Health and fitness professionals such as personal trainers, yoga, and pilates instructors need personal trainer insurance for many reasons. Weight machine accidents, slips, and legal fees arising from client’s perceived professional negligence or false advertising could land a lawyer at the doorstep in record time. In this case, professional liability or general liability insurance is needed to pay medical costs, court-awarded settlements, and legal fees.
- The 6 Best 6 Personal Trainer Insurance Companies
- What Coverages do Personal Trainers Need?
- How Much Does Personal Trainer Insurance Cost?
- What to Consider in Personal Trainer Insurance?
- How to Get Cheap Personal Trainer Insurance?
- Compare Personal Trainer Insurance Quotes with Coverhound and Coverwallet
The 6 Best Personal Trainer Insurance Companies
Fitness insurance has become more and more popular since more and more studios and gyms require personal trainers to have proper insurance coverage before they can work. Here are the 6 best providers of personal trainer insurance that we recommend:
- Simply Business: Best for finding low-cost coverage
- InsurePro: Best for flexible short-term and pay-per-day coverage
- CoverWallet: Best for comparing several quotes online
- Next Insurance: Best for a Simple and Cheap Policy
- Hiscox Insurance: Best for Personal Trainers or Studio Owners Offering Classes Under Contract
- Thimble Fitness Insurance: Best for Part-Time Personal Trainers
Simply Business: Best for finding low-cost coverage
Simply Business is another digital broker specializing in small businesses. They work with several carriers and their goal is to find the cheapest policy for you from their carrier partners. Some of their partners may not be well-known, but they offer low-cost coverage and have great financial strength rating. Most are rated A by AM Best.
They also earn a great customer satisfaction score of 4.1 out of 5 on Trustpilot.
If your main goal is to find low-cost coverage, you may want to start with Simply Business.
InsurePro: Best for flexible short-term and pay-per-day coverage
InsurePro is another national brokerage focused on serving small businesses with the most essential insurance coverage. Their innovative approach is to enable small businesses to buy an insurance policy for just a few days or weeks. This approach allows small businesses to save a lot of money if they don’t need a traditional annual policy.
They work with several carriers and have built their technology platform to offer small businesses to buy any coverage policy for a short-term. With this approach, even their traditional annual policy tends to be cheaper than what we have seen in other platforms.
If you need short-term insurance coverage, you may want to give them a try.
CoverWallet: Best for comparing online quotes
CoverWallet is a national digital business insurance broker. They work with several leading business insurance companies and are able to provide quotes of these companies for you to compare. Once you provide your personal information on their quote form, you will see quotes from companies such as Hiscox, Travelers, Liberty Mutual, or Nationwide.
If you are new to buying personal trainer insurance, you might want to give them a call and discuss your situation with an agent. Their agents are very knowledgeable about business insurance in general. Even personal trainer insurance might appear simple and inexpensive, there are nuances of which you should be aware before making your final decision.
Next Insurance: Best for a Simple and Cheap Policy
Next Insurance is a small business insurance carrier providing personal trainer programs for as low as $11 a month, serving a wide range of providers including but not limited to CrossFit, yoga, dance, golf, and spinning instructors. Coverages include general liability and professional liability for bodily injury, medical payments, advertising harm, and property damage claims. However, there are several exclusions.
Package plans come in Basic, Pro, and Pro Plus, which vary by limit, aggregate, and deductible amount.
Its simple-to-use online portal allows users to purchase a policy and obtain a certificate of insurance in minutes. To fill a quote, users specify the type of training (fitness, golf, aerobics) and answer a series of qualifying questions before receiving a quote.
Hiscox Insurance: Best for Personal Trainers or Studio Owners Offering Classes Under Contract
Hiscox, one of the nation’s oldest insurance companies, offers professional liability for bodily injury/medical cost claims and general liability coverage against negligence claims and breach of contract. It promises flexible payment options, worldwide coverage, and proudly advertises its 4.7/5 star rating throughout the website as of the time of this writing.
Pricing for professional liability starts at $270 per month and $350 for general liability, making it our most expensive option.
If you offer fitness classes to corporate and high-profile clients whose lawyers requires a strict contract, Hiscox promises that their professional and general liability insurance policies for personal trainers or studio owners satisfy all contract insurance requirements.
Thimble: Best for Part-Time Personal Trainers
Thimble is an ‘on-demand’ insurance service promising ‘by the hour’ insurance plans for more than 120 types of small businesses, claiming a pace of 100,000 policies sold by the end of 2019. According to Thimble, 50% of fitness professional policies are for 30 days or less, making it the ideal option for instructors offering cyclical class schedules, such as 8-week boot camps or summer classes.
Like Next Insurance and Hiscox, Thimble offers general liability for bodily injury and property damage. Rates are the lowest we’ve seen, with rates starting at $5 per hour, $7 a day, and $15 per month with a $0 deductible and a $1 million policy.
Thimble’s quote form is also a breeze to use, with users only needing to enter a zip code and coverage dates before revealing full policy details with coverage/exposure period, inclusions, allowed activities, and excluded activities. There is even an option to view a sample certificate.
This is probably the best company for best-time personal trainers who might need to get a policy once or twice a month when they have a class.
What Coverages do Personal Trainers Need?
There are several policies that a personal trainer may want to consider. Below are the top 3 policies that most freelance or independent personal trainers and persona trainers who also own a gym usually get:
General liability insurance
General Liability Insurance protects personal trainers from:
- bodily injury claims caused by unforeseen accidents, such as slip and falls off of a treadmill or chest press machine.
- third-party property damage to replace that fancy $10,000 workout room mirror in the event of an accident.
- reputational harm, where a partner business can sue you of breach of contract or failure to pay royalties for the playlist that you use for your classes.
Learn more at general liability insurance cost and the best general liability insurance companies
Professional liability insurance
Professional Liability Insurance: Also called Errors and Omissions (E&O) insurance. It covers judgment errors – giving wrong instructions, omissions – forgetting to mention important instruction details, and failure to deliver a contracted number of courses or personal coaching sessions.
Learn more at the best professional liability insurance companies for personal trainers
Commercial property insurance
Commercial Property Insurance: Lastly, personal trainers who own studios could opt for commercial property insurance, which protects your place of business against theft, vandalism, fire, and other ‘acts of God.” Even renters can benefit from business personal property coverage for weights, mirrors, and similar items.
Less importantly, workers’ compensation, product liability, and commercial auto insurance could be included depending on the scale of your business.
Is personal trainer insurance required?
Although personal trainer insurance isn’t required by law, it is likely to be required by the gym you work at or by your clients. If you are a freelance or independent personal trainer, before letting you do your personal training sessions in a gym, it is very likely that the gym owner will ask for your insurance certificate.
Even if the gym doesn’t require it, your clients will ask for your insurance proof.
If you work for a gym, make sure to ask if you are added to their personal training insurance policy as an additional insured. If not, you need to have your own insurance policy.
If you own a gym, it is very likely that your landlord require you to have commercial property insurance. In order to attract clients to the gym, you may need general liability and professional liability insurance as well.
How Much Does Personal Trainer Insurance Cost?
Many factors affect the cost of personal trainer insurance, depending on the state, type of insurance, and available coverage limits/deductibles.
The average cost of a $1MM general liability insurance policy for personal trainers is $23 per month, or $276 per year. Most personal trainers pay between $11 to $78 per month for their business insurance needs. That is a wide range, depending on how many policies and which policies they get. Below are the average costs of different coverages for personal trainers:
| Personal trainer insurance coverage | Average costs |
| General liability insurance | $23 per month |
| Professional liability insurance | $28 per month |
| Commercial property insurance | $38 per month |
- General Liability Insurance: On the low end, personal trainers can expect to pay as low as $150 in annual premiums and $0-$500 in deductibles on a $1 million per occurrence/$2 million aggregate.
- Professional Liability Insurance: Rates can be between $150-500 in annual premiums and $100-1,000 deductibles.
- Commercial Property Insurance: Rates varies between $150-$700 annual premiums and $100-$500 deductibles.
These are just the averages . Your rates will be different. Be sure to shop around with a few companies to compare quotes. The best way to compare quotes is to work with a digital broker like Simply Business or CoverWallet who can provide you with several quotes in one place.
Learn more at Personal Trainer Insurance Costs & Quotes
What factors affect personal trainer insurance cost?
Several factors affect the cost of personal trainer insurance. Below are some important ones:
- Coverage: As you can see above, different coverages cost differently. The more coverages you get, the more you’ll pay for your personal trainer policy.
- The size of your gym or the number of your clients: The more clients you have and the bigger your gym is, the more you’ll have to pay for your personal trainer insurance policy.
- Your experience: The more experience you have as a personal trainer, the lower your premiums are.
- Location, past claims history, and annual revenue can also affect overall premiums.
Personal trainer insurance cost varies by providers and other details of the personal trainers, you should always compare quotes from a few companies to choose the best one.
>>MORE: How Much does General Liability Insurance Cost?
>>MORE: The Best Professional Liability Companies for Small Business
How to Get Cheap Personal Trainer Insurance?
To get cheap personal trainer insurance, consider a general liability insurance-only plan. The greater the coverage, the higher the premium. You may also opt for cheaper plans or coverage limits in exchange for higher deductibles.
Our advice is to shop around, especially with digital brokers who might allow you compare rates from several carriers. We recommend two online commercial insurance brokers: Coverhound and CoverWallet, each of which returns wildly different quotes from different providers with the same or similar selections.
Compare Personal Trainer Insurance Quotes with Coverhound
In a recent quote request for a Miami-Dade County based personal trainer, Coverhound revealed quotes from Hiscox only. “Instant quotes” were retrieved from 10+ carriers, with Hiscox being the only resulting provider based on the business details entered.
- $29.16/mo for general liability insurance
- $59.50 for professional liability insurance
- $20-$80/mo for workers compensation
Compare Personal Trainer Insurance Quotes with CoverWallet
CoverWallet requires a more comprehensive form completion with 20+menu pages for contact info, business type, building details, and employee details before connecting with carriers to retrieve a list of quotes. Our findings revealed different quotes:
- $552/month for general liability insurance from Liberty Mutual
- $30/month for workers compensation insurance from Amtrust
- $56/month for workers compensation insurance from Berkshire Hathaway Guard
Does Personal Trainer Insurance Cover Online Classes?
More and more personal trainers offer their classes online nowadays due to covid. While many insurance companies may claim that their personal trainer insurance cover online classes, they may cover just a few types of online classes. For example, they may cover an online yoga class, but not Peloton classes. We have not found any companies covering all types of online classes.
If you offer online classes, we recommend that you call the insurance companies that you are considering to discuss your class type to ensure coverage before buying.
The studio where I work already provides insurance coverage, do I still need to have my own personal trainer insurance?
Yes, you still need your own personal trainer insurance. The policy that the studio carries is under the studio name. It protects the studio, not you. When things happen, your own personal trainer policy will protect you. You may need to have an attorney representing you in law suit, the studio’s policy may not cover your attorney fees, but your policy will.
Who needs personal trainer insurance?
Many professionals in the fitness industry need personal training insurance. Personal trainer insurance can provdie coverage to personal trainers, gym instructors, studio owners, pilates instructors, yoga teachers, Peloton trainers , and more.
When buying personal trainer insurance, you should make sure it covers your personal training types in the certificate.
How to get liability insurance for personal trainers?
Liability insurance can be either general liability or professional liability or both. At least, you should have one. If you provide personal training at a studio or your own place, you should prioritize for general liability insurance. If you provide online classes, you should have professional liability insurance.
We recommend the top 6 companies above for your selection. They each have strengths and weaknesses and best for something. You should choose at least 2 from the list that are most suitable for your situation, get their quotes online, compare, and buy.
Working with a broker like Simply Business or CoverWallet will also help you get several quotes faster.
Final Thoughts
Personal trainer insurance is critical in forging trust with clients and staying protected against lawsuits. Be sure to seek multiple quotes from different providers to find the policy that is right for your business.
