Personal Trainer Rates: What to Charge Per Session (and Per Block)

Practice Runbook · updated 2026-09-22

Most personal trainers set their rate by asking what the gym down the road charges. That tells you what the market tolerates. It tells you nothing about whether you can live on it.

There is a better order. Start from the income you need, subtract the sessions you will never actually deliver, and let the rate fall out of the arithmetic. Then price blocks on top of that number rather than underneath it.

Step one: the rate you actually need

Four inputs and one correction. The correction is the part people skip.

Revenue needed is 42,000 + 7,000 = 49,000.

Sessions actually delivered is 25 × 46 × 0.85 = 978, not the 1,150 the diary suggests.

So the rate is 49,000 ÷ 978 = 50.10 per session.

Price at 45 because it sounded competitive and you are working a full week for about 44,000 of revenue — roughly 37,000 take-home once costs come out. The gap is not dramatic. It is just permanent.

The 85% is not pessimism

It is the number almost everyone gets wrong. Twenty-five slots in the diary is not twenty-five sessions delivered. Clients go on holiday, get ill, cancel inside the window, and no-show. Some slots sit empty between a client leaving and the next one starting.

Eighty-five per cent is a reasonable starting assumption for an established practice with a policy that is actually enforced. Without a cancellation policy you are charging for, it is lower — often closer to 75%.

Log attendance for three months and use your own number. Until then, do not build your pricing on the assumption that every booked slot gets delivered and paid for.

Step two: pricing blocks without gutting the rate

Blocks exist for two reasons: cash up front, and commitment. A client who has paid for ten sessions turns up for the fourth one on a cold Tuesday. That is worth something to both of you.

What blocks are not is a discount ladder. At a 50.10 base rate:

Five per cent buys commitment. Thirty per cent tells a client your rate was never real — and every future conversation starts from the discounted number, not the real one.

The part nobody warns you about

When a client pays 476 for ten sessions, that money is not yours. You owe them ten sessions. Accountants call it unearned revenue, and it is a liability until you deliver.

This matters because of what it does to your sense of how the business is going. Sell four ten-session blocks in November and November feels excellent. You have taken roughly 1,900 and delivered maybe six sessions. December and January are when the work happens — and there is no new money arriving for it.

Trainers who have never tracked this describe the same pattern: a strong autumn, a flat January, and no clear reason why. The reason is that January's work was paid for in November and spent in December.

The fix is not complicated. Know, at any moment, how many sessions you owe and what they are worth. If that figure is 3,000 and your bank balance is 1,200, you have already spent work you have not done.

Expiry dates are not a trick

Blocks need an expiry — three months for ten sessions, six for twenty is a common shape. Without one, a client can buy ten sessions, use four, disappear for a year and come back expecting six sessions at a rate you abandoned.

Say it plainly at the point of sale, put it in the policy document, and freeze blocks for genuine illness or injury when asked. An expiry that is enforced reasonably is fair. One that is buried and then sprung is not.

What you should not do is build a business model that depends on expired sessions. Revenue from work you never delivered is a sign clients stopped turning up — which is a retention problem wearing a profit disguise.

Raising rates on existing clients

The rate you calculated applies to new clients immediately. Existing ones need notice and a date.

• Give at least a month's notice, in writing.
• Honour blocks already bought at the old rate until used or expired.
• Apply the new rate to blocks purchased after the change date.
• Do not apologise for it or explain your cost base. "My rates are going to 55 from the first of March" is a complete sentence.

Some clients will leave. Usually the ones at the bottom of your profitability list, who are also frequently the ones who cancel most. That is not a disaster; it is capacity returning to you.

What to do this week

1. Work out your real required rate using the five inputs above.
2. Count how many sessions you currently owe across every open block, and multiply by the rate each client paid. That is your unearned revenue.
3. Check the expiry date on every block you have sold. If there isn't one, set a policy starting with the next block.
4. Track attendance for three months and replace the 85% with your own number.

None of this requires software. A spreadsheet that knows what each client has bought, what you have delivered, and what is left will tell you more than most booking apps do.