How Much Is a Personal Trainer in London? 2026 Prices, Gym by Gym

How much is a personal trainer in London in 2026?

A personal trainer in London costs between £30 and £85 a session at the prices the trainers and clubs publish themselves, and about £40 on average. That average comes from Bark, the marketplace where London trainers quote for work, and it is the only London-wide figure we could find that a company puts its name to. Big chains are less forthcoming: Fitness First prints a starting price, Third Space prints one for its clubs, and Virgin Active tells you to ask. Every figure below was checked on 28 October 2026.

If you train two or three times a week, the useful number is a month of 12 sessions, not one hour. On those terms the gap between options is several hundred pounds.

Two things this table can’t show. Bark doesn’t say how long its average session is, and Third Space prices by the hour while our sessions are 45 minutes. Compare like with like when you get a quote: ask for the length of the session and whether a warm-up you could do alone is eating into it.

What do London gym chains charge for a personal trainer?

At some London gym chains the personal trainers are not staff. At Fitness First, the trainers are self-employed and any training is “subject to a contract between them and you,” in the chain’s own words. That matters for price, because the trainer sets it, and for the small print, because cancellation rules are the trainer’s rules, not the gym’s.

Fitness First: from £30 a session

Fitness First says personal training “starts at £30 per session, but the cost varies” by trainer and club. You must be a member to book, you choose a trainer through the app or at reception, and the first session is a consultation about your goals, injuries and routine. Fitness First says its trainers hold at least a Level 3 personal training qualification. At £30, twelve sessions start at £360 a month before the membership.

Third Space: from £85 an hour, in sixteen London clubs

Third Space is the London-only luxury end of the market. Its membership page lists 16 clubs, from Mayfair, Soho and Marylebone to the City, Moorgate, Canary Wharf, Wood Wharf, Battersea Power Station, Clapham Junction, Islington, Tower Bridge, Chelsea, Richmond, Wimbledon, Queen’s Park and The Whiteley in Bayswater. Personal training starts at £85 an hour. Membership starts at £257 a month for one club, £299 for all of them and £345 for Group Plus, and a private locker is another £40 a month. Twelve hours of training plus a single-club membership comes to at least £1,277 a month.

Virgin Active: three tiers, prices on request

Virgin Active doesn’t publish its personal training prices; it asks you to chat to the club or find a trainer. What it does publish is useful for comparing value: its trainers come in three levels, Expert, Elite and Icon, you start with a 40-minute wellness consultation, and a standard session is a 5-minute warm-up, a 35 to 40 minute training block and a 5-minute cool-down. That is a fair benchmark for what “a session” really contains in a London club.

PureGym and The Gym Group: trainers on the floor, prices from the trainer

London’s budget chains have personal trainers working on the gym floor, but neither PureGym’s branch pages nor The Gym Group’s London page lists a personal training price. Ask the trainer directly, and ask for the price of a block of sessions as well as one. If the answer is near Bark’s £40 average, a month of 12 is close to £480.

How much is a gym membership in London, from Croydon to Clapham?

Gym membership in London depends far more on the postcode than on the brand. PureGym, which lists 89 gyms with London in their name, charges exactly twice as much for Core in Clapham as in Croydon. These are the monthly prices on five branch pages on 28 October 2026. Off-Peak limits your hours, Core is round-the-clock access and Plus adds multi-gym access and guest passes.

The Gym Group, the other big budget chain in London, starts from £20.99 a month on no contract, with a one-off £10 joining fee, and says most of its London gyms are open 24 hours. At the other end, Third Space’s £257 a month buys a single club. Between the two sit mid-market chains such as Fitness First and Virgin Active, which quote membership by club: ask for the price at the branch nearest your flat or office, and for the off-peak rate.

What does a month of personal training cost in London, all in?

The honest monthly cost of personal training in London is the trainer plus somewhere to train. Here is how five real combinations add up, using the published prices above. None of them includes joining fees, which run from £10 to £24.99 at the PureGym branches we checked.

The biggest saving isn’t the gym, it’s the coaching. Moving from a £49.99 Clapham membership to a £24.99 Croydon one saves £25 a month. Moving from an in-person trainer at the London average to a live video coach saves over £300.

What should I check before hiring a personal trainer in London?

London has no single register a trainer must be on to call themselves one, so the checking falls to you. These are the questions worth asking any trainer, us included.

1. 1

   What qualification they hold

   UK chains set their own bar: Fitness First says all of its trainers hold at least a Level 3 personal training qualification. Ask what the trainer holds and where it is from, and whether it covers what you need, such as training after an injury or during pregnancy.

2. 2

   How long a session really is

   An “hour” at one club and a “session” at another can differ by 20 minutes. Virgin Active’s standard session is a 35 to 40 minute block with a 5-minute warm-up and cool-down either side.

3. 3

   Who you are contracting with

   At chains where trainers are self-employed, your agreement is with the trainer. Ask for the cancellation policy in writing before you pay for a block.

4. 4

   What you pay on top

   Membership, joining fees, travel across town and the time it takes. A trainer in a Soho club is a different proposition if you live in Walthamstow.

5. 5

   Whether the plan survives your week

   Tube strikes, late meetings and school holidays all happen. Ask how much notice you need to move a session and whether you lose it if you can’t.

6. 6

   What happens in session one

   A good first session is questions and a movement check, not a punishing workout. Fitness First and Virgin Active both start with a consultation; we do the same.

Is a £19 online session good value next to a London trainer?

MakeMyFitness is live online personal training. Your coach joins on a video call, watches you move and corrects your form in real time, at home, in your building’s gym, in your own PureGym or in a hotel room on a work trip. There are no studios and no home visits, and nothing is pre-recorded. Our coaches are based in India, which is why our London sessions run from 6 AM to 2:30 PM UK time all year, and until 3:30 PM in British Summer Time.

Put against London’s published prices, a 45-minute session at £19 is under half Bark’s £40 average and under a quarter of a Third Space hour. A 4-week plan is 12 sessions, three a week, for £167, and plans are charged in pounds on a UK card. You can move any session with 24 hours’ notice.

What you don’t get is someone standing next to you. Your coach can’t spot a heavy bench press or hand you a plate, so heavy lifts to failure are better saved for days with a training partner. Everything else, from squat depth to the angle of your back on a Romanian deadlift, a coach can see clearly on a phone propped against a bench.

Our lead coach is Kumar Abhishek, who holds a Diploma in Personal Training and is a Human Performance Nutritionist, both from K11 School of Fitness Sciences, and is TRX Suspension Training qualified. We don’t hold UK qualifications such as Level 3, and we say so up front because London clients ask.

Which London personal training option suits you, and when shouldn’t you use us?

• You work in Mayfair or the City and want a trainer beside you in a luxury club: Third Space charges from £257 a month plus £85 an hour.
• You already train at a budget gym in Croydon or Wimbledon: keep the £19.99 to £30.99 membership and add Personal Gym Training at £19 a session, coached on your phone.
• You live in a flat and won’t travel to train: Personal Home Training at £21 a session uses your floor and your time, not the Tube’s.
• You are coming back from an injury: see your GP or physio first. Once they have cleared you to exercise, Rehab & Recovery is £31 a session of exercise coaching; it is not physiotherapy.
• You want company and a lower price: Group Classes are a small live class at £12 per person, or £96 for 12.
• You can only train after 3:30 PM: we can’t help. Our UK sessions end at 2:30 PM in winter and 3:30 PM in summer, so an in-person London trainer is the better fit for evenings.
• You want someone physically spotting heavy lifts: hire an in-person trainer at your gym; a coach on video can’t take the bar off you.

For when to train and where to run between sessions, see staying fit in London; for what to eat around them, healthy eating in London. The London page has our session times in UK time, and the UK page lists the other cities we coach.