How much does a personal trainer cost in London?

If you’re searching for a personal trainer, one of the first questions you’re probably going to ask is: how much does it cost?

As a rough guide, I would expect an established independent trainer in London to charge around £70 per hour upwards, with £100–£120 per hour not unusual in central London.

In Kentish Town, I charge £80 for a 45-minute personal training session. Clients committing to weekly PT receive Flexi Coaching included. Standalone Flexi Coaching costs £120 per month.

That sounds simple enough. But I actually think looking purely at the hourly rate is one of the least useful ways of comparing personal trainers.

You’re not buying a class.

A class is fairly transactional. You book an hour, you have the experience, and then you leave. Ten classes are, broadly speaking, ten times as valuable as one.

Personal training shouldn’t work like that.

The first ten sessions you have with a good personal trainer should be enormously valuable. You’re learning how to move, how to select exercises, how to load them, how hard to train, how your body responds and how to put everything together.

By the time you’ve done 100 sessions, you probably don’t need somebody standing next to you explaining those things anymore.

So before asking what a personal trainer costs, it’s worth asking a slightly better question:

What am I actually paying them to do?

What does personal training include?

There are broadly two types of personal training client.

The first simply wants to turn up at the gym and have somebody take care of everything.

They don’t particularly want to think about programming. They don’t want homework. They don’t necessarily want nutrition coaching or messages between sessions.

They want to walk through the door, train for 45 minutes or an hour, walk out again and forget about it until next week.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

The second type of client is trying to achieve something beyond the session itself.

They might want to lose fat, gain muscle, learn how to use the gym properly or eventually become confident enough to train without a personal trainer at all.

For that person, the session is only one part of the service.

You also need to think about the programme they’re following when the trainer isn’t there, how their training progresses, their nutrition, their habits, their lifestyle and whether they’re actually doing what they agreed to do.

At that point, you’re not really buying an hour of somebody’s time.

You’re buying guidance, support, accountability and education.

How much does a personal trainer cost in London?

There is obviously a huge range.

You can usually find cheaper personal training if somebody works outdoors because they have very little facility cost. That might suit you perfectly well, although the trade-off is that you have much less equipment available.

Newer trainers can also be cheaper while they are building a client base. Some trainers working inside big chain gyms subsidise their rent by doing shifts or other work for the gym.

And an employed personal trainer may have a completely different cost structure from somebody running an independent business.

Once you’re looking specifically at established, self-employed trainers working in London gyms, the economics become quite different.

I’d be surprised to see an independent gym-based personal trainer in London charging much below £50 per hour.

For an established independent trainer, I think somewhere around £70 per hour and upwards is a much more realistic starting point.

In central London, £100–£120 per hour is not particularly surprising either.

Rent matters. Location matters. Experience matters.

But ultimately, once somebody is self-employed and established, price is also influenced by supply and demand.

If a trainer has a lot of clients, good reviews and limited availability, there is usually a reason they are able to charge more.

Equally, if someone is cheap and can fit you in at virtually any time you like, it’s reasonable to ask why.

How much do your personal training sessions cost?

I charge £80 for a 45-minute personal training session.

I deliberately use 45-minute sessions rather than an hour.

Most of my clients are busy, and I don’t think an hour is some magical unit of exercise that everybody needs.

Forty-five focused minutes is usually enough.

If somebody needs longer, I’d rather they come in slightly earlier and get warmed up by themselves.

I don’t think somebody should be paying me to stand next to them while they stretch and have a chat.

One thing I’m very keen on is optimising what people spend on my time.

I’d rather somebody pay me for the part where my involvement genuinely adds something than spend an extra 15 minutes essentially racking up the pounds per minute.

That £80 is for the personal training session.

If somebody does not need weekly PT but wants support between occasional sessions, standalone Flexi Coaching is available.

Is Flexi Coaching included with personal training?

Clients committing to personal training once a week receive Flexi Coaching included. If you want ongoing coaching without weekly PT, standalone Flexi costs £120 per month.

Flexi includes your training programme in Trainerize, nutrition and lifestyle coaching, accountability, message support, video exercise-form feedback and monthly Saturday-morning Open Gym sessions.

Different clients use that support differently. Some need help adapting training around travel. Others need more accountability or support with their nutrition and habits.

The arrangement should reflect the help you actually need. You do not have to pay for a trainer to stand next to you at every workout.

Do I need two or three PT sessions every week?

For most people, no.

Very few people need to pay for two or three personal training sessions every week in order to get results.

If you enjoy doing that and can comfortably afford it, fine.

But that’s different from needing to.

A good personal trainer should be able to give you a programme that allows you to train independently between sessions.

They should also make that programme feel achievable.

You should understand the exercises. You should know what you’re trying to do. The difficulty should be appropriate. You shouldn’t constantly feel beaten up.

The idea is to build momentum.

For most people, one personal training session per week — and sometimes considerably less — can be plenty if the rest of the system is good.

How can I spend less on personal training?

One model I use quite regularly is to start somebody with two sessions.

If they have a two-day programme, we use one session to go through each day.

They then go away and do the workouts by themselves.

Alongside that, they might use the coaching membership so I can keep an eye on their training, nutrition, habits and progress.

Then when the programme changes, perhaps we have another session to go through anything genuinely new.

Over the first six months, that person might only end up paying for five personal training sessions.

Compare that with the assumption that:

“I want to train twice a week, therefore I need to pay a personal trainer twice a week.”

At £80 per session, that would be £160 every week.

That becomes expensive very quickly.

But there’s no particular reason the trainer has to stand next to you for every workout.

Five strategically used PT sessions, alongside a good programme and ongoing coaching, could be enough to teach you most of what you need to know.

Suddenly the cost looks very different.

When is a cheaper personal trainer good value?

Sometimes cheaper is completely sensible.

If all you really need is accountability, you may not need the most experienced trainer in London.

Maybe you simply want somebody there every Tuesday morning.

You want them to smile when you walk in, count your reps, keep you moving, have a chat about what you did at the weekend and make sure you actually turn up.

If that is genuinely the service you need, paying a premium may not achieve very much.

The calculation changes when the problem becomes more complicated.

If you have significant injuries, very specific goals, need more involved programming or want somebody to manage everything outside the gym as well, then experience and quality become much more important.

The cheapest option can stop being particularly cheap if it takes you much longer to get where you wanted to go.

Why are the first few personal training sessions so valuable?

This is why I don’t particularly like evaluating personal training as simply “£X per hour”.

Early on, a good trainer should be teaching you an enormous amount.

What exercises suit you?

What does good technique actually feel like?

How hard should you train?

How do you progress?

What should hurt, what shouldn’t, and what should you do if something doesn’t feel right?

You should gradually understand your own body better.

That knowledge stays with you after the session has finished.

Personal training is therefore closer to coaching and education than it is to simply paying somebody to exercise alongside you.

Should a personal trainer help me train independently?

That depends entirely on what you want.

Some people actively do not want to become independent.

They’re busy. They can afford personal training. They enjoy the service and they would quite happily pay somebody once or twice per week indefinitely to organise everything.

That is completely legitimate.

Other people arrive saying:

“I want to learn how to do this myself.”

If that’s the goal, I think the trainer should actively work towards it.

You might initially train with them reasonably frequently.

Then perhaps you move towards mostly training alone while they continue to handle your programming and accountability.

Eventually, you might decide you don’t need them at all.

If somebody comes to me wanting to become autonomous and six months later says, “I know what I’m doing now; I’m happy doing this myself,” I don’t think that represents losing a client.

That can simply mean the job has been done.

Should I choose an independent personal trainer or a PT company?

There is another consideration when comparing prices.

An independent personal trainer can usually make decisions about the service themselves.

They can decide how often they need to see you, how they structure your coaching and what combination of services makes sense.

In my experience, larger personal training operations are more likely to have a system that their trainers work within.

There are advantages to systems and standardisation, but there is also naturally less freedom to rebuild the service around every individual.

Continuity matters too.

If you work with one trainer from beginning to end, that person knows what happened last week, how you responded to something six months ago and all the little details that never quite make it into a set of notes.

If you regularly move between different trainers, some of that continuity is inevitably harder to maintain.

That is something worth considering alongside the headline price.

Is personal training worth the money?

I think almost everybody could get some value from seeing a good personal trainer at least a couple of times.

Getting someone to check your technique, help you understand the gym and make sure your programme actually makes sense can save an enormous amount of wasted effort.

I also think a lot of people would benefit from having a trainer continue to manage their programme even if they don’t need them standing next to them every week.

Ongoing personal training is more individual.

Some people genuinely benefit from it.

Some people simply enjoy it.

And plenty of people eventually don’t need it.

So before you compare trainers based on whether one costs £60 and another costs £90, work out what you actually need help with.

Then ask exactly what you are getting for your money.

That will tell you considerably more than the hourly rate.

For the related questions, read Is personal training worth it? and How do I find a good personal trainer?

If you want help putting this into practice, read about my personal training in Kentish Town or book a free consultation to discuss what you need.