Guide

SOAP notes for counselling

A single format for the session note, with a fictional example. Use it only if it matches how you already think.

Updated 4 October 2026.

Information, not legal advice. This page is a practical overview for practices. It is not a substitute for advice on your own contracts, insurance or registration.

SOAP is a note format borrowed from health care and used, with care, in counselling. The letters stand for Subjective, Objective, Assessment and Plan. It is one way to write a session note that another clinician, a supervisor, or the client can follow. It is not the only acceptable format, and it is not a requirement of BACP or UKCP. Those bodies ask for accurate, adequate records. SOAP is a structure that helps you meet that bar without writing a transcript of the hour.

This page uses UK spelling and a fictional adult client. Nothing here is a real person.

What each letter is for

Subjective is the client’s account: what they say brought them, in their words, and what they report about the week. Mood in their language, sleep as they describe it, a worry they name. You are not diagnosing in this section. You are recording the account.

Objective is what you can point to without interpreting the person’s character. Attendance, presentation you directly observed (“spoke quietly, looked at the floor for much of the session”), a scale score if one was completed, a risk statement the client made in the room. Do not put gossip, and do not put your irritation.

Assessment is your clinical impression today, tied to the work you have agreed. It can note movement from last time, a theme, or a risk formulation. It should be tentative where you are tentative. “Appears lower in mood than last session, still attending work” is an assessment. “Is manipulative” is a slur, not an assessment.

Plan is what happens next. Homework the client actually agreed, the next appointment, a safeguarding step, a letter, a review date. If there is no next session, say how the work is ending and what the client was told about the record.

A worked example

Alex, 34, is a fictional client who came for anxiety about a new job. This is session 4 of an agreed 12. Alex has consented to a written note and has declined recording.

Subjective. Alex said the week had been “mostly manageable” until a team meeting on Wednesday, when they felt unable to speak and left the room. They reported sleeping about five hours a night and waking with a tight chest. They denied thoughts of suicide or of harming anyone else. They said they had used the breathing practice twice and found it “a bit artificial but it stopped the spiral”.

Objective. Attended on time. Speech was clear. Became tearful when describing the meeting, then settled. No alcohol use reported beyond one drink at the weekend. No current safeguarding concern identified in the session.

Assessment. Anxiety in performance situations remains the focus. Alex could describe the bodily build-up and could use a practised strategy, which is a change from session 2, when they could not name a strategy. Mood is low but they are attending work and the session. Risk of harm to self not indicated today. The formulation remains: fear of being judged, maintained by leaving situations early.

Plan. Next session Thursday at 10:00. Alex will note one meeting this week: the first body cue, what they did, and whether they stayed. Review the ending date at session 6. Note written and signed by the counsellor the same afternoon. Recording was not used.

That note can be read by Alex, by a supervisor, or by a colleague covering a week of leave. It does not include a joke, a guess about Alex’s manager, or a private reaction that belongs in supervision rather than in the record.

When SOAP fits, and when it does not

SOAP fits individual therapy where you need a shared structure across a team, or where notes may be read by someone who was not in the room. It is less natural for some psychoanalytic process notes, which many practitioners keep separate and without identifying detail. If your modality’s tradition is a sparse attendance record plus a formulation review, do not pretend every hour produced a medical SOAP. BACP does not prescribe the layout. Your insurer and your workplace might.

DAP notes are a shorter cousin: Data, Assessment, Plan. If SOAP feels too clinical for your setting, read DAP notes and pick one format for the practice so the record does not change shape every week.

Signing, Assist, and what not to paste

If a client consents to recording, Assist can draft a SOAP-shaped note from the transcript. You still check every line. A transcript can mis-hear a name or invent certainty the client did not have. You sign only what you stand behind. The draft is not the record until you apply it. See AI session notes and clinical notes software.

Do not paste an entire email thread into the note. Summarise the decision. Do not store the note in a personal notes app as the only copy. The practice management point of a proper record is that the note, the booking and the invoice refer to the same client without a second copy of the health information living in a spreadsheet.

Outcome scales are coming soon in Reach + Within. Until then, if you use a paper PHQ-9, record the score in the Objective line yourself rather than promising a graph the product does not yet draw.

A second fictional fragment

Here is a shorter note from a later session, still fictional, to show that SOAP does not have to be long to be useful.

Subjective. Alex said the team meeting “went better than I expected”. They spoke once, stayed in the room, and rated the anxiety afterwards as “unpleasant but finished”. Sleep was about six hours. No thoughts of suicide.

Objective. Attended. More spontaneous speech than session 4. No new risk information.

Assessment. The agreed experiment, staying in the meeting, happened once. That is early evidence for the plan, not proof the work is finished. Anxiety is still the focus.

Plan. Continue weekly. Repeat the same experiment once more. Review whether to space sessions at session 8. Signed the same day.

Supervision and the client’s copy

Take to supervision the question you are actually unsure about, not a performance of the note. If you keep a process note for yourself, keep identifying detail out of it, or accept that it is part of the record the client might ask to see. When a client asks for a copy, SOAP is usually easier to share than a free-form diary because each heading has a job. Explain any word they will not know. “Assessment” means your clinical impression that day, not a formal test, unless you did use a formal test.

If a complaint arrives two years later, the note you can defend is the one written close to the session, signed, and stored where the rest of the file lives. Reconstructing SOAP from memory after a letter from a solicitor is a poor plan. The guide on keeping records covers how long that file may need to exist. The guide on choosing practice software covers how to avoid the note living in a different product from the diary.

Teaching the format in a small team

Agree a one-page example, like Alex, and keep it in the staff folder as fiction clearly marked. Ask each clinician to write one note in the format and swap it. The test is whether a colleague can say what the client came for, what the risk picture was, and what happens next, without asking you. If they cannot, the headings are being used as decoration. Fix the habit before you buy another template pack.

Couples work needs a decision you write down: whose file holds the note, what each person was told, and what you will do if one person asks for the record. SOAP does not solve that. Your contract does. Put the decision in the Plan the day you make it.