Search this question and you get numbers with nothing behind them. Most of them come from platforms, course sellers and coaching mentors, all of whom are better off if the number looks large. None of them tell you how it was worked out, and an average across everyone who has ever called themselves an online coach is not a number you can plan against anyway.
There is a more useful answer, and it is arithmetic rather than a survey. What an online coach earns is the number of clients they hold, times what those clients pay, times how long they stay, minus what it costs to run the business and what the tax office takes. Every one of those is something you can measure in your own business today. This article walks through each lever, models what the top line looks like at realistic combinations, and is honest about the two things the industry's marketing skips: that revenue is not income, and that a large share of people who start online coaching never reach a full-time income from it.
The equation
Write it out once and most of the confusion goes away.
Monthly revenue = active clients × average monthly price
Annual income = (monthly revenue × 12 × occupancy) − business costs − tax
Occupancy is the part everyone forgets. A roster is not full for twelve months of the year. Clients finish, leave, pause over Christmas, or go quiet after a holiday. If you plan on a full roster all year you will overshoot your income forecast by whatever your churn rate is.
There is a third term hiding inside "active clients", and it is the one that decides everything: how long each client stays. A coach signing four new clients a month settles at a roster size of roughly signups divided by monthly churn rate. Four signups a month at 5% monthly churn settles around 80 clients — more than most coaches can coach well. The same four signups at 15% churn settle at about 27, no matter how good the marketing gets. Same effort, same offer, entirely different business.
What the top line looks like
Here is monthly gross revenue at four roster sizes and three price points. These are not predictions and they are not typical figures — they are multiplication, shown so you can find the row that matches your own business.
| Monthly price | 10 clients | 20 clients | 30 clients | 40 clients |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $150 | $1,500 | $3,000 | $4,500 | $6,000 |
| $250 | $2,500 | $5,000 | $7,500 | $10,000 |
| $400 | $4,000 | $8,000 | $12,000 | $16,000 |
Two things to read off this table. The first is that price moves the number faster than client count does, and price does not cost you any additional hours. Going from 20 clients to 30 at $150 a month adds $1,500 and roughly ten more people to program for, message and check in with. Going from $150 to $250 with the same twenty clients adds $2,000 and no extra work at all. That is the whole case for pricing the outcome rather than your hours.
The second is that the right-hand columns are not freely available. Full-service online coaching — individual programming, weekly check-ins, nutrition, messaging — runs into a capacity ceiling somewhere in the 30 to 45 range for most coaches, and what breaks first is usually the admin, not the coaching. Beyond that ceiling the service degrades, churn rises, and the roster stops growing on its own.
Revenue is not income
The number on the table above is what lands in the Stripe account. It is not what lands in yours.
Take the $250 row at 40 clients — $10,000 a month, $120,000 a year at a permanently full roster. Now apply reality:
| Gross at a full roster, 12 months | $120,000 |
| At 80% occupancy across the year | $96,000 |
| Less card processing (2% assumed here — check your processor's rates) | −$1,920 |
| Less business running costs | −$5,000 |
| Before tax and super | $89,080 |
The $5,000 line covers coaching software, insurance, certification renewals, an accountant, phone and internet, and a course or two; the itemised version is in what it really costs to run an online coaching business. It is a planning figure, not a researched one — build your own from your own invoices.
What comes off after that is not something an article should tell you. Income tax, super, whether you are a sole trader or through a company, what you can legitimately deduct: those are questions for an accountant, and the answer changes with your circumstances. The one threshold worth knowing exists is that the ATO requires GST registration once your business turnover reaches $75,000 in a twelve-month period (ATO, current as of 2026). That is turnover, not profit, and it arrives earlier than most coaches expect. Talk to an accountant before you get there, not after.
The gap between $120,000 and what you actually bank is the reason "six-figure coach" is a claim about revenue nine times out of ten. It is not a lie. It just is not an income.
The other omission is hours. Divide what is left by the time the business actually takes — including sales calls, onboarding, content, admin and the Sunday evening check-in backlog — and you get an effective hourly rate. Run that calculation once a year. It is the figure that tells you whether a roster you are proud of is paying you properly, and it is the one coaches avoid.
Retention decides the number
If you only change one thing after reading this, make it this section.
Two coaches both sign four new clients a month at $250. One loses 5% of the roster each month, the other loses 15%. Average client lifetime is one divided by the churn rate, so the first coach's clients stay about 20 months and the second's about seven. What each client is worth over their whole time with the coach:
| 5% monthly churn | 15% monthly churn | |
|---|---|---|
| Average client lifetime | ~20 months | ~7 months |
| Revenue per client at $250/month | ~$5,000 | ~$1,675 |
| Roster size at 4 signups/month | settles near 80 | settles near 27 |
The second coach has to sign three clients for every one the first coach signs, just to stand still. That is three times the content, the discovery calls, the onboarding and the unpaid hours — for a business that never gets past 27 clients.
This is why the honest answer to "how do I earn more" is almost never "get more clients". It is "work out why they leave". A client who stays 20 months instead of seven has done nothing different except keep getting a service worth staying for, and the levers there are boring and specific: onboarding that lands, check-ins that actually get answered, and noticing a client going quiet in week three rather than at the cancellation email. Retaining online coaching clients covers the mechanics.
Part-time to full-time, and how long it takes
Most online coaching starts as a second income alongside gym floor hours or another job entirely, and a large share of it stays that way. That is not a failure of the people involved — it is what the arithmetic above produces when churn is high and price is low.
To replace a $70,000 salary you need something like $80,000 of coaching revenue once costs come out, which at $250 a month is around 27 clients retained, not 27 clients signed. At $150 a month it is 45, which is above what most coaches can deliver properly. That is the trap: the coaches who price low do not get to a full-time income by working harder, because the roster they would need is larger than the roster they can hold.
The timeline is where churn shows up most clearly. In the first twelve months, a coach at 5% churn and a coach at 15% churn signing the same number of clients look surprisingly similar — both are building from zero and neither has lost much yet. The gap opens in year two. One is at their capacity ceiling and choosing who to take on; the other has plateaued and is running the same acquisition effort every month to replace the people walking out the back. Judging a coaching business on its first year tells you almost nothing.
There is also a cash-flow question separate from the income question. Twelve monthly payers and three clients who paid six months upfront can produce the same annual revenue and completely different months, which is worth deciding deliberately rather than by accident — weekly, monthly or upfront billing sets out what each does to your cash.
The levers, ranked by what they cost you
Four ways to increase the number. They are not equal.
Raise the price. Fastest, cheapest, and the one coaches delay longest. A 15% rise across a 30-client roster at $250 adds $13,500 a year for no additional hours, and the clients who leave over 15% were usually close to leaving anyway. Raising your coaching prices covers notice periods and wording.
Keep clients longer. Slower to move but compounds, and it makes every other lever work better. Nothing else changes both roster size and revenue per client at once.
Add clients. Real, but it is the one with a hard ceiling and the highest cost per unit of revenue. Every new client costs marketing time, a discovery call and an onboarding, and they are all unpaid. It is also the lever most coaches reach for first, because it feels like progress in a way that emailing thirty people about a price rise does not.
Cut costs. The smallest lever by a wide margin. Business costs for a solo online coach are usually a few thousand a year, so shaving 20% off them buys you a fraction of what one price rise does. Worth doing once a year; not worth optimising.
Know your own numbers before you compare them to anyone's
Everything in this article is arithmetic you can run on your own business, and you need four figures to do it: active clients, average monthly revenue per client, monthly churn, and annual costs. Most coaches can produce the first and guess at the rest.
If you sell through Fitsly, the Packages area reports monthly recurring revenue, active subscribers, average lifetime value per package and trial-to-paid rate, which covers three of the four without you building a spreadsheet. The fourth — what it costs you to run — is yours to assemble, and it belongs in the same place as everything else you hand your accountant. The payments and packages documentation covers what each figure counts.
Once you have those four numbers, the question stops being "how much do online coaches make" and becomes "what does mine make, and which lever moves it". That is a question with an answer.
