Personal Trainer Salary Guide

This article is a personal trainer salary guide.  ‘Crunching the numbers’ is an important step when deciding whether or not to pursue a personal training career.

While you probably want to become a personal trainer to help people, you also need to earn a living and make enough money to do what you want in life.  We want you to make informed career decisions so this guide provides you with insight on personal trainer salary and earning potential.

What is a Typical Personal Trainer salary?

Firstly, a personal trainer ‘salary’ isn’t the most accurate way to describe a PT’s income, so let’s clear up some terminology.  A salary is:

a fixed regular payment, typically paid on a monthly basis but often expressed as an annual sum, made by an employer to an employee…

Most personal trainers are self-employed contractors or business owners rather than employees and are paid by their customers rather than an employer.  This means there is some variability in a personal trainer’s income over the course of a year.  Variability however, isn’t necessarily a bad thing as earning potential of a personal trainer is significant.

So a better question to ask is…

What is the Earning Potential of a Personal Trainer?

Well… as I mentioned above, there’s certainly some variation here.

To use my own personal career as a reference, in 2003:

• I earned $70,000+
• Trained 15 clients
• Averaged 32 paid sessions per week
• Worked 44 weeks of the year

After business expenses (a paltry $10,000) I had a ‘before tax’ profit of around $60,000.   In today’s money that’s just on $80,000 per year.

I worked in a small fitness club and took the opportunity to:

• Get to know everyone by walking the gym floor
• Help people train properly by teaching sound technique; and
• Pick up good clients who liked being looked after by a competent personal trainer

My motto was results with care.  I used my own name (no need for a fancy business name when you are face-to-face with people) and had only a business card and brochure for marketing.  The rest of my marketing was done by helping members (at no cost) to develop effective training habits.  Today, this would be viewed as ‘old school’, but it still works exceptionally well.

At the other end of the spectrum, we see some personal trainers making it hard for themselves by;

• Setting up personal training studios
• Taking on significant financial risk (e.g. commercial leases)
• Spending big on sexy marketing
• Starting websites and blogs…

… and then proceeding to go bust!  The reasons are many as you will discover on your personal training course at NZIHF.

How do I Calculate My Weekly Earning Potential?

The easiest way to calculate your earning potential is to multiply your hourly session rate by the number of training hours you deliver.

As a guide, we say 30 contact hours (30 hours of personal training sessions) is about the point where you’d max out.  Any more and the quality of your sessions tend to drop and burnout is likely.

Below is a table that shows hours of training you might deliver per week and the hourly rate you might charge.

How do I Calculate My Yearly Earning Potential?

To calculate your yearly earning potential you need to identify how many weeks you’ll work each year.  Remember, you or your clients may want to go on holiday, particularly around the main holidays like Christmas and Easter.

For example; 52 weeks minus:

• 3 weeks holiday at Christmas
• 1 week at Easter; plus
• 2 weeks holiday for yourself each year…

… lands you at 46 working weeks per year.

Then to calculate yearly income:

46 weeks x Weekly Income = Annual Income

Example;

46 weeks x $1,800 = $82,800 per year

Based on this calculation where you’re charging $60 per hour you’ll see that your annual income is $82,800 per year at 30 sessions per week for 46 weeks.  Unfortunately, you don’t get to keep all of this income as you have to pay business expenses and tax.

Your main expense is likely to be the license fee the fitness club charges when your first start (assuming you’re looking at the fitness club model).  This often includes uniform and some marketing material as well.

Example;

License Fee                        $1000

Weekly Rent                      $9100   ($175 per week for 52 weeks)

Miscellaneous                   $4400

Total                                 $15,000

Then you take annual income and subtract business expenses to work out your profit before tax.

Annual Income – Business Expenses = Profit (before tax)

Example;

$82,800 – $15,000 = $67,000

Now that you’ve taken out your business expenses you can see what your profit before tax is.  Your profit before tax is the money you have after you’ve taken out the business expenses but before you’ve paid:

• Income tax
• GST
• ACC levies
• Student loan payments
• Kiwisaver

So you can see there is a bit more to go yet.  The calculations start to get a bit fuzzy from here as different business structures are taxed at different rates and you may or may not have a student loan or be apart of a Kiwisaver scheme.

What About Bootcamps or Other PT Business Types?

So what if you’re running a personal training bootcamp and the numbers differ slightly?  Well the most common payment type for a bootcamp is a weekly or monthly payment and the client can attend as many bootcamps as they want to

For a standard bootcamp at full capacity you’d be looking at 80 client on your books.  So all you need to figure out is how much are you charging each client weekly.

Paying Clients x Weekly Membership Rate = Weekly Income

Example;

80 clients x $40 = $3200 per week

Therefore annual income;

$3,200 x 46 weeks = $147,200

Now income is looking really good but remember, these numbers are based on you having the maximum number of clients.  When you start out you won’t be close to these numbers for a while.

With a bootcamp you don’t have the same expenses as you did with the club based trainer.  You won’t have to pay a license fee or weekly rent but you will have additional expenses around marketing and sales so for arguments sake I’m going to keep the expenses the same.

Annual Income – Business Expenses = Profit (before tax)

Example;

$147,200 – $15,000 = $132,200

So it looks like bootcamp is the most lucrative option when compared with the club based trainer.  But remember, we only used the average hourly rate of $60 for the club based trainer so there is plenty of room for growth there.

Also, you have to be highly capable in both marketing and sales in order to run a successful bootcamp.  You don’t need the same level of skills when training out of a fitness club.

Summary

So what can we say in summary about potential earnings?  In our view, a good personal trainer working full-time in a fitness club in Australia or New Zealand should comfortably be able to:

• Turnover $80–$100k per year
• Take home 80% of their turnover ($64–$80k per year) after expenses and before tax

With the right training and support, especially at the front end of your career, there’s a great living to be earned helping people achieve their health and fitness goals.

Got Questions?

If you have any questions about getting qualified and starting a personal training career, feel free to contact us and one of our friendly careers team will be happy to help you out.