancement coaching and 22 percent in executive coaching. Seventy-two percent chose their coach themselves, and the average engagement cost 4,353 dollars.

What does measured research say about executive coaching? A study of 1,361 senior managers found that those who worked with an executive coach improved more on ratings from direct reports and supervisors than those who did not, with a small effect size of 0.17. Meta-analyses of workplace coaching find small to moderate positive effects.

Can the return on coaching be calculated at all? Not reliably with current methods. Anthony Grant argued that financial ROI is an unreliable and insufficient measure of coaching outcomes, and we found no study that checks self-estimated returns against measured results.

Sources

1. McGovern, Lindemann, Vergara, Murphy, Barker & Warrenfeltz (2001), Maximizing the Impact of Executive Coaching: Behavioral Change, Organizational Outcomes, and Return on Investment, The Manchester Review 6(1), reprint held by the ICF research portal (PDF)
2. International Coach Federation (2009), ICF Global Coaching Client Study, Executive Summary, conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Association Resource Centre (PDF)
3. Smither, London, Flautt, Vargas & Kucine (2003), Can working with an executive coach improve multisource feedback ratings over time? A quasi-experimental field study, Personnel Psychology 56(1), 23-44
4. Grant (2012), ROI is a poor measure of coaching success: towards a more holistic approach using a well-being and engagement framework, Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice 5(2), 74-85
5. De Meuse, Dai & Lee (2009), Evaluating the effectiveness of executive coaching: beyond ROI?, Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice 2(2), 117-134
6. Fillery-Travis & Lane (2006), Does coaching work or are we asking the wrong question?, International Coaching Psychology Review 1(1), 23-36