To determine how to price your online personal training, you’ll need to consider a variety of factors.
To help you set a price point that’s both profitable and brings in clients, this article will explore:
- How to Price Online Personal Training Through Packages
- How Much To Charge as an Online Personal Trainer: 5 Factors That Can Influence Your Prices
- A Complete Online Personal Trainer Pricing Template
Before we start, completing a Sports Nutrition Course can increase the overall price of your online training programmes and means you can provide your clients with specialist advice.
Find out more by downloading our FREE course prospectus and get in touch with us today!
How to Price Online Personal Training Through Packages
A key part of understanding how to price online personal training sessions is knowing how you’re going to charge your clients.
To make money as a personal trainer, creating the foundations of an online personal trainer pricing template is important when deciding what packages you want to offer. The most popular structures for PT packages are:
- Block Programmes
- Monthly Payments
Whilst both approaches are commonly used in the personal training industry, we’d recommend creating a pricing template that adheres to the monthly payment model.
Let’s explain why.
Why You Should Avoid Creating a Block Payment Template
Implementing block programmes will see your clients pay for online personal training in bulk for a predetermined period of time.
An example of how this is implemented can be found below from Fitness With JT:
From this example we can see that the client will pay £269 up front, and in return receive a bespoke online training programme that will last for 12 weeks.
Whilst this may seem like a fairly straightforward method for pricing your online training, the approach has its drawbacks. For example, this approach comes with an end date, which in this instance is 12 weeks.
When this time comes, you will then have to resell your service to the client, running the risk of them not wanting to sign up again, which could mean financial uncertainty.
Why Monthly Online Personal Trainer Pricing Templates Are Better
Many online personal trainers use this structure to sign their clients up to a subscription-based service, which will require them to pay a set fee on a recurring basis.
An example of this can be found below from Andy Griffiths:
In order to pay for their online training, clients will sign up for a direct debit that will renew every month.
This in itself is a bonus, as clients are less likely to cancel direct debits, meaning they’re more likely to stay in your service.
Other benefits of implementing this pricing model for your online personal training business include:
- Providing a guaranteed stream of income: By signing your clients up to direct debits, you can ensure there are no gaps in your payments. This means that you won’t have to worry about chasing clients to renew their subscription every month and can rely on that guaranteed income.
- Makes it easier for the client: Your client won’t feel rushed to meet their goals within an allotted amount of time. They can merely stay subscribed until it’s reached.
This section offers a brief overview of how to price your online personal training programmes through packages. If you wish to explore this topic in much greater detail, check out our article on creating personal training packages.
Now that you know what method will work better for your business, let’s look at factors that could influence the actual price of your services.
How Much to Charge as an Online Personal Trainer: 5 Factors That Can Influence Your Prices
Questions such as ‘how much should I charge as an online personal trainer?’ will always be specific to individual businesses.
In truth, there is no one ‘correct’ way to price your online services, as a number of factors could influence how much you charge.
With this in mind, let’s break down 5 potential influences and discuss how they can affect your online personal trainer pricing template.
#1 – How Much Should An Online Personal Trainer Charge Per Hour When Offering Additional Services?
When determining how to price online personal training packages, you should consider what services you can offer your potential clients. If you can provide them something more than just a traditional online PT programme, then you could realistically charge a higher price.
‘Traditional’ online personal training will see PTs work with their clients virtually, rather than in person. This will involve completing duties such as:
- Conducting a virtual initial consultation (through the likes of FaceTime and Zoom)
- Setting out a workout programme for clients to follow in their own time
- Setting predetermined intervals for check-ins throughout the course of the programme
Online personal trainers who follow this structure may price their business similar to this example below from Motivate PT:
Here we can see that no additional services are provided. Depending on a client’s goals, this means they can pay £45 for 4 sessions a month totalling at £180 or choose 12 sessions for £38, coming to £456 a month.
The option of training with no services can be viewed as a standard package – You can then add additional services onto this standard in order to increase its overall value. To gain a better understanding of what services you can include, let’s look at a few examples and discuss why they’re beneficial to include.
How Adding A Bespoke Nutrition Plan Can Increase Your Earnings
Many online personal trainers also choose to incorporate bespoke meal plans for their clients into their pricing packages. This can be viewed as an additional service that increases the value of the programmes, as both elements pair well together.
For example, if a client’s primary goal is muscle growth, you can pair their training programme with a meal plan that is high in protein.
Or, if your client is more focused on weight loss, you’d naturally opt for lower-calorie options.
Clients will want to invest in this service as it will help them to reach their goals at a faster and more efficient rate. They will therefore be more likely to pay an increased price for a package that includes this resource.
This can be proven by through online personal training providers like James Gray Fit, who charge a total of £150 for training and nutrition coaching:
This example highlights exactly how offering additional services can influence how much to charge as an online personal trainer.
James Gray charges only £80 for coaching on its own but £150 for coaching and nutrition. Offering this additional service allows him to increase his prices as he’s providing more for his clients and sharing additional expert advice.
Clients will often be willing to pay more for this service, meaning you can increase your overall online personal training pricing.
Offering Live Online Sessions As A Service Can Influence Your Pricing Structure
When working as an online personal trainer, some clients may want to work independently following the programme you create for them. Others may want to experience their sessions virtually through Zoom.
As an online personal trainer who uses Zoom, you will be able to guide your client through their session live on camera. However, you can also give clients the option to complete the programme when they want, using prerecorded videos and a tailored plan to do so.
This has the potential to be a lucrative service that you can add value to your business. For example, this is what Ben Malton provides which can be seen below:
These packages will not include Live sessions, with clients simply receiving a bespoke fitness plan to follow.
Comparing this to the brand’s second option, which provides additional services such as a food intolerance test highlights how lucrative a venture this can be:
This means you can price online personal training highly, even when you’re not holding live Zoom sessions and choosing to offer any additional services in these packages allows you to increase your pricing structure beyond just a basic package associated with online personal training.
Alternatively, you could sell Zoom classes as a completely separate entity, an example of which can be found below from JennysKeepFit:
As you can see, it usually costs £159 for 6 half hour personal training classes. When determining how much to charge as an online personal trainer selling separate Zoom sessions, you should ensure that they are not as expensive as your packages. For example, 6 in-person personal training classes with Jenny costs £195:
Making these classes cheaper means they can be used to attract potential clients to your packages at a later date. Think of it this way – some customers may use the separate Zoom classes as a taster session, which allows them to gain insight into your training style prior to signing up full time.
To gain better insight into what services your clients value and are willing to pay extra for, it may be worthwhile conducting a survey.
#2 – How to Price Online Personal Training With a Specialty
The overall pricing of your personal training packages can also be influenced by whether or not you’ve developed a speciality.
Typically, these PTs can price their packages at a significantly higher rate, as they are qualified in that specific area of personal training. This means that the advice and guidance they provide is more tailored and valuable to the client.
A Level 4 Fitness Course allows you to develop a specialty within areas such as:
We’ve already provided insight into how much to charge as an online personal trainer who includes nutrition packages, so let’s look at the two latter examples from the aforementioned list:
What Is A Good Price For Online Personal Training That Focuses On Weight Management?
As an online personal trainer who specialises in weight management, you will craft bespoke workout and nutrition programmes that help to facilitate a client’s weight-related goals.
Working in this role has the potential to be incredibly financially rewarding, especially as a large portion of personal training clients will have weight related goals – e.g. to lose weight or gain muscle mass.
To understand how to price online personal training that focuses on weight management, let’s take a look again at Fit and Happy. From the screenshot provided below, we can see they offer 3 potential packages, ranging from £247 – £342:
As we can see, the basic package to train with a personal trainer costs £247 a month, where as specialist training under Julia McCabe, the head coach, costs £342 a month.
In total, clients training with the head coach will be paying nearly £100 more than those following the basic training.
If you’ve been wondering ‘how much should i charge as an online personal trainer?’ one piece of advice you can take away from this section is to always price specialist programmes at a higher rate than basic ones.
As a personal trainer, if you’ve taken the time to qualify in a specialist area of fitness, then you will be regarded as a specialist in that area, meaning your guidance is often more valuable.
How Much Should I Charge As An Online Personal Trainer Specialising In Back Pain Relief?
Another specialist area of fitness that many online personal trainers choose to explore is the treatment of lower-back pain. When a qualification of this manner is obtained, a PT will be able to provide their clients with a bespoke programme designed to treat and relieve pain.
Much like the aforementioned example on weight management, achieving a specialist qualification of this manner will allow you to charge a higher price for this specific package.
An example of this can be found below from Christopher Hole, who holds a Level 4 Lower Back Pain qualification:
When compared to Christopher’s other online personal training programme, we can see just how valuable this specialist qualification is:
From the examples provided above, we can see that a 12-week programme is priced at £99.99, whilst a specialist course will cost £300 for just 4 weeks of support.
Once again, the importance of creating an online personal trainer pricing template that reflects your specialist area must be stressed.
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When learning how to price online personal training programmes, these other OriGym articles may be of interest:
- Online Personal Trainer Marketing Techniques
- How to Create Personal Training Packages
- 17 Ways to Get Personal Training Clients
#3 – Determining How Much To Charge As An Online Personal Trainer Using Competitor Research
When researching ‘what is a good price for online personal training?’, you must look at what your competitors are charging and adjust your pricing accordingly.
Naturally, when conducting personal training marketing research, you’ll come across businesses that are doing better than you, and those who aren’t.
You can use this information to your advantage, as it will help to highlight aspects of your business that both over- and underperform in comparison to competitors.
For example, let’s say that you conduct research and find a competitor charging £90 for a basic 12-week programme, with no additional features included.
From this, you could determine that your 12-week programme is more valuable to clients, as it also comes with additional nutrition advice, as well as bespoke meal plans.
In response to these findings, you can adjust the price of your own package to reflect its worth in comparison to competitors, charging £150 for 12 weeks.
Essentially, conducting competitor research ensures that you’re not over- or undercharging for the services you provide. In order to guarantee this, you should always look at competitors on both sides of the pricing spectrum.
To display how pricing templates for online personal trainers can vary drastically, let’s take a look at two examples.
Firstly, the pricier option comes from Ultimate Performance, which costs £689 for 3 months:
When clients sign up to this online training provider, they’ll receive:
- A bespoke training programme tailored to their needs
- A tailored meal plan
- A full life-style audit to help support your plan
- Access to a system of accountability that allows you to track your progress
- Contact with an online personal trainer who is there to support you throughout your journey
Ultimate Performance is a large fitness company that can afford to provide clients with this high-end experience. Their prices are reflective of this, and their clients will be expected to pay a higher fee for a luxury experience.
To contrast to this, we can look back at Chris Hole’s most popular training package:
Whilst both of these packages last for the same duration of time, Chris’ is the cheaper option by a considerable amount.
This is because the package only provides a personal training programme, and none of the additional features shared in Ultimate Performances example.
This is what makes questions like ‘how much should I charge as an online personal trainer?’, challenging to answer.
How much you decide to charge will be entirely dependent on your own business, following competitor research. Once this has been conducted you will need to use your own judgement in order to determine where your business fits in relation to others.
Using the two previous examples, if you determine your service is more valuable than Chris’, but less valuable than Ultimate Performance, you should choose to price your own 12 week programme between the two prices.
#4 – How To Price Online Personal Training To Cover Your Expenses
When running an online personal training business, there will naturally be both personal and professional expenses that you need to cover. In order to ensure that these are paid, you must price your personal training packages accordingly.
Before settling on a definitive price for these packages, you must first calculate your total outgoings. This will include factors such as:
- Equipment cost – e.g. workout equipment for demonstrations, laptop to communicate with clients, online personal training software subscriptions
- Marketing costs – e.g. Google ads, social media ads, website costs
- Your own personal living costs – e.g. rent, food, utility bills
By adding all of these fees together, you can generate a total for your outgoing finances. You can then price your online personal training packages at a rate that will allow you to meet and exceed these fees.
Note how we said to exceed your outgoing fees, as you will want to earn more than your monthly expenses in order to generate a profit.
Be aware that some of these fees can be considered as tax deductible expenses for personal trainers, such as rent fees. Just be sure to do adequate research into this topic, as it could potentially influence your overall outgoings, and the price of your packages.
#5 – How Your Level Of Experience Can Influence Your Online Personal Trainer Pricing Template
How much experience you have in the personal training industry can also influence the overall cost of your packages.
For example, one direct answer to the question ‘how much should a beginner online personal trainer charge?’, is always less than those with more experience.
An experienced online personal trainer will be able to charge more for their service as they have proof that training they provide has been beneficial to a significant number of clients.
Experienced online personal trainers can show off this validated status through client testimonials and progress photos, which help justify their higher prices, and display the effectiveness of their programmes.
Scott Laidler is a great example of an online personal trainer who displays evidence of his clients’ successes in order to justify his higher prices. On his website alone, potential clients will be able to find:
- Client testimonials
- Actual photos of clients’ meal plans
- Progress photos
- Evidence of media outlets he’s been featured in
All of these features help to highlight Scott’s experience in the industry, establishing him as a trustworthy personal trainer. This kind of “social proofing” helps to justify his prices, for example his Accountability Coaching Package costs £389:
A newly qualified personal trainer will not be able to display the same level of experience as Scott.
We’d strongly encourage newly qualified trainers to conduct competitor research. In doing so, you will be able to find other online trainers who share a similar level of experience as you, and price your own packages accordingly.
A Complete Online Personal Trainer Pricing Template
In order for you to understand how to price your own online personal training programmes, we have created a template for you to follow. For reference, this is based on our own research spanning businesses of various sizes.
This template will follows a monthly payment programme, as this is the most efficient way of keeping clients subscribed to your service:
From this online personal trainer pricing template, you’ll be able to see how the price of the package must reflect the increasing price, meaning that the more services you offer, the higher you can charge.
By creating an online personal training pricing template similar to the example above, you will be able to entice clients to sign up for the more expensive programme through the additional features you can offer them.
Before You Go!
Now you know how to price your online personal training programmes, you will be able to effectively implement all the advice we’ve provided in this article and set a price point that works for your business.
Remember, obtaining a specialist qualification in Sports Nutrition will allow you to increase the price of your online training programme, making your packages much more valuable to clients.
OriGym’s FREE prospectus can also be downloaded, where you’ll learn more about every course we offer.
