How Much Does Rehab Cost? Let's Do the Maths

Four weeks of private residential rehab typically costs £14,000 to £20,000 at UK private clinics, and from around £9,900 at licensed centres in Europe. Sierra Recovery publishes a price of £9,900 for 28 days with a private room. That is the answer, and how much does rehab cost deserves a straight one.

Most pages carrying this question never give a figure. The convention across the sector is to explain that costs vary by centre and leave it there, which is true and useless to anyone trying to make a decision.

So this article does something different. It takes a month of residential treatment apart and prices each component at published open-market rates. Accommodation. Meals. One-to-one therapy. Group therapy. Nursing cover. Then it adds them up and puts the total next to the price.

Every line is sourced, and every line is checkable.

How much does rehab cost?

Prices vary more than almost any other private healthcare purchase. Here is the shape of the market for a four-week stay.

The US range comes from the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, which puts the average 30-day inpatient programme at about USD 12,500. Its underlying data is older material adjusted forward for inflation, so treat it as scale rather than precision. The UK and international ranges above are drawn from publicly available pricing information across the sector rather than an independent survey, and are given here as such.

Every row describes something people call rehab. They are not the same product, and the gap is not explained by the quality of the bed linen. Treatment options at the top and bottom of that table differ enormously in how much clinical contact they include. The next section shows where the money actually goes.

Let's do the maths: 28 days of rehab, priced line by line

Suppose you tried to assemble the same month yourself, buying each piece separately at going rates. What would it cost?

Where the £13,750 goes

Each component priced separately at going rates, using the lower estimate from the table above. The marker is Sierra Recovery’s published price for the same 28 days.

£9,900 published

£0£13,750

• Accommodation £2,800
• Meals £1,680
• One-to-one therapy £2,616
• Group therapy £1,680
• Nursing cover £2,520
• Yoga £420
• Fitness, equine or art £1,120
• Medical review £634
• Excursions £80
• Airport transfers £200

Now the sources, because a table like that is worthless without them.

Accommodation. The range reflects how far apart residential properties sit. The average daily rate for a hotel room in England outside London was £111 in June 2026, according to VisitBritain's hotel occupancy data, and that is roughly the floor: a private room in a residential setting is not a budget room. London runs closer to £260, and a genuinely luxurious property will charge £300 a night and upwards, sometimes £500. Which end of that range a centre sits at is one of the largest single differences between two fees that both call themselves rehab, which is why it is the first line here rather than a footnote. Meals. This one deserves a range, because the answer depends entirely on how you buy the food. HMRC sets a benchmark rate of £25 a day for someone away from home for fifteen hours or more, which is the government's conservative view of feeding one person for a day. Buy those same three meals out and the figure roughly doubles. Lumina Intelligence put the average spend per eating-out visit at £18.35 in the first quarter of 2026, so three meals bought out comes to about £55 a day. That is the benchmark this line uses, rounded to £60, because three cooked meals a day prepared for you is closer to eating out than to a supermarket shop. The upper figure of £120 a day, about £40 a meal, is what a kitchen with a chef and a menu built around dietary and clinical needs costs. Over 28 days the line runs £1,680 to £3,360. One-to-one therapy. This is a calculation rather than a published price, so here it is in full. The Unit Costs of Health and Social Care 2025, compiled by the University of Kent and the University of York, costs a Band 7 clinical psychologist at £72 per working hour. The same manual records that for every hour a psychologist spends face to face with a client, roughly two further hours go on assessment, notes, formulation and supervision. Multiply £72 by that ratio and an hour in the room comes to about £218. Group therapy. Published UK fee schedules for group psychotherapy generally sit around £35 a session with an accredited psychotherapist and nearer £45 with a chartered psychologist. Charity-run and lower-cost groups start around £20. We have modelled three groups a day rather than the four or five a full programme can run, which keeps the estimate cautious. Nursing cover. The same manual costs a substance misuse nurse at £90 per hour of face-to-face contact. We have assumed one hour a day, which is modest for a residential setting. Yoga, and the activity hour. A group yoga class in the UK runs £15 to £25, with private instruction three to five times that. The activity hour is priced across the range a centre actually draws on: personal training averages £40 an hour in the UK, art therapy sits at £55 an hour under British Association of Art Therapists guidance, and equine-assisted work runs £100 to £120 a session. Trauma-informed boxing sits in the same band as personal training. A day with one of those in it is not a day at a hotel. Excursions. Four a month, guided, of the kind this part of Andalusia actually offers: the karst landscape at El Torcal de Antequera, the flamingos at the Laguna de Fuente de Piedra, riding, mountain walking and mountain-bike routes. The official guided routes at El Torcal are €6 to €17.50 a person, and a riding morning or a guided bike route booked through the usual platforms sits nearer the top of the £20 to £60 range once transport and a guide are counted. Medical review. NHS England's National Cost Collection puts a general psychiatry service contact at £317.

Assembled separately, the components come to between £13,750 and £24,970. The published programme price is £9,900.

Two caveats, because the table would be misleading without them. Buying pieces separately is not the same as running an integrated programme, where staff are shared across a group and everything is bought at scale. And these are UK reference rates, used to show the shape of the cost rather than to describe what anything costs to deliver in rural Andalusia, where staff and property cost less. The point is not that the numbers match exactly. It is that accommodation and food alone account for between £4,480 and £11,760 before a single hour of therapy, and the therapy is what you are actually buying.

Just to compare: a care home bed costs £6,784 a month, with no therapy in it

There is a cleaner way to test whether a rehab fee is reasonable, and it does not involve hotels at all. This is a comparison, not a like-for-like: a care home and a treatment centre do different jobs. It is here because it is the closest thing in British healthcare to a published, audited price for a room, meals and nursing, which makes it a useful floor to measure a rehab fee against.

A private nursing home place in England costs £1,696 a week for someone paying their own way, according to the Unit Costs of Health and Social Care 2025. Over four weeks that is £6,784.

What does that buy? A room, meals, and nursing care. It does not buy psychotherapy. It does not buy a group programme, psychiatric input, or any addiction treatment whatsoever.

The same manual costs local authority residential care for adults aged 18 to 64 who need long-term mental health support at roughly £1,338 per resident per week once capital costs are included. Call it £5,350 for four weeks, again with no intensive therapy attached.

Set £6,784 against a published £9,900 that includes 28 nights, full board, twelve one-to-one sessions and three structured therapy groups a day. The difference is around £3,100, and that £3,100 is the entire clinical programme.

That is the number worth sitting with. The question stops being why residential rehab costs so much, and becomes how the treatment fits into the gap at all.

Cost per therapy hour: the number that makes two quotes comparable

Here is a tool you can use on any rehab centre in any country, including this one.

Ask three questions, then do one sum.

1. How many one-to-one sessions a week does the fee include?

2. How many group sessions a day, and how big are the groups?

3. Multiply both across the full length of stay to get total scheduled contact hours.

Then divide the quoted fee by that number. You now have a cost per therapeutic contact hour, and you can compare providers who otherwise describe themselves in completely different terms.

Run it on Sierra's published programme as a worked example. Three one-to-one sessions a week over four weeks is twelve sessions, so twelve hours. Take the group programme conservatively at three sessions a day of about ninety minutes, and that is 84 sessions, or roughly 126 hours. Together, about 138 scheduled contact hours. Divide £9,900 by 138 and you get roughly £72 an hour, against the £218 an hour that one-to-one clinical psychology time costs in the UK on the figures above.

Two cautions, and they matter. Group hours and one-to-one hours are not equivalent units, so this is a rough measure rather than a precise one. And contact hours measure dose, not quality. A well-matched therapist over fewer hours can be worth more than a poor match over many.

It cuts the other way too. A programme with a lower headline fee often includes far fewer hours, so its cost per contact hour can be worse. A smaller bill is not the same as better value.

Types of rehab, and what each type costs

Costs can range enormously because "rehab" covers several different levels of care. Comparing them on price alone will mislead you, so it helps to know what you are looking at.

Detox deals with the physical side. It manages withdrawal symptoms safely, and it is not rehab. On its own it does very little for the reasons someone drinks or uses. Inpatient rehab is what most people mean by the word. You attend rehab as a resident, and the fee covers accommodation, meals, and a full treatment programme. This is the rehab treatment the rest of this article prices. Outpatient rehab costs far less because you live at home. For some people with a stable home and milder dependence it works well. For others, staying in the environment where the drinking or drug use happens makes it considerably harder.

Prices vary depending on which of these you are buying, how long you stay, and how much clinical contact is scheduled. A cheap quote for one type is not a bargain against another type.

Why one four-week programme costs three times another

Most people assume the price gap is about pools, grounds and thread count. Some of it is. Most of it is not.

Staff time dominates every serious costing of treatment. A Band 7 clinical psychologist costs £72 an hour before you account for the preparation and supervision around each session. Accommodation at £111 a night is a minor line beside that. Two centres in similar buildings can have completely different cost bases if one runs three one-to-ones a week plus daily groups and the other runs a keyworking session once a week.

This is also why inpatient and outpatient prices are not comparable. Outpatient treatment costs considerably less because you live at home, so the fee carries no accommodation, no catering and no round-the-clock staffing. It suits some people well. It is not a discounted version of residential rehab, and comparing the two on price alone will mislead you.

This is also why the cost of alcohol rehab and the cost of drug rehab are usually quoted the same way. What you are buying in both cases is a treatment programme built from staff hours, not a room.

The real drivers of price are these:

• Scheduled one-to-one sessions: how many per week, and whether the number is contractual or aspirational.
• Group programme: how many sessions a day, and how many people are in the room.
• Who delivers the therapy: qualification, registration and supervision arrangements.
• Staff-to-client ratio: a small unit costs more per person than a sixty-bed facility.
• Access to psychiatric input: available on site, on request, or not at all.
• Length of stay: fourteen days, twenty-eight, or longer.

The uncomfortable corollary is that a high price guarantees none of this. Some expensive programmes are expensive because of the property. The only way to know is to ask for the session counts in writing, before you pay anything.

What the fee covers, and what is billed on top

The quoted price is rarely the whole invoice, and the honest thing is to say so before you book rather than after.

Usually included in a residential programme fee:

• Accommodation and all meals
• The scheduled one-to-one and group therapy sessions
• Clinical assessment, and treatment plans written for you rather than off a template
• Nursing presence through the residential stay
• Therapeutic and physical activities, and use of the rehab facilities
• Aftercare after discharge, and for how long. At Sierra that is a weekly session for a full year, more than 48 in total

What the cost covers should be set out in writing before you commit to anything.

Usually billed separately:

• Medically supervised detox, where it is clinically required
• Psychiatric assessment and any ongoing psychiatric input
• Medication
• Travel to and from the centre
• Any weeks beyond the programme you booked

That first exclusion deserves a proper explanation rather than a footnote. Sierra Recovery is a residential treatment centre, not a hospital and not a detox unit. Where a medically supervised alcohol detox or drug detox is clinically necessary, it is completed in an appropriate medical setting before admission, and it is charged separately.

This is a clinical point before it is a commercial one. Withdrawal symptoms from alcohol, benzodiazepines and opioids can be dangerous, and in some cases life-threatening. Managing them belongs somewhere equipped for it. Never stop these substances abruptly without medical advice.

On aftercare, ask any provider what is included and for how long. At Sierra it runs for a full year: one session every week, online or in person at the PROMIS clinics in London, which is more than 48 sessions in the twelve months after discharge. It covers one-to-one sessions with the lead clinician, the weekly group, and a clinical handover to UK providers, and it is inside the £9,900 rather than sold on afterwards.

How to pay for rehab, and what to do if you cannot

Private treatment is out of reach for many people, and a page about cost that ignores that is not much use. There are ways to get help whatever your situation.

Payment options for those who can fund a private rehab programme are usually straightforward: savings, family contribution, a payment plan agreed with the centre, or in rare cases insurance. The cost in the UK is higher than most other European options, which is one reason people look abroad.

For everyone else, the picture is harder.

The NHS does not generally provide residential rehabilitation directly. Funded residential placements come through local authority individual placement funding, following an assessment under the Care Act 2014 and a panel decision.

The scale of that provision is worth knowing before you plan around it. Lambeth Council, a large London borough, funds seven residential rehabilitation placements for adults, at £650 to £800 a week, with a standard duration of four months. That is not a criticism of local authorities, who work within fixed budgets and long waiting times. It is context, so you can plan realistically.

While you wait, or if funding is not an option:

• Start with your GP or a local drug and alcohol service. This is also the route into a funding assessment, so it is worth doing early.
• NHS talking therapies accept self-referral and usually run to between 8 and 16 sessions.
• Mutual-aid groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous are free and meet in most areas, including online.
• Charity and voluntary sector organisations that can help run structured outpatient rehab and day programmes in many regions at no cost.

None of this is a lesser version of getting help. For a lot of people struggling with drug addiction or with alcohol or drugs more generally, it is the whole of it, and it works.

Is private rehab worth the cost?

You cannot put a price on your health is not an answer. Anyone spending five figures is entitled to the arithmetic.

Three things are worth weighing, and none involves a success rate, because no honest provider can give you one.

The public economics are unusually well documented. The UK government's own analysis puts the return on alcohol treatment at £3 for every £1 invested, rising to £26 over ten years, and drug treatment at £4 for every £1, rising to £21. That analysis was published in 2018 and describes treatment as a public investment rather than a promise about any individual. It still tells you that people who study this at population scale consider it to repay itself several times over. Untreated dependence has its own invoice. NHS England costs a non-elective long-stay admission for mental and behavioural disorders due to drug or alcohol use at £3,290, and an acute alcohol intoxication admission of the same type at £3,303. A handful of those episodes approaches the cost of a programme, before anything else in a person's life is counted. Then there is your own arithmetic, which only you can do. Take current weekly spend and multiply by 52. Add lost earnings from reduced hours or absence. Add what previous attempts have already cost. Put that annual figure beside a one-off number and see how it looks.

What treatment buys is not a guaranteed outcome. It is time away from the environment, a concentrated period of clinical attention, and a plan for what happens next. Relapse is common in addiction recovery, which is precisely why the aftercare arrangements matter as much as the residential weeks, and why long-term recovery is better measured in years than in the length of a stay in rehab.

Whether that is worth £9,900 is a judgement only you can make, but it should be an informed one.

Does rehab cost less in other countries?

Yes, and the reason is structural rather than clinical. Staff costs and property costs differ between countries, so the same treatment intensity costs a different amount to deliver in inland Andalusia than in southern England. That is a difference in input costs, not in the quality of the clinical work.

Which raises the fair question of how you tell the difference from the outside. Two things are actually checkable.

The session counts. Ask any centre, anywhere, how many one-to-one and group sessions the fee includes. A programme unwilling to put that in writing has told you something. The health authority registration. Sierra Recovery is registered with the Junta de Andalucía as NICA 67331, an authorised care unit for addiction healthcare, verifiable in the Spanish public registry. Plenty of centres in plenty of countries display no health administration licence at all.

For country-level detail, see the cost of rehab in Spain, rehab in the UK, rehab in Thailand, rehab in Ireland, rehab in Australia and rehab in the United States.

Seven questions to ask before you pay a deposit

Whichever centre you are considering, these seven questions will tell you more than any brochure.

1. How many one-to-one sessions a week, and who delivers them?

2. How many group sessions a day, and how many people are in each group?

3. What is the total number of scheduled therapeutic contact hours across the stay?

4. What is excluded from the fee?

5. Do you hold a health authority registration, and what is the number?

6. What happens, clinically and financially, if the team recommends a longer stay?

7. What continuing care is included, and for how long?

Sierra Recovery answers all seven in writing, publishes its price, and treats a small number of people at a time in a converted cortijo in the mountains of Málaga. The clinical model is adapted from PROMIS Clinics in the UK, which has been treating addiction and mental health for decades. You can read more about the programme or the centre itself.

Still working out whether it is worth it?

Talk it through with someone who will give you real numbers

Our team answers questions about cost, length of stay and what is included, in plain terms and with no obligation. If we are not the right fit for you, we will say so.

Speak to our team -> /contact/

Sources

1. Jones KC, Weatherly H, Barker A et al. (2026) "Unit Costs of Health and Social Care 2025 Manual" - Personal Social Services Research Unit, University of Kent and Centre for Health Economics, University of York - https://kar.kent.ac.uk/115569/

2. NHS England - "National Cost Collection 2024/2025", as reported in the Unit Costs of Health and Social Care 2025 Manual - https://kar.kent.ac.uk/115569/

3. GOV.UK, Office for Health Improvement and Disparities - "Alcohol and drug prevention, treatment and recovery: why invest?" (2018) - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/alcohol-and-drug-prevention-treatment-and-recovery-why-invest/alcohol-and-drug-prevention-treatment-and-recovery-why-invest

4. VisitBritain - "England hotel occupancy, June 2026" (data provided by Amadeus) - https://www.visitbritain.org/research-insights/england-hotel-occupancy-latest

5. HM Revenue and Customs - "EIM30240: Employment Income Manual, benchmark scale rates" - https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/employment-income-manual/eim30240

6. Lambeth Council - "Funding for drug and alcohol rehabilitation placements for adults" - https://www.lambeth.gov.uk/lambeth-data-hub/funding-drug-alcohol-rehabilitation-placements-adults

7. NHS - "Counselling and NHS talking therapies" - https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/talking-therapies-medicine-treatments/talking-therapies-and-counselling/counselling/

8. National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics - "Average Cost of Drug Rehab" - https://drugabusestatistics.org/cost-of-rehab/

9. Lumina Intelligence - "UK Restaurant Consumer Trends 2026", Eating and Drinking Out Panel - https://www.lumina-intelligence.com/blog/uk-restaurant-consumer-trends-2026/

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does residential rehab cost?

Four weeks of private residential rehab typically costs £14,000 to £20,000 at UK private clinics. Sierra Recovery publishes £9,900 for 28 days including a private room, with further weeks at around £2,475 each. The spread across the market is driven mainly by how many hours of clinical contact the fee includes, not by the standard of the building.

How much is two weeks of rehab, and is a shorter stay worth it?

A two-week stay costs less in absolute terms but buys proportionally fewer therapy hours, so the cost per contact hour does not necessarily improve. Sierra's minimum stay is 14 days and the standard programme is 28. Length of stay is a clinical decision that should be made with the treatment team rather than set by budget alone.

Does the NHS pay for residential rehab?

Not directly. The NHS provides detox in some cases and free talking therapies, but residential rehabilitation is usually funded by local authorities through individual placement funding after a Care Act 2014 assessment. Provision is limited. Lambeth Council, for example, funds seven adult placements at £650 to £800 a week.

Is aftercare included in the cost of rehab?

It depends entirely on the provider, so ask for the detail in writing. At Sierra Recovery it is a year of weekly sessions, more than 48 in the twelve months after you leave, online or in person at the PROMIS clinics in London, with one-to-one time with the lead clinician, the weekly group, and a clinical handover to UK providers. All of it is inside the £9,900. Always ask any provider how long the included period lasts and what happens after it ends, because a month of aftercare and a year of it are sold with the same word.

Does health insurance cover private rehab in the UK?

Rarely, and less often than people expect. Most UK policies either exclude addiction treatment or cover it only where it forms part of a mental health claim, and pre-existing conditions are generally excluded. Check your policy wording for addiction specifically, and ask your insurer in writing before assuming any cover.

Does the cost of rehab change depending on the substance?

The residential programme fee itself does not usually change by substance. What changes is whether a medically supervised detox is needed first, which is common in alcohol addiction and in benzodiazepine and opioid dependence, and less common for cocaine or cannabis. That detox is a separate cost and, at Sierra, takes place in an appropriate medical setting before admission.

Is private rehab worth the money?

Judge it by arithmetic rather than promises. A private nursing home place with no therapy in it costs £6,784 for four weeks in England. UK government analysis puts the return on alcohol and drug treatment at £3 and £4 for every £1 invested. Set those against what your own situation is costing each year. No provider can guarantee an outcome.

Is the cost of rehab different in other countries?

Considerably. Staff and property costs vary between countries, so the same treatment intensity costs less to deliver in some places than others. Sierra's published £9,900 for 28 days in Spain sits well below typical UK private pricing. See the country pages for the cost of rehab in Spain, the UK, Thailand, Ireland, Australia and the United States.