How much does private stroke rehabilitation cost in the UK?

This article explains what you are actually buying, what the NHS provides before you spend anything, and the one question that separates a rehabilitation programme from a series of appointments.

Where those figures come from

In September 2026 we checked the published rates of ten UK providers offering home-visit or neurological physiotherapy. Six publish full prices. One publishes clinic rates but withholds home-visit rates. Three publish none at all and ask you to call for a quote.

Among those who do publish, home initial assessments ran from £95 to £160, and hour-long follow-up visits from about £90 to £160. Most include travel within a local radius; some add a per-mile charge beyond it.

For context, the only independent UK benchmark we could find is the UK Private Practice Barometer 2026, which reported a median initial physiotherapy fee of £74 and a median follow-up of £63, with a London average initial fee of £84.22. Two caveats matter, and we would rather state them than let you find them: it is a commercial marketing agency's survey rather than a regulator's, and it covers musculoskeletal clinic practice only. It contains no home-visit figures and no neurological figures at all. Home visits and neuro specialism both cost more than the clinic median, which is why the real-world range above sits above it.

There is no published survey of UK private neurological or home-visit rates. We looked. If a provider quotes you a "typical market rate", ask them for the source.

Why a visit price is not a cost

Here is the problem with comparing £95 against £120 against £150.

Recovery after a stroke is dose-dependent. What changes an outcome is the total amount of purposeful, task-specific practice a person does — not the number of appointments in the diary. So the number that determines both your bill and your result is not the price of a visit. It is:

price per hour × total hours.

Almost every private provider publishes the first half of that equation and not the second. You can find out what a session costs. You usually cannot find out how many sessions you will need, over how long, or what the whole thing will come to — until you are already several weeks in.

That is not necessarily anyone acting in bad faith. A provider working session by session genuinely may not know. But it means a £95 visit and a £150 visit are not comparable numbers, any more than two supermarket prices are comparable when one is per item and the other is per kilo.

What national guidance says the dose should be

NICE guideline NG236, published in 2023, recommends that people after a stroke are offered at least 3 hours a day of multidisciplinary therapy, on at least 5 days a week, where they can tolerate it.

What is actually delivered looks different. A study of 94,905 UK stroke patients led by Matthew Gittins, published in Clinical Rehabilitation in 2020, found an average of 14 minutes of physiotherapy per day of hospital stay, and 2 minutes of psychology. The 2023 National Clinical Guideline for Stroke reported that 11.9% of patients received more than 45 minutes of physiotherapy seven days a week.

Both of those figures describe hospital care. Once you are home, there is no comparable number at all — the national stroke audit measures therapy dose for inpatients only. No national audit measures community therapy dose in England. The closest available figure covers speech and language therapy for aphasia, where median provision was 32 minutes per week (Palmer et al., 2018).

This is the gap most families discover on their own, usually a few weeks after discharge, and it is why private rehabilitation gets searched for in the first place.

What the NHS gives you first

Before spending anything, find out what you are already entitled to. Most areas run a community stroke or neuro-rehabilitation team who will see you at home after discharge, typically for a defined period of a few weeks. Your stroke team or GP can refer you, and it costs nothing.

Private rehabilitation is worth considering when that block ends and progress has not, when the frequency on offer is lower than you can tolerate, or when you want to add intensity alongside NHS input rather than instead of it. Good private providers will work alongside an NHS team; ask directly whether yours will.

What we charge, and what it buys

We publish our prices as four-week blocks with the clinical hours attached, so the cost of a whole course is knowable before it starts:

Programme	Dose	Clinical hours	Price	Per clinical hour
Guided Recovery	2 visits a week, 1.5 hours	12 hours	£1,800	£150
Intensive Recovery	3 visits a week, 2 hours	24 hours	£3,360	£140
Immersion Recovery	up to 3 hours a day, 5 days a week	60 hours	£6,900	£115

Initial assessment is free. Everything is delivered in your own home by an HCPC-registered neurological physiotherapist, and travel is included in the block price.

We are more expensive per hour than a single visit from a general physiotherapist, and we would rather say so than have you discover it. What the higher hourly rate reflects is neurological specialism, a named registered clinician rather than whoever is available, outcome measures taken at the start and repeated at the end, and a programme built to deliver a dose rather than fill a diary.

Notice also that our rate falls as the dose rises. The most intensive programme is the cheapest per hour, because the fixed costs of travel and setup are spread across far more contact time. If affordability per hour is your concern, the intensive block is the better value — which is the opposite of how most services are priced.

Is more therapy actually worth paying for?

Honesty requires naming the strongest evidence against this before the evidence for it.

A randomised controlled trial by Lang and colleagues, published in Annals of Neurology in 2016, gave stroke survivors escalating doses of upper-limb practice — up to 9,600 repetitions — and found no dose-response relationship. A 2021 Cochrane review found that gains in activities of daily living from increased therapy time were not statistically significant. Anyone who tells you more hours automatically means more recovery is overselling.

What the evidence does support is that purposeful, task-specific, high-repetition practice, individually targeted and sustained over time is what drives change — and that ordinary provision falls well short of delivering it. A 2009 study by Lang and colleagues found that a typical therapy session contained an average of 32 upper-limb repetitions. At the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery at Queen Square, an intensive programme of 90 hours over three weeks produced a median gain of 9 points on the Fugl-Meyer upper-limb scale, sustained at six months — though that was an uncontrolled cohort with no comparison group, so it cannot tell us what those patients would have achieved anyway.

On cost, NICE modelled higher-intensity physiotherapy (1–2 hours a day versus under 45 minutes a day) at £9,700 per quality-adjusted life year in its central scenario, and found it dominant — better outcomes at lower total cost — once reduced care costs were counted. NICE also rated its own analysis as having "potentially serious limitations", and a trial within the same review found intensive physiotherapy not cost-effective at £74,100 per QALY. Both figures are real. We would rather you saw both.

The wider context: a local-authority-funded care home place for someone over 65 costs £951 a week (NHS England, 2023-24), and the UK societal cost of stroke is around £26 billion a year, of which 61% is unpaid family care (Patel et al., Age and Ageing, 2020, at 2014/15 prices). Rehabilitation is not the most expensive thing in this picture.

Five questions to ask any provider before you pay

Whoever you choose — and it need not be us — these five questions will tell you more than any price list:

1. How many hours in total, over what period? If they cannot answer, they are selling appointments, not a programme.
2. What will the whole course cost? Not the session. The course.
3. Is travel time billed to me, and is mileage extra?
4. What outcome measure will you use, when will you repeat it, and will I see the result? A provider who measures is a provider who can be held to something.
5. Who exactly is coming, and what is their HCPC registration number? You can check any registrant yourself on the HCPC register. Ours is PH134357.

A cheaper hour that delivers 10 hours of general physiotherapy is not better value than a dearer hour that delivers 60 hours of specialist neurological practice — and it is not worse value either. It depends entirely on what you need. But you cannot make that judgement from a session price alone, and that is the whole point.

This article is general information and not a substitute for assessment by your GP, stroke team or physiotherapist. Every recovery is different, and prices quoted for other providers were those published on 12 September 2026.