How to Price Personal Training Sessions: The Price Floor Method

Oct 26

3 min read

Ask ten personal trainers how they set their prices and most will give you the same answer: they looked at what other trainers nearby charge and landed somewhere in the middle. It feels safe, but it ignores the only numbers that matter to your business: your costs, the income you need and the hours you can actually sell.

This article walks you through the price floor method we use in the Volt Box Trainer Business pack. It takes about twenty minutes with a calculator, and you'll come out with two numbers: the lowest price you should ever charge, and a sensible price to put on your rate card.

Step 1: Add up what the business costs each month

List everything you pay to work as a trainer, month by month. Annual costs get divided by 12.

Sam, our example trainer (a composite, not a real client), coaches in a rented gym space in a mid-size city. Their monthly costs look like this:

Rent or gym access: $400
Insurance: $40
Software and apps: $60
Phone and data: $40
Education and CPD: $90
Equipment: $50
Marketing: $120
Payment fees: $60
Other: $40

That's $900 a month before Sam has earned a penny for themselves.

Step 2: Decide what you need to take home

Pick the monthly income you need to live on, not the one you'd love. Sam's is $3,000. Then add a buffer for tax, quiet months and the unexpected. We use 20% of take-home, so $600.

Costs ($900) + take-home ($3,000) + buffer ($600) = $4,500 a month.

Step 3: Count the hours you can actually sell

This is where most pricing goes wrong. You might be in the gym 40 hours a week, but you won't bill 40. Sam can realistically sell 20 sessions a week. Allow for holidays, illness and slow weeks with 48 working weeks a year:

20 sessions × 48 weeks ÷ 12 months = 80 billable sessions a month.

Step 4: Divide

$4,500 ÷ 80 = $56.25 per hour. That's Sam's price floor.

Charge less than that and every session quietly loses money once costs, tax and time off are counted. It's not the price to charge. It's the line you never go below, including for semi-private sessions, online coaching and "special offers".

Step 5: Decide where to sit above the floor

The floor tells you what you need. Your price should also reflect what you offer. Score yourself 1 to 3 on three things:

Support: how much contact clients get between sessions.
Complexity: how specialised your work is (general fitness, sport-specific, post-rehab).
Demand: how full your diary is and how many enquiries you turn away.

A total of 3–4 suggests 10–30% above your floor, 5–6 suggests 30–50%, and 7–9 suggests 50–100%. Sam scores 2 on each, a total of 6, so they take the midpoint of 40%:

$56.25 × 1.4 = $78.75, rounded up to $80 a session.

Rounding up to a clean number isn't vanity. "$80" is easier to say, easier to remember and easier to build packages around than "$78.75".

What to do with the number

Once you have a session price, everything else follows from it. Packages are priced from it, semi-private is a share of it, and online coaching is checked against it per hour of your time. In Sam's case, an 8-session monthly package at $600 works out at $75 a session, comfortably above the floor, and a semi-private group of three at $40 each earns $120 an hour.

All money here is in USD. Convert it to your own currency and swap in your own costs: rent in London, Riyadh or Sydney will look very different from Sam's.

Try it with your own numbers

The Price Floor Calculator in our Trainer Business Toolkit does this maths for you. Fill in the yellow cells and it works out your floor and a suggested 1:1 price automatically. It works in Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers.

If you want the full system, including three-tier packages, WhatsApp scripts to adapt for every price objection and a pipeline tracker, the Client Attraction Kit covers it in five guides and a nine-tab toolkit.