Running the business
How much should you charge as a personal trainer?
Everyone wants a number. The number is the easy part, and it's also the part that matters least. What decides whether your rate works is what's left after the floor fee, the driving, the admin and the tax — and almost no trainer has ever worked that out.
There's no going rate, and the spread is enormous: the same hour honestly sells for very different money in an inner-city studio, a suburban gym, a regional town and over a video call. What you can charge is set by where you train, what you specialise in, how full your book is and what your market will bear.
The number that decides whether your rate works isn't on your price list. It's your real hourly rate: everything you earned in a week, less the cost of running that week, divided by every hour you worked — travel and admin included. That number is usually confronting, and it changes people's pricing far more reliably than knowing what the trainer down the road charges.
What people charge, and why that's the least useful question
Asking what everyone else charges feels like the safe way to set a price. It's the opposite. It anchors you to whatever the least confident trainer in your postcode decided two years ago, and it tells you nothing about whether that rate would keep your business alive.
And the honest answer to "what is everyone charging" is that nobody can tell you, because any single figure you find online is somebody's postcode presented as a national average. If you want a number for your own market, go and get it: what trainers in your suburb, in your setting, with your speciality are charging today. That's a morning's work and it's the only comparison worth anything — and even then it tells you what the market will pay, not what you need to earn.
Here's the more useful way to think about it. Two trainers both charging $95 can end the year in completely different financial positions, because one runs 22 sessions a week out of a single venue and the other runs 22 sessions across four suburbs with an hour of driving between each block. Same rate. Different business.
The rate you quote is not the rate you earn
A session fee looks like income. It's really a gross figure with a queue of claims on it, and most of the queue is invisible when you're standing on the gym floor:
- Floor fee or rent — the gym's cut, whether it's a flat weekly rate, a percentage, or a "membership" that's really rent.
- Travel between venues, which you pay for in fuel and pay for again in time.
- Admin — programming, invoicing, chasing the invoice you sent three weeks ago, answering messages at 9pm, rescheduling.
- Insurance and registration, which you carry whether you train two clients or thirty.
- Equipment, replaced quietly and constantly.
- Phone, software and music licensing.
- GST, if you're registered. If your prices include GST, one dollar in eleven of every session fee was never yours. When PTs have to register for GST →
- Income tax, which nobody withholds for you.
- Super, which nobody pays for you either. If you had a job, an employer would be putting a percentage of your wage into a fund for you. As a sole trader that contribution is optional, which is exactly why it usually doesn't happen.
- The gaps. A 5:30am start and a 6:30pm finish with six dead hours in the middle is a thirteen-hour day that pays for seven.
- The days you don't work. No sick leave, no annual leave. A week off is a week of zero.
Your real hourly rate: the calculation
This takes twenty minutes and it's the single most useful thing in this guide. Do it on an ordinary week, not your best one.
- Add up what you were actually paid for that week. Money received or properly earned — not what you invoiced and are still waiting on.
- Count every hour you worked. Sessions, driving between venues, programming, invoicing, messages, restocking gear, the phone call with the client who wanted to reschedule.
- Subtract the direct costs of running that week — floor fee, fuel, and the weekly share of your annual costs like insurance and registration.
- Divide.
An example, with made-up numbers, because the shape is the point and yours will be different. A trainer running 25 sessions a week at $85:
| Line | Example week | Why it counts |
|---|---|---|
| Income — 25 sessions × $85 | $2,125 | The number on the price list, delivered in full. |
| Floor fee | −$200 | Paid whether the week is full or half empty. |
| Fuel and car | −$45 | Driving between clients and venues. Car claims → |
| Insurance and registration | −$25 | Annual costs, divided by 52. They are weekly whether you feel them or not. |
| Phone, software, gear | −$25 | Small, constant, easy to forget entirely. |
| Left over | $1,830 | Before income tax and before any super. |
| Paid session hours | 25 | The hours you invoice for. |
| Travel between venues | 4 | Worked, unpaid. |
| Admin and programming | 5 | Worked, unpaid, and usually underestimated by half. |
| Total hours worked | 34 | The honest denominator. |
| Real hourly rate | $53.82 | $1,830 ÷ 34. |
An $85 session is a $54 hour. Before income tax. Before a cent of super. Before the week you take off at Christmas.
There's a harder version of this. If that week is a run of split shifts with eight dead hours across it — hours you cannot sell, cannot fill and cannot spend anywhere useful — the honest denominator is 42 and the rate is $43.57. Whether you count the gap is a genuine judgment call — some trainers use it for programming and their own training, some sit in a car park. Be honest with yourself about which one you are.
The good week tells you what the business can do. The average week tells you what it does. Run the same calculation on a week with two cancellations and a public holiday, because that's the week your rate has to survive, and fixed costs like the floor fee don't shrink to match.
You can't price properly without knowing what you currently earn
Doing that calculation by hand once is useful. Doing it every week from bank statements and memory isn't going to happen, which is why most trainers do it never. Momentum Tracking keeps the inputs live as you go: revenue per client, revenue per week, what each pack is actually worth per session, and what's still owed to you. Set your rate against real numbers instead of a feeling about how the month went.
See how it works → Built by an Australian PT of 12 years. Free 30-day trial.Pricing structures, and what each one does to you
Your rate is only half the decision. How you sell it changes your cash flow, your cancellation rate and how much of your week you can actually plan.
| Structure | Cash flow | No-show risk | What it really does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Casual single sessions | Worst | Highest | Highest headline rate and the least commitment. Your income depends on who feels like turning up, and you find out on the day. |
| Prepaid packs (5, 10, 20) | Strong | Low | Paid before delivery. The client has skin in the game, so attendance improves. The money is a liability until the sessions are used. |
| Weekly recurring (direct debit) | Best | Low | Predictable to the dollar and almost no invoicing. Harder to sell at the first conversation, and you need a written policy for missed weeks. |
| Small group (2–4) | Good | Medium | Lower price per head, higher revenue per hour. Scheduling is the constraint, and one person leaving destabilises the whole group. |
| Online coaching | Varies | Low | Breaks the link between your income and your hours, which is the only real ceiling you have. Lower price point, higher churn, and far more messaging than people expect. |
Why packs are the default answer
Packs are better for you for the obvious reason: you're paid up front, so a quiet fortnight doesn't become a cash flow problem. But the argument that actually persuades clients is that packs are better for them, and it happens to be true.
A client paying session by session makes a fresh decision every week about whether to train. Some weeks they decide no. A client who has bought ten sessions made that decision once, in a moment when they were motivated, and the sessions are sitting there waiting. That's not a sales trick — commitment is the mechanism that produces results in this industry, and the per-session discount is a fair exchange for it.
A prepaid pack is money you've received for work you haven't done. Spend it in March and you're still training that client in June for nothing. Track the balance, know at any moment how many sessions you owe across your whole book, and treat that total as a debt rather than a bank balance. How to track prepaid packs →
What justifies a higher rate
Clients don't pay more because you deserve it. They pay more when the thing being sold is visibly different. What genuinely moves your rate:
- A speciality that solves an expensive problem. Pre- and post-natal, strength for older adults, return-to-training after injury within your scope, athlete preparation. The narrower the problem, the fewer people can solve it, and the less the price is compared.
- Results you can point at. Not a transformation gallery — specific, credible outcomes for people who look like the person you're talking to.
- Scarcity that's real. A trainer with a waitlist can charge more, and the waitlist itself does most of the selling. Being genuinely hard to book is a price signal nothing else replicates.
- Positioning and delivery. Whether the client feels they're inside a system or attending a series of unrelated workouts. Whether the invoice arrives promptly with your ABN on it or turns up as a text message six weeks late. What goes on an invoice →
And what doesn't, however unfair that is: years in the industry on their own, certifications the client has never heard of, your own physique, how hard you work, or the fact that your rent went up. Every one of those is real. None of them is an argument a client finds persuasive, because none of them is about the client.
How to raise your rates
The trainers who get into trouble are rarely the ones who priced too high. They are the ones who set a rate in their first year and were still charging it four years later, absorbing every increase in rent, fuel and insurance out of their own margin, one quiet dollar at a time.
- New clients first. Every enquiry from today gets the new rate. There's nothing to negotiate and nobody to disappoint, and within a few months a meaningful share of your book is already on it.
- Give existing clients notice. Four to six weeks is respectful and normal. Put it in writing so it's one clear message rather than an awkward conversation repeated fifteen times on the gym floor.
- Say it in two sentences. "From 1 September my rate goes to $X. Everything else stays the same." No apology, no itemised list of your costs. Justifying the increase invites a negotiation about whether your costs are the client's problem.
- Grandfather deliberately, if at all. Holding a few long-standing clients at the old rate is a reasonable choice. Doing it by accident, forever, is how you end up running three price lists and quietly resenting your best clients. If you grandfather, decide who and for how long, and write it down.
- Expect to lose someone. If nobody leaves, you were probably underpriced. If most of them leave, the problem was never the price.
Why competing on price is a losing position
A prospective client cannot assess your programming. They can't tell a well-periodised block from a random circuit, and they won't be able to for months. What they can assess on day one is your price, whether you turned up early, whether you remembered what they told you last week, and whether they felt looked after.
Price is the only one of those they can compare across trainers before buying. So if you make price the argument, you've invited them to judge you on the single dimension where somebody can always beat you — and somebody always will, usually somebody who hasn't worked out what their real hourly rate is either.
There's a second effect that's easy to miss. In a market where quality is unverifiable up front, price is read as a signal of quality. Below a certain point a low rate doesn't say "good value", it says "new, or not busy". Discounting to win a client also teaches that client that your numbers are soft, and the next conversation about money starts from there.
Common questions
How much do personal trainers charge in Australia?
There's no single going rate, and the spread is wider than any published figure suggests. Price moves with the city, the suburb, the setting, the speciality and how full the trainer's book is, so a rate from an inner-city studio and a rate from a regional town aren't describing the same job. Any single number presented as a national average is really somebody's postcode. What you should charge depends on your costs, your availability and your market, not on an average.
How do I work out my real hourly rate?
Take one ordinary week. Add up everything you were actually paid for that week, subtract the direct costs of running it, then divide by every hour you worked — sessions, travel between venues, programming, invoicing, chasing payments and answering messages. The result is usually well below your session fee, and it's the number to price against.
Are prepaid packs better than casual sessions?
For the trainer, almost always. You are paid before you deliver, cancellations drop because the client has already committed money, and your week stops depending on who decides to show up. The catch is that a pack is a liability — the money is sitting in your account but the sessions are still owed, so it has to be tracked or you'll spend it twice.
How much notice should I give before raising my rates?
Enough that it doesn't feel like an ambush. Four to six weeks is a common and reasonable amount of notice for existing clients. Tell them once, in writing, in two plain sentences, and apply the new rate to every new enquiry from today.
Should I charge more for training at a client's home?
Usually yes. Mobile training removes your floor fee but adds unpaid driving, loading and unloading gear, and a session you can't fill with anyone else if that client cancels. Price the travel time, not just the hour, or a spread-out mobile book will earn less per hour than a full day in one venue.
What if a client says I'm too expensive?
Sometimes it's true and they're not your client. Often it means they can't yet see what they're buying. The answer is to be clearer about the outcome and the plan, not to drop the price — a discount given at the first objection tells the client the original number was invented, and every future number will be treated the same way.