How to track your ICF coaching hours with Coachful

What you are actually tracking, and why it is easy to get wrong

If you are working toward an ICF credential, you already know the headline numbers: 100 hours for the ACC, 500 for the PCC, 2,500 for the MCC. What catches most coaches out is everything attached to those numbers. A share of the hours has to be paid. Some of them have to be recent. All of them have to come after you started your coach training. And when the ICF audits an application, it does not ask for your spreadsheet. It asks you to produce a client who can confirm the hours happened.

So the job is not "keep a tally." The job is to keep a record you could defend, without spending your Sunday evenings rebuilding it from calendar invites. This article shows you what Coachful counts for you automatically, what it deliberately does not, and how to keep the one log the ICF will actually care about.

Everything here about ICF rules was checked against the ICF's own credentialing pages and the 2026 ACC Candidate Guide on 11 September 2026. The ICF changes its requirements every few years, so if you are reading this much later, confirm the numbers before you apply.

The requirements, in one place

All three credentials share the same shape: coach education, client coaching hours, mentor coaching, an assessment, an exam. The numbers scale.

Two rules sit underneath that table and decide whether your hours count at all.

Hours only count after you started coach-specific education. The ICF defines that start as any ICF-accredited programme of at least 30 hours, or a non-accredited or CCE programme of at least 30 hours where at least 80 percent is on the Core Competencies. Sessions you ran before that date do not count, however good they were.

Not every conversation is a client coaching hour. Mentor coaching, coaching supervision and going over assessment results with a client are excluded. Practice sessions inside a training programme with fellow students, trainers or mentors are excluded, unless the session was outside the classroom, with a real client, and separate from your training credits.

Paid, pro bono, and group hours

"Paid" is broader than most coaches assume. The ICF counts direct payment, barter, internal coaching you do as part of your job, and coaching delivered through a third party such as a coaching company or an employer programme. Pro bono is coaching you gave away or volunteered.

Group coaching counts, with two conditions. Groups of 15 or fewer count in full. If a co-coach is in the room, the time is split between you. And an hour with a group of ten is one hour, not ten. Coaches who multiply group hours by participants are the ones who get a difficult email later.

What Coachful counts for you

Open your coach dashboard and go to My Data. The first panel is Coach development, and the top of it is Credential progress.

Coachful builds this from your calendar. Every completed session you hosted is added up, and the total is shown as hours and as distinct clients against each of the three thresholds. A session counts when all of these are true:

• It is a coaching session type: a 1:1 coaching session, a cohort call, a squad call or an intake call. Webinars, workshops and content you published are not sessions.
• You hosted it. Sessions run by another coach on your team appear on their panel, not yours.
• It happened. Drafts, pending requests, declined proposals and cancelled sessions are excluded, and nothing counts until its end time has passed.

Hours come from each session's real duration. A 45-minute session adds 45 minutes, not an hour. Clients are counted once each, however many sessions you have had with them, and you are never counted as your own client even though you appear on every attendee list.

The bars turn green when both the hours and the client count for that credential are met. Only you can see this panel. It is not visible to your clients, your team, or anyone else in your organisation.

What Coachful does not count, on purpose

Read the small line under the bars. It says: "From your completed Coachful sessions. The ICF also requires paid-hour minimums, hours after your training start date, and mentor coaching, none tracked here, so treat this as a head start on your log, not the log itself."

That sentence is there because we would rather you knew than found out during an audit. Specifically, Coachful does not know:

• Which sessions were paid. A client on a package and a pro bono client look the same to the calendar. You know the difference; the panel does not.
• When your coach training started. Sessions from before that date are in your total. If you were coaching before you trained, subtract them.
• Your mentor coaching hours. These are a separate requirement and they are excluded from client hours anyway, so they belong in a different column.
• The 18-month recency window. The panel shows lifetime totals. Your recent hours are visible in your session history, but the panel does not carve them out.

What this means in practice: the panel tells you, at a glance and without any effort, whether you are in reach of a credential. The ICF log tells the ICF. You need both, and the second one takes about ten minutes a month if you keep it up.

Logging sessions that happened outside Coachful

Most coaches arrive with history. Sessions from before you moved to Coachful, sessions that happened in person, a client you coach on the phone. Those can go into your record too.

1. Open the client's page from Clients.
2. Choose Log a past session.
3. Give it a title, the date and time, and the duration. The duration defaults to 60 minutes, so change it if the session was shorter or longer. Add notes if you want them alongside your other session notes.
4. Save. The session must be in the past; Coachful will not let you log something that has not happened yet.

Past sessions are logged as 1:1 sessions by default. Cohort calls can be logged from the programme's scheduling view. Once saved, a past session counts in Credential progress exactly like a session that was booked through your calendar.

A word of caution, from the ICF's own audit process rather than from us: if you are asked to verify hours, you will need to reach the client. Do not log a session for someone whose email you no longer have and who would not remember you.

The log the ICF actually wants

The ICF publishes a client coaching log template. It is deliberately simple, and it asks for these things per client:

• The client's name and contact details
• The dates you coached them, start to end
• Hours, with paid and pro bono kept in separate columns
• Whether the coaching was individual or group

You do not submit this log with your application. You keep it. If your application is selected for audit, you will be asked to produce contact information for your clients, or for confidential internal or third-party work, an authorised person at the organisation who can confirm the hours. The ICF also expects you to have obtained your clients' consent to store their details, to have a policy on how you protect that information, and to have "a system in place for tracking relevant data." That last phrase is the whole reason to keep the log current rather than reconstruct it in a panic.

The fastest way to keep it current with Coachful:

1. Once a month, open My Data and note your total hours and clients. If the number moved, something needs logging.
2. Open each client who had sessions that month. The session list gives you dates and durations. Copy them into the ICF template, and mark each one paid or pro bono. Your client's package or invoice tells you which.
3. Keep the template somewhere you control, with the client's email address in the contact column. Coachful stores that email on the client record, so you are not hunting for it later.

That is the entire routine. Coachful does the counting and holds the evidence. The template holds the two facts Coachful cannot know, paid or not and before or after your training, in the format the ICF expects.

A second panel, for the skill itself

Hours get you eligible. The performance evaluation and, from 2027 on the Portfolio path, observed mentor coaching, are where your actual coaching is assessed against the Core Competencies. Coachful can help with that side too, if you turn it on.

In your scheduling AI settings there is a switch called Coach development feedback. With it on, every session summary also produces a private note on your coaching: the quality and mix of your questions, where you drifted from coaching into telling, threads the client offered that you did not pick up, and a score against six of the ICF Core Competencies. Over time the Coach development panel shows those scores as trends, so you can see whether Listens Actively is moving and whether Evokes Awareness is stuck.

Two things to know. First, it scores competencies 3 through 8 and deliberately not 1 and 2. Demonstrates Ethical Practice and Embodies a Coaching Mindset describe how you practise over time, not what a single recording shows, and the ICF does not assess them from a session either. Second, this is a self-development aid built on the published competency model. It is not an ICF assessment, it is not endorsed by the ICF, and it is not a substitute for a mentor coach. It is a mirror you can look in between mentor sessions.

Like the hours panel, this is coach-private. Clients never see it, and no one else in your organisation can read it.

Common mistakes we see

• Counting group participants as hours. One 90-minute group call is 1.5 hours.
• Counting sessions from before training. Check your programme start date and draw the line.
• Letting paid hours slip below the minimum. For the ACC, only 25 of your 100 hours can be pro bono. Coaches who build their early hours on free clients often have the total and miss the paid share.
• Forgetting the recency window. If you paused for two years, your total may be fine and your recent 25 or 50 hours may not be.
• Logging clients you cannot contact. If an audit asks and you cannot reach them, those hours are gone.

Where to find things

• Your hours and client count: Coach dashboard → My Data → Coach development → Credential progress.
• Logging an older session: Clients → the client → Log a past session.
• Competency feedback on your sessions: Scheduling settings → AI settings → Coach development feedback.
• The ICF's own log template and current requirements: search the ICF site for "client coaching log template" and "experience requirements." Both pages are maintained by the ICF and are the source of truth.