In short
US dissertation consultancies do not sell you a statistician: they sell you a team split across chapters, with a methodologist, a literature review specialist and an internal review, covering everything from topic selection to the defense slides. Statistics Solutions, one of the best known, states on its home page “25 Years of dissertation experience” and “Over 10,000 students that we've assisted during their dissertation process”, and warns on that same page about something I fully endorse: “If a company offers to write your dissertation, run; it's unethical and indefensible” (checked in September 2026). The model has worked for decades, but it was built for one specific circuit, the US professional doctorate with a chair, an IRB and a URR, which looks nothing like the supervisor and examining panel of a Spanish, Latin American or UK thesis. Ask any consultancy, that one or the one next door, four questions before you pay: who does the work by name, whether they explain the decisions or only hand over results, whether they are still there on defense day, and where they put the ethical line in writing. All four are answered in one sentence, or they are not answered at all.
You are somewhere in chapter three, the analysis has stalled, and you have ended up searching for something like dissertation statistics help. The first thing you find is a US website with testimonials, a free thirty-minute consultation button and a promise of defending in under a year. The decision in front of you is no longer whether to hire help, because you settled that the moment you typed the search; it is the far less comfortable one of whether that service was built for your thesis, and what you should ask before handing anyone the file with your data. This article covers both, with the provider's own website open in front of me, checked in September 2026.
What you are actually buying from a US dissertation consultancy
The model is old and it is coherent. You do not get a lone statistician who shows up once there is data: you get a team split across chapters. Statistics Solutions, whose thesis service is called “Complete Dissertation”, describes “a team approach of 2 -3 specialists” on its home page and splits the work like this: a methodologist who helps “with the prospectus, methods and results”, a literature review specialist who covers “with the prospectus, introduction, literature review, and discussion sections”, and an added internal review, because “our peer-review process ensures that another consultant provides input”.
Their service catalog runs from topic selection to the defense slides, and along the way it includes the concept paper and proposal, the chapter one introduction, chapter three methodology (“Select and justify the research design”), data management (“Code, merge, clean, and organize your data so it's analysis-ready”), quantitative results with “APA-formatted tables, figures, and interpretation”, qualitative results via “case study, phenomenological, grounded theory”, and the chapter five discussion.
That solves a real problem, and it is worth saying so before getting critical. A stalled doctoral candidate does not have a statistics problem: they have twelve chained problems of which statistics is one, and the rest are coordination, calendar and paperwork. A single supplier who covers all twelve and speaks their university's administrative language saves exactly what a thesis wastes most of, which is time between emails.
One note on the numbers. The home page says “25 Years of dissertation experience” and “Over 10,000 students”; their dissertation consulting services page says “For over 30 years, Dr. Jim Lani and the team at Statistics Solutions have helped more than 15,000 doctoral students”. Nothing sinister there: they are pages written at different moments and updated at different speeds, which happens to everyone. But it tells you what a shop-window figure is good for, which is none of the things you actually have to decide.
It was built for a doctorate that is probably not yours
Read the catalog closely and one line gives the game away: “IRB/URR: Navigate the institutional review process and address revisions”. The IRB is the ethics board. URR is not a generic term: it stands for University Research Reviewer, and Walden University describes that process as “the quality assurance mechanism for capstone research”, an institutional reviewer who signs off your work in stages on top of the chair and the committee.
A consultancy selling help to clear the URR is telling you who its typical client is: a candidate on a US online professional doctorate program, an EdD, a DBA, a DNP, a PsyD, where the bottleneck is institutional revision rounds and the real risk is being stuck in them for years. For that client, a team that knows the circuit and minimizes revisions is worth every dollar.
That bottleneck does not exist in a Spanish, Latin American or British thesis. There is no URR and no chair: there is a supervisor answering to an academic committee, external reports before submission, and a panel that examines you in public with an open questions round. The risk is different too. Over there it is never escaping the revision loop; here it is walking into the defense with an analysis someone dismantles in ten minutes, or submitting the paper and having a Q1 reviewer reject it on the results section.
It is not that the statistics change by country: a mixed ANOVA is the same in Ohio and in Murcia. It is that the package is built to clear filters that will never be applied to you, and it does not include the ones that will: the reviewer response, the rehearsal of a public defense, the fit with your own program's regulations. What actually decides a submission and a defense here is broken down in the statistical work of a doctoral thesis.
Question 1: who does the work, by name
Their consultants page says that “many are statisticians” and that “many dissertation consultants have received their doctoral degrees”. Notice how honest that phrasing is: it says many, not all. And it is precisely the sentence you have to turn into a concrete question before paying anything: who, singular, is going to touch my data.
What you need fits in four facts. Full name. Training. Whether they have published in your field. And whether it will be the same person from the first email to the last. A serious consultancy hands that over without blinking, because it is their strongest selling point. If the answer is “one of our experts”, what you are buying is a subcontracting chain in which whoever runs the model can change between chapter three and chapter four, and you find out because the tone of the emails suddenly shifts.
There is a more awkward and more useful question: whether that person has published in journals in your area. This is not snobbery. A general statistician will run you a flawless logistic regression; someone who has fought with psychology or health data knows why your nine-item scale is not an innocent continuous variable, why the ceiling effect on your anxiety measure will eat the interaction, and why a reviewer will ask about measurement invariance before asking about the p value. If you are still choosing, the long list of criteria is in how to choose a statistician for your doctoral thesis.
Question 2: do they explain the decisions, or only hand over results?
This is the question that separates two businesses trading under the same name. In one, you get a chapter four with APA-formatted tables and you paste it into your document; in the other, you get that plus the reasoning behind every decision. While you are writing, the difference is invisible. It becomes visible the day someone asks why you used that model rather than the equivalent one, and at that point no email thread will save you.
Statistics Solutions' own site describes the consultant as someone who “acts as a guide and advisor to the client” and defines the job as “selecting the appropriate analysis, conducting analyses on the data, and interpreting the findings”. That is the correct description of the job. But it is a description, not a guarantee, and it can be tested with two requests that cost you nothing to make.
First: ask for the syntax or the code. If the analysis was run in SPSS there is a .sps file; if it was run in R there is a script. Handing it over means what you bought is reproducible, that you can rerun it when a reviewer asks for the model with one more covariate, and that you are not paying again for a two-line change.
Second: ask them to justify one concrete decision in writing against its reasonable alternative. Why a mixed model and not a repeated measures ANOVA. Why multiple imputation and not listwise deletion. Why that multiple comparison correction and not another. The answer does not need to be long; it needs to exist. If those two requests cause discomfort, question two has already been answered.
Question 3: are they still there on defense day?
Statistics Solutions does cover this part, and fairness demands saying so, because plenty of providers do not: their catalog has a “PowerPoint & Oral Defense” item covering the presentation slides and getting you ready to defend your findings. A cheap marketplace freelancer finishes when the output lands in your inbox and disappears; a consultancy with a track record knows the deliverable is not the file, it is you passing.
That said, there is a part nobody can buy for you. Your consultant does not walk into the room. You do, and the questions will be about decisions you may not have made: why that sample and not a larger one, what happened when normality failed, whether the effect is meaningful as well as significant, what you would do differently. A service that prepares your defense helps exactly to the extent that it already explained what you are about to defend. Otherwise it is slide formatting under another name.
The test for telling the two apart is simple: ask for a session in which they ask and you answer out loud, not one in which they explain and you nod. If you want to run that test on your own before spending anything, the defense simulator generates the questions a panel could put to you and lets you go blank in private, which is where going blank is affordable.
Question 4: where the ethical line sits, and who draws it
Here Statistics Solutions says two things I endorse without reservation. On its home page: “If a company offers to write your dissertation, run; it's unethical and indefensible”. And on its dissertation statistical help page: “the doctoral student should talk to his or her advisor and ask whether or not it is okay to use dissertation statistical help”. The second one is the important one, and it is the one almost nobody follows.
Because the line is not drawn by the consultancy, and it is not drawn by your own moral compass at two in the morning. It is drawn by your university, in writing, in its academic integrity regulations, and it varies more than people assume: there are programs where commissioning the analysis from an external professional is normal and acknowledged in the acknowledgments, and programs where the thesis is understood as proof of methodological competence and outsourcing chapter four is misconduct. Ask your supervisor by email, not in the corridor, and keep the reply.
And there is a practical test that holds under any set of regulations: if you cannot explain, unaided and out loud, why each decision in your analysis was taken, the line has already been crossed, whatever the contract you signed says. An analysis you do not understand is not yours even if you paid for it. The whole argument, with the criteria I use to accept or decline a commission, is in is it ethical to hire a statistician for your thesis.
What you will not find on their website: the price
There is no public rate card, and they say so plainly: “There is no set price for statistical consulting services as the needs of different groups and different individuals vary greatly”, and the price “depends on what work needs to be done and how much statistical help is required”. What they do offer is “a free 30-minute consultation”. That is the standard model in this sector and there is nothing shady about it: a fixed quote given without seeing the data or the design is an invented quote, and whoever gives you one over the phone will revise it upwards later.
What you can control is how you arrive at that call. Bring two things written down. First, exactly which deliverable you expect: the drafted chapter four, the tables, the script, the interpretation, all three? Second, and this is the one everyone forgets, what happens if the panel or a reviewer asks for an additional analysis six months from now: whether it is included, priced differently, or opens a brand new invoice from scratch.
For orders of magnitude in the Spanish-speaking market, the ranges and what pushes an invoice up or down are in how much a thesis statistical analysis costs. They are not directly comparable with US figures: that market for professional doctorates has a different cost structure, a different price level and a different service scope, and comparing loose numbers across the two tells you nothing useful.
Frequently asked questions
Is Statistics Solutions reliable?
It has been operating for decades and its website states “25 Years of dissertation experience” and “Over 10,000 students” (checked in September 2026). The model they sell, a team split across chapters, coverage from topic to defense and an internal review by another consultant, is coherent and works for the client it targets: the candidate on a US professional doctorate. Reliability and fit are not the same question. The useful one is not whether they are serious, but whether your thesis resembles the thesis the service was built for.
Does a US consultancy work for a thesis in Spain, Latin America or the UK?
For the pure statistical work, yes: a mixed model does not change when it crosses the Atlantic. For the process, it does not fit. Their catalog includes IRB/URR, which is the vocabulary of quality control at US online universities, and it does not include what actually decides things here, namely the reports required before submission, the public defense with an open questions round, and the reviewer response if you are also publishing. Then there is language: if your thesis is written and defended in Spanish, the writing and literature review half of the package is of no use to you.
How much does a dissertation consultancy cost?
None of the large ones publish rates, and Statistics Solutions says so explicitly: “There is no set price for statistical consulting services”. What they offer is a free thirty-minute consultation where your case gets quoted. That is not bad practice, it is the only honest one when scope depends on design. Go into that call with the deliverable defined in writing and with the question of what happens if an analysis has to be redone six months later.
Is it ethical to pay someone for my thesis analysis?
It depends on your university's regulations, and you request that answer from your supervisor by email before hiring, not after paying. Statistics Solutions recommends the same thing: “the doctoral student should talk to his or her advisor and ask whether or not it is okay to use dissertation statistical help”. As a practical criterion that works on any program: if you cannot explain out loud why each decision in the analysis was taken, the line has already been crossed.
What should I ask a consultancy before paying?
Four things, and all four are answered in one sentence or not answered at all. Who does the work, with a name, their training and whether it is the same person to the end. Whether they hand over the syntax or code, and whether they justify one decision in writing against its alternative. Whether they stay with you until the defense with a rehearsal of questions and not just slides. And where they draw the ethical line, checked against what your university's regulations actually say.
What if I only need someone to check what I have already done?
That is a different and considerably cheaper commission than a full package, and it is the most common one when the thesis is written and submission is close. What gets checked there is that the test statistics match their degrees of freedom, that the effect sizes follow from your own F or t values, that the assumptions are reported, and that the references exist. Say it in those words on the first call rather than accepting the default package you will be offered.
The four questions apply to me too
If you have read this far it is because you are deciding who to pay, so run the same questionnaire on me. Who does the work: I do, with a name, a surname and publications in psychology and health sciences. What I hand over: the syntax, the reasoning behind each decision and the sentence you defend it with, not just the output. How far I go: to the defense and to the reviewer response. And the ethical line gets discussed before I accept the commission, not once money has changed hands.
See how I work →Hiring help for the statistics of a thesis is not the problem, and anyone telling you otherwise has never supervised one. The problem is hiring it without knowing who does the work, without a single decision being explained to you, and finding that out in front of an examining panel. Send the four questions by email before you pay: what they answer, or fail to answer, will tell you more than twenty testimonials on a home page.