What therapy documentation costs you, in hours and in money
Turn your daily note minutes into hours, money and productivity points you can take to a manager.
What therapy documentation costs you comes down to three numbers. They are your daily minutes on notes, how many of those minutes fall outside paid hours, and the days you work each week. Take 60 minutes of notes a day, 20 of them off the clock, five days a week for 46 working weeks. Documentation then takes 230 hours a year, and 76.7 of those hours are unpaid.
A manager can take a number like that to the people who set budgets. You might put it as "I spend 230 hours a year on notes, 76.7 of them off the clock, which is about 29 working days."
Working out what therapy documentation costs
You need three figures. A first estimate takes about a minute, and the two weeks of tracking described below make it accurate.
- Minutes per day on documentation. Count all of it, including daily notes, evaluations, progress notes, recertifications and the ten minutes spent reconstructing a session you didn't get to write up.
- How many of those minutes happen off the clock. Before your shift, after you clock out, at home on the sofa, on a Sunday.
- Days worked per week.
The documentation time calculator does the sum for you. Here is the same sum by hand, as an example. It assumes 60 minutes of documentation a day, 20 of them after clocking out, five days a week and 46 working weeks a year. It also assumes an eight-hour working day and an hourly rate of 40 in any currency.
- Per week: 60 × 5 = 300 minutes = 5 hours
- Per year: 5 × 46 = 230 hours, or 28.8 eight-hour working days
- Unpaid per year: 20 × 5 × 46 ÷ 60 = 76.7 hours, or 9.6 working days
- Value of the unpaid time at 40 an hour: 20 × 5 × 46 ÷ 60 × 40 = about 3,067
The 46 working weeks is an assumption that allows for leave and public holidays. If you take less time off, the yearly figures go up.
The productivity points that documentation time costs
Documentation done on the clock costs productivity points as well as time. If your employer doesn't count notes as productive time, the minutes still sit in the paid minutes your productivity is measured against.
Take a 450-minute paid day with 40 minutes of documentation on the clock. Those 40 minutes are 40 ÷ 450 × 100 = 8.9% of the paid day. Your ceiling is 91.1% before anything else goes wrong.
An 85% target on that day asks for 0.85 × 450 = 382.5 minutes of treatment. Only 450 − 40 = 410 minutes are left for treatment, so 382.5 ÷ 410 = 93.3% of the remaining time has to be treatment.
So on that day, an 85% target that makes no allowance for documentation works as a 93.3% target on the time left for treatment. The slack this leaves at each target is worked through in the guide to the documentation time percentage.
Getting your own documentation time figure
First estimates from memory can be wrong in both directions. Routine daily notes are easy to underestimate, and the occasional evaluation that took an afternoon is easy to overestimate. Two weeks of rough tracking fixes this.
You don't need an app. A note on your phone with two numbers a day is enough: minutes documented on the clock and minutes documented off it. Round to the nearest five. After ten working days you will have an average you can defend. The guide to tracking your own minutes covers the method.
Track the ordinary days as well as the bad ones. A figure built only from the worst weeks is easy to challenge, and the conversation then turns to your method instead of your workload.
Taking the figure into a conversation
Lead with the annual figure. Five hours a week sounds survivable. About 29 working days a year sounds like a staffing problem, and it is the same fact.
Separate paid from unpaid notes. Paid documentation time is a workload and target-setting issue. Unpaid notes are a pay and hours issue. In the US, work an employer suffers or permits off the clock counts as hours worked under the federal wage rules. The guide to unpaid documentation time covers what that means. Raised together, the two are easier to dismiss as one complaint.
Bring a proposal as well as a total. Options include point-of-service documentation, a protected administrative block, a lower target on evaluation-heavy days, or a caseload change. A manager who can't change the target may still be able to change the schedule.
Show what the unpaid time does to your pay. The real hourly rate calculator divides your salary by your contracted hours plus your unpaid hours, and shows the gap between the two hourly rates.
Ask what the department average is. If nobody has measured it, say so.
Documentation time and burnout
Burnout has been measured in all three therapy professions. In a 2024 survey of speech and language therapists in the UK, 55% said they had experienced burnout in the past 12 months. In the same survey, 39% were considering leaving their current role.
In a US survey of 2,813 physical therapists, run from December 2020 to January 2021, 49.3% reported burnout. In a survey of occupational therapists in Ireland published in 2022, over two thirds had experienced burnout from their job in the past 12 months. Almost half had considered leaving the profession in the last year.
None of these figures separates out documentation, so they can't say how much of that strain comes from notes. Your own tracked figure shows how much of your week notes take, and that is the part you can bring to a manager.
One caution
Use the figure for resourcing, not comparison with colleagues. Documentation speed varies with setting, EMR, caseload complexity and experience. A colleague who documents faster may have a more stable caseload.