Private clinic start-up finance: funding a new healthcare clinic

Founders often budget for equipment and rent and underestimate everything else. A realistic start-up budget for a clinic covers:

• Premises entry costs: rent deposit, legal fees on the lease, and any premium for an existing clinical unit.
• Clinical fit-out: wipeable floors and wall finishes, clinical hand-wash basins, adequate ventilation for procedure rooms, treatment room privacy, accessible entrances and toilets, and clinical waste storage.
• Equipment: couches, diagnostic ultrasound, shockwave, lasers, audiometry booths, sterilisation or decontamination units, and a clinical records and booking system.
• Regulation and insurance: CQC registration fees where your services are in scope, medical malpractice cover, and professional registrations for every clinician.
• Launch marketing: website, search and local advertising, and referral development with GPs, consultants and sports clubs.
• Runway: wages, rent and your own drawings for the months before bookings cover costs. For many clinics this is the largest single line, and the one most often missing from the plan.

If your clinic will carry out regulated activities in England, such as treatment of disease, disorder or injury by a health professional, diagnostic and screening procedures, or surgical procedures, you must be registered with the Care Quality Commission before you start providing them. CQC's guidance on who has to register explains the scope and its exceptions, which depend on the activity and on who delivers it. Registration needs a named registered manager, policies and premises ready for assessment, so you are paying rent and loan instalments during the application. Lenders who fund regulated clinics will ask where you are in that process.

Aesthetics founders should also watch the rules on non-surgical cosmetic procedures. The government has consulted on a licensing scheme for practitioners and premises in England, and its consultation response sets out the direction of travel. Build possible licence costs and premises standards into your plan so that a lender sees you have thought about them. Our page on aesthetics clinic finance covers that sector in more depth.

Illustration only, with round hypothetical figures and no rates. A musculoskeletal physiotherapist and a sports medicine doctor plan a three-room clinic with a total start-up budget of £180,000.

• They contribute £60,000 between them as share capital.
• £45,000 of equipment, including diagnostic ultrasound and shockwave, goes on hire purchase over five years.
• The landlord contributes £20,000 towards the fit-out in return for a ten-year lease.
• Each founder takes a Start Up Loan and invests it in the company, and a modest unsecured facility covers the remaining fit-out and runway.
• They open with two rooms equipped, keeping the third for a later phase funded from trading once bookings justify it.

Phasing reduces the amount borrowed before the clinic has proved itself, and makes the later round of borrowing easier to arrange because there will be trading figures to show.

The main risk is not the loan itself but running out of cash before the clinic breaks even. Borrowing the maximum on day one adds repayments before income arrives, so match borrowing to milestones where you can. Personal guarantees and, for sole traders, unlimited personal liability mean a failed clinic can follow you home. We do not arrange lending secured on a home you live in; if you are considering releasing equity from your house, take independent advice first. It is also worth pricing the alternative of buying an established clinic, which costs more upfront but comes with patients and trading figures that lenders can assess.