How to Increase Your Personal Trainer Salary [New 2025 Data] — Buildfire TechTricks365

Personal training is one of those professions where the top earners can make 4-5x more than average. 

What separates the highest salaries from everyone else? It’s not just their experience or location—it’s how they approach their fitness business.

If you want to make more money as a personal trainer, this guide is for you. We’ll start with the latest salary data, address the biggest barriers holding you back, and then jump into proven tactics to generate more money without burning yourself out. 

All it takes is an open mind and willingness to try something new.

How Much Do Personal Trainers Make?

The average personal trainer salary in the US is $46,571 per year. This is based on the latest data from Indeed.com, which accounts for over 34,400 personal trainer salaries submitted in the past 36 months—last updated in March 2025.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median pay for a personal trainer is $46,480 annually or $22.35 per hour. 

The fact that both the average and median salaries of personal trainers in the US from two independent sources means you can safely use $46,500 per year or $895 per week as rough benchmarks when comparing your salary to other personal trainers. 

But this number varies by location, and top earners can make more than double the national average.

Average Personal Trainer Salary by State

Here’s a look at the top ten highest-paying states for personal trainers based on annual salary:

1. Washington: $69,105
2. District of Columbia: $68,948
3. New York: $66,752
4. Massachusetts: $66,635
5. Alaska: $65,709
6. Vermont: $64,874
7. North Dakota: $64,558
8. Oregon: $64,510
9. Colorado: $64,158
10. Hawaii: $63,391

Personal trainers in these states can earn about 35% more than the national average, which is a fairly significant pay bump. 

Online Personal Trainer Salary

Online personal trainers and fitness coaches earn more money than those working strictly in gyms. 

New data from ZipRecruiter suggests that online personal trainers earn an average of $59,779 per year. This is 28% more than the average salary for coaches training clients in person.  

Top earners (90th percentile) in the online personal training space earn $111,000 per year—more than double the national average of traditional personal trainers. 

The top 3% of online personal trainers make $126,000 per year. 

Read More: How to Become an Online Personal Trainer in 2025

Why Most Personal Trainers Hit Income Ceilings

Many personal trainers quickly hit a wall in terms of their pay. This results in a whopping 80% of new trainers quitting within two years on the job. 

Here’s why:

• There are only 24 hours in a day. Even the hardest-working personal trainers can only handle about 12 clients per day if they’re doing 1:1 sessions.
• Gyms take high commissions. According to the International Sports Sciences Association (ISSA), gyms take between 30% to 60% in commissions from personal training clients. 
• Geographic limitations. Some trainers are simply located in a city or state where the pay is less or there’s lower demand for their services. Moving or driving hours to secure clients isn’t always realistic.  
• Burnout. Personal training is a physically demanding job that requires long hours to stay in shape, even in your “free” time when you’re not training clients. 
• There are factors beyond your control. Your gym might raise membership prices, increase rates on personal training sessions, or hire more personal trainers—all of which can make it harder for you to secure new clients and retain your existing ones. 

Traditional personal training just isn’t one of those professions that provides limitless growth potential. You can only have so many clients or raise your prices so much before you’re hit with other barriers preventing you from earning more money.

Who knows? Maybe you’ll hit the jackpot and land some celebrity clients who are happy to pay $500 for a 60-minute session. But I wouldn’t bank on this.

Most trainers find themselves working in a dead-end cycle unless they proactively take steps to boost their salary. 

8 Proven Strategies to Make More Money as a Personal Trainer

Don’t let these barriers prevent you from boosting your income as a personal trainer. 

If you follow these tactics below, you can easily break through into the top-earner bracket—earning over $100,000 per year without working longer hours or raising your rates. In fact, you’ll eventually be able to work less and get paid more if you implement these strategies correctly. 

1. Go Digital

The data is clear—online personal trainers make more money than those who only train clients in person. 

We’ve reached a point where every personal trainer needs their own fitness app. This gives you total control over how much you’re getting paid and allows you to grow your personal training business without limits.

By training clients remotely through a mobile app, you’re no longer bound by location constraints, and you can train thousands of clients simultaneously. 

There’s a really strong demand for fitness mobile apps—with the category projected to grow at 16.3% CAGR between 2024 and 2030 in the US alone. 

You don’t have to quit your day job either. By leveraging powerful tools like Buildfire, any personal trainer can quickly create a custom mobile app without writing a single line of code. So you can continue training clients in person for as long as you need until your digital program takes off.

2. Stop Trading Time For Money

If your sole form of income is getting paid by the hour by training clients face-to-face, then you’ll end up stuck in a rat race while constantly hitting income ceilings. 

You might add a couple more clients to your book of business or bump your rates by 5-10%, but you’ll never 10x your pay because the math simply doesn’t work. At the end of the day, you still need to show up. If you’re sick, on vacation, or otherwise can’t make an appointment, you don’t get paid for the session. 

Instead, you need to shift your mindset and think of ways to maximize the value of your time.

For example, let’s say you earn $100 per hour training clients (more than 4x the average). If you work ten hours, you’ll earn $1,000—not bad, right?

Consider using those ten hours to create an online training program or a 30-day workout challenge. While you won’t get paid for your time, you now own an asset that you can sell digitally forever. 

You could sell 100 at $50 over the next six months to generate $5,000. Or maybe you’ll sell the program for $100 to 250 people over the next year to earn $25,000. 

3. Target High-Income Clients

The more money your clients make, the more disposable income they’ll have to pay for higher-priced personal training services.

While this may seem obvious, it’s not always easy if you’re working in a traditional gym setting or if you work in a lower-income region. 

So how do you market yourself to individuals earning $150,000 per year if the average household income in your area is closer to $60,000?

Simple—digital targeting. 

Your location doesn’t actually matter. If you have a mobile training program, you can market it to clients from anywhere. You can even pay for some ads on social media to promote your fitness app while getting even more specific with demographics based on income, gender, and location.

This allows you to double or triple your prices for virtual training since you’re able to reach people who not only can afford it but are happy to pay higher rates. 

4. Eliminate Commissions

If you work at a gym, there’s a good chance that roughly half of what your clients pay are going straight to the facility as a commission fee.

So even if you’re able to command higher prices while training people who are willing to pay more, your earrings are still capped because commissions are eating into your profits. 

It’s a double-edged sword because if you leave your gym and try to train elsewhere, you lose out on the equipment and infrastructure that the gym provides. Even if you strike gold and manage to somehow acquire clients who all have their own personal home gym, you’re now forced to drive between their houses instead of having all your clients back-to-back in one location. 

You can eliminate commission fees altogether by creating your own fitness mobile app.

With no-code app builders like Buildfire, you just pay a low, flat monthly fee—which is much less than the percentage-based commissions charged by a gym.

It’s easy to break even with just a handful of sales each month, and everything else is pure profit. 

5. Offer Natural Services Extensions

You should always be exploring new ways for your existing clients to spend more money. This is much easier than trying to acquire completely new clients to train.

Rather than simply raising your rates (which can only go so high), it’s better to come up with value-added services that can co-exist naturally with your original training offer.

• Custom workout programs
• Meal programs
• 90-day fitness challenges
• 1:1 coaching
• Weight loss programs
• Nutrition coaching
• On-demand exercise videos

However, it can be tough to fit these upsells and cross-sells into your weekly 60-minute sessions with a client. You don’t want to seem like you’re constantly selling or taking away from what they’ve already paid for.

But if you have your own fitness mobile app, it’s easy to offer these extensions through push notifications and in-app promotions. 

A client may download your app initially to access on-demand video tutorials for new exercises. From there, it’s easy to sell them weight-loss programs, meal plans, and 30-day challenges. 

This is the smarter way to extend the lifetime value of your clients. Not only does it help prevent churn, but can continue delivering them more value to triple or quadruple their spending over time.

6. Scale Through Building a Community

If you figure out how to build an active and engaging fitness community, you can grow organically and keep your clients for the long run.

This doesn’t happen overnight, and you’ll need to set up a space where your clients can feel like they’re part of a bigger community that’s all working to motivate each other and reach the same goals.

For example, you can set up message boards within your fitness mobile app where users can discuss their progress and share before/after photos. This adds a social media-like experience to your app, which gives them a reason to keep using it (and paying for a subscription) even when they aren’t working out.

You can also use your app to facilitate weight-loss challenges and reward members who walk or run the most miles each month.

Since clients can be part of this online community from anywhere without actually having to step foot in the same gym at the same time, it makes it much easier for you to scale because your churn will be lower and your clients will organically refer friends and family. 

7. Product Sales and Affiliate Marketing

In addition to personal training services, you can earn money by selling physical products to your clients.

Examples include:

• Hats, shirts, and hoodies
• Water bottles and blender bottles
• Supplements
• Kettlebells and medicine balls
• Massage guns
• Resistance bands
• Yoga mats
• Gym bags and backpacks

The possibilities are really endless here. 

There are two main ways to approach this, both of which can be done from within your mobile app—either selling the items yourself or joining affiliate programs and earning commissions by referring users to those businesses.

Most gyms won’t let personal trainers do this unless they’re selling gym-branded items. This limits what you can sell and means you’re sharing a percentage of the profits. 

But there are no restrictions if you’re selling equipment and merch through your own mobile app.

8. Step Outside of Your Comfort Zone

Some of you might be content with your current personal trainer salary. 

If you’re making enough to make ends meet, you may not immediately feel a need to make any changes. After all, who cares if personal trainers in another state make more than you? The cost of living is cheaper where you live, so it’s all relative, right?

These are all fair points, but I don’t necessarily agree with them. 

Approach your income the same way you tell your clients to approach their fitness routine. Step outside of your comfort zone, and don’t settle for average. 

Complacency will crush you over time. Becoming an online personal trainer and having your own fitness mobile app is really the only way you can future-proof your business. 

Otherwise, you’ll always have outside factors threatening your livelihood—your gym closing down or being bought by new owners, your best clients moving away, or other trainers taking a portion of your share. 

How Buildfire Helps Top-Earners Scale Beyond the Gym

Buildfire is a no-code app builder that’s perfect for any personal trainer or coach who wants their own fitness mobile app. 

It’s affordable, and it has everything you need to create custom workouts for your clients, upload meal plans, add videos, sell memberships, and ultimately take your personal training career to the next level.

There are other white-label gym apps on the market designed for personal trainers. But those cookie-cutter tools really limit your options, and some even take commissions on your sales (just like the gym).

Buildfire gives you more support, opportunities for multiple revenue streams, and limitless scalability. Plus, you’ll stand out from other online personal trainers who are all using the same basic tools. Buildfire even help get your app published to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store while maintaining all of the technical elements on the backend. 

You’ll have access to tons of pre-built features specifically for fitness apps that you can add to your app and customize with just a few clicks. But if you need some extra help or want a custom feature, Buildfire’s in-house development and design team can handle it. 

You’ll never outgrow Buildfire and they’ll never take commissions on your revenue. Just pay a fixed monthly rate for access to the platform, and the sky’s the limit with how much money you can make. 

Final Thoughts

The easiest way to increase your personal trainer salary is by training clients digitally through your own fitness mobile app. You can reach clients from anywhere and easily earn $100,000 to $250,000+ per year without ever stepping foot in the gym. 

Look—you don’t need to abandon your bread and butter just yet. You can still keep your current clients and do what you do best. 

But this is a natural transition for most personal trainers who want to make money, future-proof their business, and buy back their time. You can easily double or triple your personal trainer salary by selling services and training programs from an app.

To get started, sign up for a 30-day free trial of Buildfire today.