How To Earn Six-Figures As A Personal Trainer

Are you a personal trainer, and would you like to be bringing home a six-figure salary of £100,000+ per year? 

If you said yes, you’ll want to tune into this article as we’ll be looking at what it takes to earn a six figure salary. 

To help with this post, I asked Sheffield personal trainer Nick Screeton – the founder of LEP Fitness, for his advice on what it takes to make six figures per year as a personal trainer. 

Warning…

Before we dive into the article, it’s important to realise that this post doesn’t contain some ‘secret magic formula’ where you’ll become an overnight success…

There’s no such thing as an overnight success because it’s often years in the making and thousands of hours of work that cannot be skipped. 

While this post may give you some ideas and even help speed up the process, please remember that it will likely take years to become a high earning fitness professional…

Just look at doctors and lawyers. It can be 10+ years of studying, travel, and low-income work before the big pay cheques come through. 

Personal training is no different. If you want to succeed as a high earning PT, then you’ve got to be in it for the long run and for the right reasons. 

If earning money is your number one focus, you’d be better off picking a job in the financial industry. That said, if you want to earn an excellent living and make a massive difference to hundreds (potentially thousands) of people’s lives, then it’s possible to do both as a personal trainer. 

If this is what you want, please read on…

How Many Sessions Do You Need To Do Each Week To Earn 100K? 

Before we look at some of the ways to earn six figures as a fitness coach, it’s essential to look at the logistics and know the numbers…

There are 52 weeks per year, and let’s say you have four weeks of holiday, which means you work 48 weeks a year. 

To earn 100k a year, you need to make:

£8,334 per month 

£2,083 per week

If you did the following amount of sessions per week, here’s how much you would need to charge per session to earn 100k a year:

• 25 sessions per week x £83.32 per session
• 30 sessions per week x £69.43 per session
• 35 sessions per week x £59.51 per session
• 40 sessions per week x £52.75 per session
• 45 sessions per week x £46.28 per session 
• 50 sessions per week x £41.66 per session 

I believe that personal trainers can produce a maximum of 25-30 high-quality sessions per week. Any more than this and you could quickly burn out. Remember that personal training is more than delivering 1 hour PT sessions. You’ve also got:

• Emails – 1-5 hours a week
• Travel Time – getting to and from work 
• Meal Plans – 1-5 hours per week
• Workout Programmes – 1-5 hours per week
• Staying In Shape – 3-5 hours per week

If you’re not careful, you’ll have no time to rest, relax, and recharge your batteries. This will mean your service deteriorates, and ultimately your results and reputation suffer. 

Therefore it’s wise to aim for a smaller number of sessions, charge more and provide a higher quality of service. 

The above is one route to earning six figures as a fitness coach. There are also other ways to supplement your income as a personal trainer and create multiple revenue streams such as:

Hiring Other Personal Trainers

Once you get your diary booked up and have a waiting list, you could hire another personal trainer to take on new clients. 

Imagine you had another PT doing 25 sessions per week at £50 per session, and you took 50%. That would mean…

£25 x 25 sessions = £625 extra per week. 

If your other trainer did this 48 weeks per year, that’s an extra income of £30k a year. 

Scaling your PT business is another way to increase your yearly earnings. You could be earning £70k a year as a PT and have another PT bringing in an extra £60k (30k to you), and that would mean your total earnings for the year would be £100k. 

There’s no limit to how many PT’s you could hire. You would need to create systems and coach your PTs on how to deliver the same level of service and results.

Group Personal Training 

There’s a limit to how much you can charge as a 1-1 coach. In most cases, it’s £100 per hour (although there are people who charge more). There’s a glass ceiling that all personal trainers hit where it won’t be easy to raise prices. 

One way to scale your business and earn more money is to do group PT. For example, instead of charging £40 for 1-1 sessions, you could do group PT and charge…

£60 for 2-1

£70 for 3-1

£80 for 4-1

You win because you get more per hour, and your clients win because they pay less per session. 

Online Personal Training

There are lots of coaches who do online personal training and work with 100+ clients each month. It’s possible to earn 10k+ a month running this type of business model. 

That said, it’s important to realise that most personal trainers will have spent at least five years on the gym floor before going online. It’s crucial to get hands-on experience, and face to face coaching is one of the best ways to do this. 

Monetise Your Website

If you have a personal training website that ranks well in Google, you could also make money by:

Selling Ebooks – you could create an 8-week fat loss ebook or a muscle-building program. You can then sell on your site or via your health and fitness blog.

Add Links/Guest Posts – you can add posts from guest authors or insert links into your blog posts and get paid to do this. 

Affiliate Marketing – businesses such as MyProtein, Bulk Powders, and Optimum Nutrition offer affiliate marketing programs where you can make commission on their products. You can also sign up for Amazon Affiliates and make money through product referrals. 

Membership Site – You can charge a monthly subscription fee for a private membership site. Modern-day fitness celebrity ‘James Smith’ offers this service because it’s an effective way to help more people and scale your business. If you have 100 members all paying £10 a month, that’s £1,000 extra each month, or put another way, 12k a year. 

Combining Revenue Streams…

While a handful of personal trainers make six figures each year through coaching alone, most will combine a few revenue streams. For example…

£70k a year through 1-1 coaching 

£20k a year through online coaching 

£10k a year through passive income streams (ebooks, guest blogging, link adding, affiliate marketing, etc.)

Total = 100k a year. 

The above is just an example, but not all of your earnings need to come from one source. 

Other Things To Consider:

While we’ve covered some ways to earn six-figures, it’s also vital to realise that there will be factors that influence how much you can charge, for example:

Experience – the longer you coach, the better you’ll get, and therefore the more you can charge.

Results – people will pay more if you have a proven track record of results.

Reputation – the more referrals,  testimonials, and reviews you can get, the more you can charge.

Location – you’ll be able to charge more in big cities such as London, Manchester, etc. compared to small towns. 

Training Facility – where you train clients will impact how much you can charge. The quality of your facility/gym equipment can affect your price point.

Service Provided – what extras do you provide? Do you provide water and a towel for each client? Think of personal training like hotels. You expect more from an expensive 5-star hotel, compared to a 3-star hotel. The level of service you provide will determine how much you can charge. 

Hopefully this has given you some food for thought on how you can build a six-figure income as a personal trainer.

If you have any questions or wanna share your story, leave a comment below!

Nick