Why gyms need members who don’t go

You are paying for access

Most gyms do not charge you every time you train.

You pay for the right to walk in whenever you want.

Whether you go twenty times that month or twice, the membership fee is usually the same.

The gym likes this because most of its big costs are already there.

Rent is already being paid.

The equipment is already bought.

The lights are already on.

The front desk is already staffed.

One extra member does not suddenly create another $20 or $30 of cost every month.

So once the gym is open, adding members can be very profitable.

Planet Fitness recorded US$5.3 billion in system-wide sales in 2025, which it defines as monthly dues and annual fees billed across its corporate and franchise clubs.

That is a nice setup when the actual product is a building full of equipment that most people use for an hour at a time.

The building might hold 300 people. The gym can still have thousands of members.

Say a gym feels properly busy with 300 people inside.

That does not mean it can only have 300 members.

If one person trains before work, another comes at lunch, another at 8pm and plenty of others only turn up a couple of times a month, the same facility can support a huge membership base.

Planet Fitness had about 20.8 million members across 2,896 clubs at the end of 2025.

On a very rough average, that is more than 7,000 members per club.

Obviously 7,000 people are not fitting inside one Planet Fitness.

They do not have to.

The company also said members completed more than 650 million workouts during 2025. Spread across 20.8 million members, that comes out to roughly 31 workouts each for the year.

That is only about 2.6 visits a month on a simple average.

There are plenty of caveats around that number because membership changes during the year and some people will train five times a week while others barely go.

But you get the point.

The gym can sell access to thousands of people because only a small fraction of them are using it at any one time.

The member who barely goes is pretty useful

This is probably the funniest part of the model.

Someone who pays every month and does not go very often can be a great customer.

They pay the same fee as everyone else but use less equipment, less cleaning, less hot water, less parking and less floor space.

There is obviously a limit.

If someone never goes and gets absolutely nothing from the membership, eventually they are probably going to cancel it.

So the perfect customer is not really the person who never goes.

It is probably the person who goes often enough to think the membership is worth keeping, but not enough to be smashing the gym at 5:30pm every afternoon.

The gym needs you to use it.

Just not too much.

This is why cheap memberships can work

Planet Fitness starts its standard US membership at US$15 a month.

That sounds very cheap for unlimited access to a whole gym.

But it makes more sense when thousands of people are sharing the same building.

Basic-Fit, one of Europe’s biggest gym groups, finished 2025 with 4.82 million members across 1,660 owned Basic-Fit clubs.

The cheaper the membership, the easier it is to build a huge customer base.

It also becomes easier for people to leave it running.

A $15 or $20 membership does not hurt enough for everyone to cancel the second they stop going.

You tell yourself you will get back into it next week.

Then next week becomes next month.

The direct debit keeps coming out.

That sounds cynical, but it is part of why low-cost gyms can offer low prices in the first place.

Thousands of people are paying for access to the same equipment, and they are not all using it equally.

But a gym can absolutely oversell itself

There is a point where the model breaks.

If the place is packed every afternoon, people stop caring that the membership is cheap.

You cannot get on equipment.

You cannot park.

The change rooms are full.

You spend half your workout waiting.

At that point the gym has done too good a job selling memberships and not enough of a job managing the people who actually use them.

That is why things like longer opening hours, 24/7 access and multiple locations matter so much.

They help spread people out.

Basic-Fit says it wants members visiting at least once a week and reported an average of 1.2 visits per member per week in 2025, up from 1.0 in 2024. It connected part of that increase with the expansion of 24/7 clubs.

So the goal is not to keep people away.

It is to keep people active without having all of them demand the same equipment at the same time.

January is the perfect example

Anyone who trains regularly knows January.

Suddenly there are people everywhere.

The same gym that felt fine in December is packed.

The building did not shrink.

The equipment did not disappear.

More people just started using the memberships they were already paying for.

New members join as well, but a lot of the pressure comes from existing members suddenly becoming much more active.

January basically shows what the gym would look like if everyone used their membership properly all year.

And the answer is usually not great.

The gym likes the January rush because people are signing up.

It probably does not want January attendance for the next twelve months.

The numbers can get very good

This model can produce some serious margins once a club has enough members.

Planet Fitness reported about US$5.3 billion in system-wide membership dues and annual fees in 2025.

Its mature corporate-owned clubs were producing four-wall adjusted EBITDA margins of about 42.7%.

Basic-Fit reported €1.42 billion of group revenue in 2025 across its expanded network.

Those numbers make more sense when you remember what the business is doing.

It is selling access to the same building again and again.

The equipment is not being sold to the customer.

The gym keeps it and rents the right to use it to thousands of people.

So what is the gym actually selling?

It looks like it is selling workouts.

Really, it is selling access to the same room and equipment to thousands of people, knowing most of them will never want it at the same time.

That is why a gym can have 7,000 members without needing 7,000 treadmills.

It is also why the person paying every month and only training occasionally is not necessarily a bad customer.

They are helping make the maths work.

The gym needs you to believe you could go every day.

It just cannot afford for everyone to actually do it.