Most coaching agreements include a cancellation policy and no refund policy, but most coaches don’t notice there’s a gap between those two… until a client asks for their money back. Those two documents answer completely different questions. A cancellation policy decides what happens to a session. A coaching refund policy decides what happens to money that has already been paid, which is the harder question… and the one that always arrives at the worst possible moment.
It often shows up in specific ways. A client suddenly goes AWOL in month two of a six-month package. Someone finishes four sessions, but then says the coaching isn’t working. A payment plan stops halfway through. A charge you collected in March shows up as a dispute in your processor’s dashboard in July. Every one of those has a right answer for your practice. None of them should be addressed for the first time in the heat of the moment.
Why your cancellation policy doesn’t cover this
A good cancellation policy settles four things about a single appointment: How much notice counts, what a late cancellation costs, what a no-show costs, and how much grace comes standard. If you haven’t made those calls yet, start there, because the rest of this sits on top of it.
Refunds operate one level up. They’re not about an hour on the calendar. They’re about the container the client bought, whether that’s a ten-session package, a three-month container, or a program with a start and end date. A client who missed a session and a client who wants out of the whole engagement are asking you two different things, and a policy written for the first one leaves you improvising on the second.
What the ICF Code already asks of you
The ICF Code of Ethics, revised in May 2026, doesn’t tell you what your refund terms should say. It does tell you when they have to exist. Standard 1.1 requires a coach to communicate before coaching begins in order to “co-create a coaching agreement regarding roles, responsibilities, confidentiality, financial arrangements, and other aspects of the coaching engagement.”
Standard 1.2 is the one people miss. It requires you to respect every party’s right to end the coaching relationship at any point for any reason, “subject to the provisions of the agreement.” Read those two together and the picture is clear. A client can always walk. What happens to the money when they do is decided entirely by terms you were supposed to have written down before the first session.
Silence isn’t a neutral position. It just means the terms get argued out later, by two people who are already upset, with nothing to point at.
The four decisions inside a refund policy:
1. What counts as delivered
Pick your unit and name it. Some coaches sell sessions, so value is delivered session by session and an unused session is clearly unused. Some sell access over a period of time, so a month of availability is delivered whether or not the client showed up. Some sell a program as one indivisible thing, because the value is in completing the arc rather than attending the parts.
All three are legitimate. What isn’t legitimate is leaving it undefined and then choosing the interpretation that suits you in the moment. Your unit of delivery should be obvious from how you built and priced the package in the first place.
2. Refund or credit
A refund returns money and usually ends the relationship. A credit keeps the money in your business and gives the client a way back in later. Neither one is required of you by any professional body, and no coaching organization has ruled on which is more ethical. This is a business decision you get to make, as long as you make it in writing.
The middle path is what shows up most often in coaches’ own published terms. No refund on sessions already delivered, and a refund or a credit on the clearly undelivered remainder. If you offer credit, give it an expiration date and say what it can be applied to. An open-ended credit is a liability that follows you into next year’s books.
3. What happens to a payment plan
A payment plan is not a subscription. It’s a full price the client agreed to, collected in pieces. So decide now what a stopped plan means. Is the remaining balance still owed because the client bought the whole program, or does the engagement simply end where the payments end? Both answers work. Only one of them is in your agreement, and it should be the one you actually intend to enforce.
If you run anything that renews on its own, the rules around that are unsettled right now. The Eighth Circuit vacated the FTC’s “click to cancel” rule on July 8, 2025, days before it was due to take effect, and the FTC reopened the rulemaking with a request for public comment in March 2026. No replacement rule has landed. What hasn’t gone anywhere is the underlying law. Federal enforcement continues under ROSCA and the FTC’s general authority over deceptive practices, which is a long way of saying the old expectations still hold. Disclose the renewal terms clearly, get real consent, and make cancelling possible without a fight.
4. Your guarantee, if you offer one
A satisfaction guarantee is a refund policy with marketing wrapped around it, and it’s only as good as its edges. Name the window, and name the conditions, which usually means the client attended the sessions and did the work. Then say exactly what comes back, whether that’s the full fee, the undelivered portion, or the deposit. A guarantee with soft edges will be read generously by the person asking and narrowly by you, and that gap is where the resentment lives.
Coaching Cancellation & Refund Policy Template
Most coaches don’t write this rule down until a last-minute cancellation has already cost them a session. By then they’re deciding under frustration instead of on paper. Decide it now, while nothing’s on the line. Work top to bottom: notice window, no-shows, rescheduling, refunds
What a card dispute looks like from the other side
A client doesn’t have to ask you at all. They can call their bank, and the first you hear about it is an email from your payment processor. Stripe’s documentation maps these to the card networks’ own dispute categories. “Product not received” is Visa reason code 13.1 and Mastercard 4855, the code for a client claiming they paid and got nothing. “Product unacceptable” is Visa 13.3 and Mastercard 4853, for coaching that wasn’t what was promised. There’s also a category for credit not processed, Visa 13.6 and 13.7, which is what a client files when you agreed to refund them and never did.
The part worth reading twice is what wins those. Stripe’s evidence guidance for service businesses asks for proof the service happened, meaning appointment records, work logs, check-in confirmations, and a signed service contract. It asks for customer communications showing the client raised no complaint before disputing. And it asks for your terms and policies, along with proof the client agreed to them at the point of purchase.
Your refund policy isn’t only an ethics document. It’s evidence. And you can’t produce it after the fact, because the thing being tested is whether the client saw it before they paid. Industry sources put the cardholder’s filing window at roughly 120 days from the expected service date, though those day counts come from dispute-management vendors rather than the card networks’ published rulebooks. Treat the timing as approximate and the lesson as exact. A charge can come back long after you thought the engagement was closed.
Where to put it so it actually counts
Not the website footer. Terms buried on a page nobody opened are close to worthless, both ethically and as evidence. The refund terms belong inside the agreement the client signs, right next to the cancellation terms, in language a person can read once and understand. If you’re working from a coaching agreement template, check whether it says anything about refunds at all. Plenty of them don’t.
Say it out loud in the enrollment conversation too. Thirty seconds of “here’s what happens if you need to stop” does more for trust than any guarantee badge, and it means nobody can honestly say they didn’t know. Then keep the record. The signed agreement, the date, and the version they agreed to are part of your basic business paperwork, not optional admin.
What surprises coaches who finally write this down is which direction it pushes them. Having a clear policy makes you more generous, not less. You’ll still say yes to refunds you don’t technically owe, because sometimes that’s the right call for the person in front of you. The difference is that you’ll be choosing it, warmly and on purpose, instead of getting cornered into it by a document that never got written.
