Small group personal training should be priced at roughly 40 to 60% of your local 1:1 personal training rate, per session. If PTs in your town charge £45 an hour, your SGPT sessions should work out between £18 and £27 per head, which typically lands memberships between £180 and £320 a month depending on visit frequency. Most small group gyms we meet are charging well under this, and it's rarely a market problem.
Gym Owner Network has mentored 500+ gyms across 16 countries, and pricing is the single most common thing we fix first. This page gives you the maths, the structures, and the reason you haven't raised prices yet.
How do you calculate small group PT pricing?
Anchor to the 1:1 rate in your area, not to class prices. SGPT is personal training delivered in a shared session of six or fewer, so 1:1 is the honest comparison. Price per head at 40 to 60% of that rate, then build memberships from sessions per week.
Worked example, using a £45 local 1:1 rate:
- Per-session price: £45 × 50% = £22.50 per head
- 2 sessions a week: roughly £195 a month
- 3 sessions a week: roughly £280 a month
Check the session maths from the gym's side. Five clients at £22.50 is £112.50 for one coached hour, against £45 for the same hour of 1:1. That margin is what pays a proper coaching team, and eventually pays you to stop delivering every session yourself.
Two anchors to reject:
Class prices. If you benchmark against the £89-a-month class gym down the road, you've priced a coached product against an uncoached one. Different product, different price.
What you'd pay. Gym owners are the worst judges of their own value. You'd never pay £250 a month for training because you've never needed to. Your members aren't you.
Why is your gym probably too cheap?
Because your prices were set by feel, years ago, by a version of you with less proof. In our mentorship work the pattern repeats: the coaching has improved every year, the results have compounded, and the price has moved once, apologetically, in five years.
Owners tell us the market won't take a rise. Then we look at their numbers: full sessions, a waiting list for the 6am, members who've been there three years. That's not a price-sensitive market. That's an under-priced product.
The real block is internal. In the words of one owner we work with: "I worry I'm not worth the price I charge, which is why I'm in this mess." The fear isn't losing revenue. It's letting the community down, and what that would say about you. Which is why shouting "raise your rates" at gym owners achieves nothing. The confidence has to come first.
Product first, price second
This is the order we run in mentorship, and it's deliberate: fix the product, then raise the price. The first sale you make is to yourself.
When sessions are genuinely capped at six, every member is on an individual programme, and coaching is consistent across your team, the price rise stops feeling like a favour you're asking and starts feeling like housekeeping. You're no longer hoping the product deserves it. You know.
Across the GON network, most members recoup their mentorship investment within 60 days, usually from a single price change. The average member adds £130k in new revenue in their first year. Averages from real member gyms, never guarantees, but they show where the headroom usually is: not in more leads, in the price of the thing you already deliver.
How to structure SGPT memberships
Keep it simple. The structures that work across the network share three traits:
Recurring monthly memberships, not session packs. Packs create re-buying decisions every few weeks. Memberships create a relationship. Your MRR is the heartbeat of the business, and packs give it an arrhythmia.
Two or three tiers, by frequency. 2x, 3x, and unlimited-style weekly frequencies cover almost everyone. More tiers than that and you're running a spreadsheet, not an offer.
Priced so your best tier is the obvious one. The middle or top tier should carry the clearest value per session. Most of your members should sit there.
What to avoid: founder rates that never expire, mate's rates that spread by word of mouth, and legacy prices protected for years out of guilt. Every gym has these. The gyms that grow clean them up, respectfully, with notice, and almost always keep the member.
How to raise prices without losing members
Raise prices after the product visibly improved, communicate straight, and give notice. Done that way, the members you lose are usually the ones costing you money to serve.
The short version of the playbook:
- Fix and show the product first. Capped sessions, individual programming, visible coaching standards. Let members feel the difference before you price it.
- Tell them straight, in person or by letter, with weeks of notice. State the new price and the reason. Skip the apology paragraph. Clarity is kindness.
- Expect less fallout than you fear. Owners forecast catastrophe. Across the network, the actual result of a well-run rise is a small number of departures and an immediate margin jump. Sam & Tristan at CTPT Canterbury went further: cut from 110 members at the wrong price to 30 at the right one, then grew to 230 in a facility four times the size.
We've published a full step-by-step guide: how to raise gym membership prices without losing members.
Frequently asked questions
How much should small group personal training cost?
Per head, 40 to 60% of your local 1:1 PT rate. In most UK markets in 2026 that means £18 to £30 per session and monthly memberships between roughly £180 and £320.
Is £200+ a month realistic outside big cities?
Yes. Network gyms in small towns hold £200+ memberships, because the comparison in the member's head is 1:1 PT at £40+ a session, not the leisure centre. Premium pricing follows product clarity, not postcode.
Should I publish my prices on my website?
For a premium coached product, most network gyms convert better through a conversation, because the price needs the value context. Either way, the price belongs on your sales page or in your consult, never buried in apology.
How often should a gym review prices?
Annually, as routine. A yearly review normalises movement, so no single rise carries five years of backlog and five years of fear.
The uncomfortable summary
Your pricing problem is probably a confidence problem wearing a spreadsheet. The market has been ready for years. The product might genuinely need work first, and that's fine, because that's the correct order anyway.