If you ask most coaches how long their sessions are, they'll say 60 minutes. Ask them why, and many will pause.
TL;DR
- The 60-minute default is a convention, not a law. Question whether it fits your practice.
- 45-minute sessions work well for busy clients and back-to-back scheduling days.
- 90-minute sessions suit intensive work, new engagements, and deep single-topic exploration.
- Session length interacts with frequency: shorter and more often, or longer and less frequent.
- The right length is partly about your energy, not just your client's needs.
If you ask most coaches how long their sessions are, they'll say 60 minutes. Ask them why, and many will pause.
"That's just what coaching sessions are."
It's not a bad answer. Sixty minutes is the industry default for real reasons. But it's still a default, not a principle. And coaches who've never questioned it are sometimes offering a format that doesn't actually fit their clients, their practice, or their own working style.
Let's look at the actual options, what each one is suited for, and how to decide what's right for you.
The Three Most Common Formats
45 Minutes
Forty-five minutes has been gaining ground, particularly among coaches who work with executives and leaders. There are a few reasons.
The first is cognitive efficiency. For most focused conversations, 45 minutes is enough time to go somewhere meaningful. Sessions don't fill time by going deeper. They fill time by going wider, covering more ground that may or may not be the most important ground. A tight 45 minutes forces both you and the client to prioritize.
The second is practical: busy clients like it. An executive who's in back-to-back meetings all day finds a 45-minute slot far easier to protect than an hour. You're not asking them to carve out 60 minutes. You're asking for 45, which often means 15 minutes of buffer before their next thing. That's not a small difference for someone whose calendar is already under pressure.
The third is back-to-back scheduling. If you see six clients in a day, 45-minute sessions with a 15-minute break between each is a very manageable cadence. Six 60-minute sessions with the same breaks means six-and-a-half hours of your day is gone before you account for your own prep and admin.
The risk with 45 minutes: you need to know how to structure a coaching session tightly enough that you're not still in the middle of something important when the session ends. A sharp structure matters more at 45 minutes than at 60.
60 Minutes
Sixty minutes remains the most common format because it works. It's long enough to settle in, go somewhere, and land cleanly. It's short enough to stay focused and not drift. Most coaches and most clients are already calibrated to think in hours.
The argument for 60 minutes is really an argument for the middle ground: not so short that you're rushing, not so long that either party starts to ramble. The standard exists for good reasons.
Where 60 minutes starts to strain: when you're seeing many clients back-to-back without enough buffer, the cumulative cognitive load is significant. Six hours of active listening is a lot. The quality of your attention in sessions five and six may not be what it is in session one.
Knowing how to run a coaching session well matters at any length, but at 60 minutes you have enough room for a natural pace. The structure can breathe. The cost is that sessions can also drift, especially with clients who are particularly verbal or who arrive without a clear focus for the day.
90 Minutes
Ninety-minute sessions serve a specific purpose: depth. Not every session needs 90 minutes. Most don't. But some do.
New engagement kick-offs benefit from more time. You're establishing the relationship, doing discovery, co-creating a focus for the engagement, and often covering practical logistics. Trying to compress that into 60 minutes usually means something important gets rushed or skipped.
Deep single-topic work also benefits from 90 minutes. When a client is working through something significant, a complex career decision or a major relationship dynamic, the first 30 minutes sometimes function as a warm-up. The real territory doesn't open until you've been in it a while. Ninety minutes gives you room to go somewhere and then do something with what you find there.
VIP intensives and one-off strategy sessions are obvious candidates for 90 minutes or longer.
The downside: 90-minute sessions require significant client energy. Not all clients have that. Some will flag around the 60-minute mark regardless of how engaging the session is. Watch for it. A client who's coasting in the last 25 minutes of a 90-minute session wasn't well-served by the extra time.
How Length and Frequency Interact
This is the piece most coaches miss. Length doesn't exist in isolation. It pairs with frequency.
Weekly 45-minute sessions versus biweekly 60-minute sessions add up to similar total hours in a year, but they feel different to clients and to you.
Frequent shorter sessions work well when a client is actively navigating change and needs regular touchpoints. The weekly rhythm keeps them oriented. The 45-minute constraint keeps each session focused rather than open-ended.
Less frequent longer sessions work well for clients who need time to implement between sessions before there's anything real to bring back. Biweekly 60 minutes gives them a week of processing and a week of action, then a session to make sense of it.
Monthly 90-minute sessions are common in senior executive coaching, where the client moves fast and doesn't need weekly check-ins, but benefits from a longer, more intensive conversation at regular intervals.