What care actually costs in British Columbia

Ask what a massage costs in Victoria and you will get a number. It will be wrong, not because anyone is lying but because “a massage” is not one purchase. An initial assessment, a thirty-minute focused treatment and a ninety-minute session are all filed under the same word, and they are not substitutes for one another. Averaging them produces a figure that describes no appointment anybody can book.

This is a guide to reading the prices on this site without being misled by that, and to the two or three things that genuinely do vary between clinics.

The length is the number that matters

Almost every apparent price difference between two clinics is a length difference. One sells a forty-five-minute treatment, the next sells thirty, and the cheaper one is not cheaper — it is shorter. That is why every price on Ailio is shown with the appointment length beside it, and why the city pages compare like with like: a median for sixty-minute treatments is computed only from sixty-minute treatments, at clinics that publish both the price and the length.

If you take one habit from this page, it is that: compare prices at the same length, or you are not comparing prices.

The first visit is not the recurring one

In physiotherapy and chiropractic in particular, the dearest row on a clinic’s price list is usually an initial assessment and the one that matters is the follow-up. The assessment is longer, sometimes includes imaging or a referral discussion, and is paid once. The follow-up is what a course of care actually costs, repeated six or eight times.

A clinic with an expensive assessment and a cheap follow-up can be considerably less expensive over a course of treatment than one with the opposite shape, and no single number on either price list tells you that.

Why there is no “cheapest clinic” list here

We could publish one. It would be popular and it would be misleading, because the cheapest row in almost any city is not an appointment. It is a ten- or fifteen-minute add-on, a chair massage at an event, or a student-delivered session — real services at real prices, and not what somebody searching for a treatment is trying to buy.

So the price figures on this site are fenced: rows too short to be the visit they are filed under are excluded from a median, as are student-delivered rows and any row a clinic asked its booking system not to show a price for. The effect is that our medians are a little higher and a great deal more useful than a raw minimum would be. Where a bound still looks implausible, we show the length beside it rather than smoothing it away.

What actually varies, once length is held constant

Three things, in roughly this order. The practitioner’s designation and how long they have practised. Whether the clinic bills your insurer directly or leaves you to claim. And overheads — a clinic with imaging, gym space or evening reception costs more to run than a single treatment room, and that shows up in the price of the same forty-five minutes.

None of those are visible in a price on its own, which is the honest limit of any price comparison, including ours.

Where the numbers are

Deliberately not on this page. A figure written into an essay is correct on the day it is written and silently wrong afterwards, and nothing would catch it. Every number lives on the pages that recompute it, with the count of services and clinics it came from and the date it was last read:

• Browse by city — each city page carries the median, the middle half of the range, and the number of clinics behind both, per discipline.
• Each city and discipline page also breaks the range down by appointment length, which is the comparison this guide is about.
• If a funder is paying — ICBC, WorkSafeBC and the rest publish their own rates, and those pages carry the schedule and its effective date rather than our arithmetic.

Ailio takes no commission and adds no booking fee, so the price you see is the clinic’s own. Where a placement is paid for, it is labelled as an advertisement and it is kept out of the rankings and the medians — it is never mixed into a result list or a figure on this site.