What’s reasonable cost to hire a college admission coach

We have friends who spent tens of thousands over multiple years, and others who spent more like $5K for one year. We probably spent $2K total with someone willing to do hourly (many won't). Our person charged $200/hour I think. I would not suggest a one-time thing, as (at least for us) the most helpful thing is having someone outside the family that your kids is accountable to. For our kid it mainly helped him figure out essay topics and then stay on track as he didn't need a lot of help with actual writing. Also, we only used someone for the fall of senior year, though we know people who hired counselors as early as freshman year (total overkill IMO). Hope this helps!

In early 2021, we paid $3750 as a one-time "full service package" fee for college application planning & counseling for our then-HS junior.  That included up to 20 hours of the counselor's time which was more than enough for our purposes; she worked with our kid to develop and finalize the list of schools to apply to (based on her interests and probable major, preferred environment, grades and school record), choose senior-year HS classes, make decisions about things like taking the SAT (she didn't! the pandemic changed a lot of things), keep track of deadlines for college and scholarship applications, and polish her application essays.  We had a similar deal for in fall 2018 for our then-HS senior, a one-time $3000 fee for essentially project-managing the entire process of applying to colleges.  For me it was worth every penny not to do that work myself, and in both cases the counselor suggested schools we weren't previously aware of that turned out to be a great fit for our kids!  I expect rates have continued to go up some over time, but we did not talk to anyone who charged anything like $7K per year!  The counselors we interviewed all offered similar "package price" fees for comprehensive help with the process (one time fee for students who will apply to college in the next year, or an annual fee for those starting to prepare in freshman or sophomore year), and some also offered different price levels for different service levels (such as reviewing application essays only, or more extensive tutoring/coaching for HS classes), and/or supplemental tutoring for an hourly rate, but I didn't pay too much attention to those rates as it wasn't something we needed.