Exercise Trainers and Group Fitness Instructors Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Exercise Trainers and Group Fitness Instructors offer sit among all 303,620 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 303,620 Exercise Trainers and Group Fitness Instructors jobs in May 2024, which is 0.20% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Colorado, where the location quotient is 1.90, meaning the occupation holds 1.90 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 40,010 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 25.7% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $34,090 at the 25th percentile, $46,180 at the middle, $60,920 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $54,470, a ratio of 3.0 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Connecticut posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $65,790, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Exercise Trainers and Group Fitness Instructors stands number 120 by employment and number 617 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Personal Care and Service Occupations, the group median wage is $37,320 across 32 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 24% more than its group median, and it supplies 9.6% of the group's 3,159,920 jobs. In 17 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $46,180, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 21,540 jobs, 7.1% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Wichita, KS posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $36,590 a year, against $73,440 in Bridgeport-Stamford-Danbury, CT. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Exercise Trainers and Group Fitness Instructors paycheck, gross, is $1,776 every two weeks on an annual $46,180, which is $3,848 a month and $888 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($34,090) to the 75th ($60,920) is worth $26,830 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $50,798 would sit between the median ($46,180) and the 75th percentile ($60,920), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $34,090, is $12,090 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Personal Care and Service Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Barbers, Locker Room, Coatroom, and Dressing Room Attendants, Gambling Service Workers, All Other, Shampooers, Entertainment Attendants and Related Workers, All Other, Gambling and Sports Book Writers and Runners. The full directory is on the Careers hub.