What Headway's $9.99 Per-Session Fee Means for Your Practice

Short answer: Headway has turned a one-time referral into a recurring cost. The $9.99 marketplace service fee is charged on every appointment with a client who found a therapist through Headway, for as long as the therapist sees that client, and it is deducted from payout. The practices it costs most are the ones with full, stable caseloads, because they pay it every week for a referral that happened once. Oasys is where a practice goes when it wants to own that relationship: claims, billing, and the clinical record in one system, at a flat $80 per clinician per month, so the price does not move with sessions or with where a client came from.

This draws on Oasys's ongoing conversations with solo and group practice owners about what they pay for referral networks and what it takes to run billing themselves, plus published reviews of Headway and Headway's own help center. Oasys makes an EHR, so it has a stake here, and the facts about Headway below come from what Headway has published.

What changed

Headway's model was already a trade. It fills a calendar and handles credentialing and billing for in-network sessions, and it keeps a margin on the rates it negotiates; the commission is not publicly disclosed. The new fee sits on top of that.

According to Headway's help center, it is $9.99 per appointment, the same for every health plan, on insurance and private-pay sessions alike. It applies to every appointment with a client who searched on Headway and booked from the therapist's Headway profile, "for as long as you see that client, not just their first session." It is deducted from the regular payout, is not applied retroactively, and does not change the contracted rate or what clients pay.

It starts October 8, 2026 for providers whose primary practice state is Virginia, Washington, Georgia, Ohio, or Illinois, and later in 2026 for everyone else.

Exempt sessions: clients a therapist brings themselves, clients who book through the therapist's direct link (on a website, Psychology Today profile, or email signature), clients who found the therapist on Headway before the change, health system referrals, and sessions that do not take place. Client source is set at the first booking and stays the same.

What it means for you

The size of the fee may sound small. The shape of it is what matters, because it grows with the number of marketplace clients and with how long they stay. A client seen weekly is about $40 a month and about $520 over 52 sessions. How that lands depends on where a practice is.

If you are new or under-booked. The marketplace still does the job it was built for: it puts a calendar in front of clients. For a clinician with no referral flow, the fee is a cost of acquisition, and the useful question is how long you want to pay it. The sessions that come through your own direct link carry no fee, so every client you bring yourself is one you keep at the full rate. A practice that starts on Oasys has billing and the clinical record ready from the first of those clients, rather than building them later under pressure.

If you are solo with a steady caseload. This is where the fee bites hardest. A therapist carrying 10 weekly marketplace clients pays roughly $5,200 a year in this fee alone, and 20 clients is roughly $10,400, before counting Headway's margin on the rate itself. The referral happened once. The cost repeats every session. For a full caseload, the part of Headway you rely on most is the credentialing and billing, not the listing, and billing is the part Oasys takes over.

If you run a group practice. The fee is per provider and per client, so it multiplies. If each of 10 clinicians carries 10 weekly marketplace clients, that is 100 clients and roughly $52,000 a year in fees. Headway applies the fee by each provider's primary practice state, the practice admin manages marketplace settings for everyone, and a supervising provider's intake and each session after a transfer include the fee, so a practice with supervisees feels it in more places. This is also the segment where Oasys fits best, because supervision, permissions, and payroll are built for multi-clinician practices.

If you were already thinking about going direct. The fee moves the date up. The cost of staying is now a visible number on every payout, and the cost of moving is a one-time credentialing project plus the billing setup.

Why the two prices work so differently

Headway and Oasys charge for different things, and that is the whole comparison.

Headway earns on sessions: a margin on every rate it negotiates, and now $9.99 on every marketplace appointment. Its revenue grows as a practice's sessions grow.

Oasys is $80 per clinician per month, annual, with no add-ons. There is no per-claim fee, no per-ERA fee, no per-session fee, and no charge that depends on where a client came from. A practice that doubles its sessions pays the same. A practice that hires pays for the new clinician.

For a therapist whose caseload is full, that is the difference between a cost that follows the success of the practice and a cost that does not.

Where Oasys comes in

Headway bundles credentialing, billing, and a marketplace. The fee makes the marketplace the expensive part, and the other two are what a practice needs to replace.

Billing and claims. Claims are coded from the signed note, and payment is blocked until the note is complete. Authorization gaps surface before the session, not after a claim bounces. Practices choose between fully managed billing, where Oasys's team handles claims end to end, and self-serve billing, where the practice runs its own claims on the platform.

Payer enrollment on the claims side. Once a clinician is credentialed and paneled, clearinghouse enrollment for claims, ERA, and eligibility is tracked per payer and has often wrapped up within a couple of weeks.

Credentialing. Oasys does not perform credentialing. It works with dedicated credentialing companies for practices that want the layer handled, which typically takes three to six months for the major payers.

Out-of-network and private pay. Headway works only for in-network clients. Oasys generates superbills from the same signed note used for a direct claim.

The clinical record and the group layer. Headway does not provide a full clinical record, so practices already document somewhere else. In Oasys, documentation, scheduling, billing, supervision, and payroll reporting live in one system, with supervision that follows credential status and a payroll ledger produced as an output.

What a practice keeps. On Headway, a therapist is paid by Headway, not by the insurer, and Headway keeps the difference between the rate it negotiates and the rate it pays out. A practice that contracts directly keeps the full contracted rate. For some payers the direct rate will be lower than Headway's negotiated rate, and for others it will not, so the comparison is worth running payer by payer.

Three numbers worth pulling this week

How many of your current clients came through the Headway marketplace, since they are the ones who carry the fee. Which state Headway counts as your primary practice state, since it sets your start date. And how many of your active clients you could route through your direct link going forward, since those stay fee-free.