Buying a Gym or Fitness Studio
Know Which Fitness Business You Are Buying
The category spans different models: traditional gyms selling access to a floor, boutique studios selling coached sessions and community, and franchised units of national brands. They price differently because they retain differently: tiered guidance puts independent traditional gyms at roughly 1.5x to 3x SDE, boutique studios at 2x to 4x, and franchise units higher still when the brand carries demand. Marketplace data adds a caution for 2025: median revenue and earnings for sold gyms fell sharply as more small gyms traded, so read any average against its mix. The trade association's benchmarking of 175 companies puts the median EBITDA margin at 23.6 percent and median revenue growth near 10 percent, on a sample skewed to larger operators.
What Gyms Trade For
The publisher's sold gym and fitness center listings put half of transactions between 1.72x and 3x SDE across 2021 to 2025, on a 2.42x median and revenue at 0.4x to 0.9x, from 400 sold businesses. Within that band, retention quality does the pricing: industry guidance treats monthly member churn above roughly 8% as a red flag and below 4% as premium territory, and the association's own benchmarking puts the median operator at keeping two thirds of its members across a year while adding 5.5 percent net. Federal figures put revenue per establishment near $924,000 and payroll at about 32 percent of revenue, the heaviest labor line among the trades a searcher usually weighs, on a workforce that is mostly part-time.
The Processor Is the Source of Truth
Membership businesses generate beautiful-looking P&Ls right up until the cancellations catch up. Underwrite from the billing system and payment processor, not the financial statements: active members by month, new joins, cancellations, and freezes, average revenue per member, and failed-payment recovery. Cohort the members by join date and plan type. Association traffic data shows visit frequency rising across every price segment, so a gym whose visits per member are falling is losing to itself rather than to the market. A gym holding headline membership flat by discounting is shrinking in every way that matters to your debt service.
Deferred Revenue Is Real Debt
Paid-in-full memberships, prepaid class packs, and annual contracts collected before close are services you will owe after close. Get the deferred-revenue schedule explicitly and negotiate it in the working-capital discussion, because cash the seller already collected for future service is your cost to deliver. The contracts themselves are worth reading against the state's health-club statute, because several states regulate them tightly and the penalty is severe: in New York an agreement that does not comply is void and unenforceable and the member cannot have waived the defect, while California caps a contract at three years and about $4,400 all in. A prepaid book can be worth far less than its face.
What to Verify in Diligence
Beyond the membership file:
- The lease, since big footprints with specialized buildouts are hard to move and rent burdens sink gyms
- Equipment age, ownership versus leases, and replacement cycles
- Instructor and trainer dependence in boutique models, where a departing star coach takes a class's membership
- Franchise terms if applicable (transfer approval, fees, royalties, required refreshes, territory rights)
- Liability waivers and claims history, because a missing waiver is discovered only after somebody is hurt
- Local competitive saturation, including the budget-brand unit that may be opening a mile away
Financeability Notes
Gyms finance under SBA 7(a) when earnings are documented, with franchised brands benefiting from lender familiarity with the model. Underwriting focuses on retention trends, lease terms against earnings, and equipment condition; expect the deferred-revenue liability to surface in the working-capital analysis if you do not raise it first. Two program rules are worth knowing before you fall for a listing. A club that restricts membership by gender is not eligible unless it can document that both men and women may join and use the facility. And leasehold improvements, usually the largest capital item in a studio, are not collateral at all, so these deals often run short and the shortfall gets covered by life insurance on the buyer.
Terms in This Industry
Contract length and cancellation terms
How long a membership binds a member, and how easily a member can walk away from it.
Payment processor
The vendor that drafts monthly dues and holds the record of who is actually paying.
Dues per member
Monthly revenue divided by active members, the number that says what a membership is actually worth.
Personal training attach
The share of members who also buy training, the margin that sits on top of the dues line.
New studio on a sale
The rule that treats a change of ownership as a brand new business for bonding.
What the Data Says
BizBuySell's sold gym and fitness center listings carry a $210,500 median sale at roughly 2.55x median owner earnings, sold-transaction ground under the appraisal bands, and a reminder that most of what trades is a single room of members and equipment.
Source: BizBuySell gym and fitness center benchmarks (sold listings)
Census County Business Patterns puts fitness and recreational sports centers at 41,556 employer establishments with 708,273 workers in 2023, roughly seventeen employees per site, numbers that say most of the industry is a single room with staff rather than the franchise chains that dominate the conversation.
Source: Census County Business Patterns, fitness centers (2023)
Marketplace benchmarks show median revenue and earnings for sold gyms falling 27% and 37% in 2025 as a heavier mix of smaller gyms traded, a reminder to read category averages against their composition.
Enter earnings to apply this industry's cited band.
A sanity check against asking prices, not a valuation.
Lender context, from the SBA loan-level file: Live Oak Banking Company (44), The Huntington National Bank (27), Byline Bank (8) wrote the most of this industry's 408 acquisition approvals. A bank that knows the trade says yes faster; the ranking for every industry is on Most Active Lenders by Industry.
Holding a live deal in this industry? Underwrite it with the comps, cited band, and charge-off rate pre-loaded.
Compare bands across industries in the cited multiple bands by industry.
Who Else Is Buying in This Industry
- Flynn Group · San Francisco
The world's largest franchisee: restaurant portfolios bought by the dozen (Applebee's, Taco Bell, Panera, Wendy's) and now Planet Fitness gyms, the ceiling consolidator above multi-unit franchise deals.
- Grand Fitness Partners (98 Planet Fitness clubs) · 2026 · A 98-club Planet Fitness franchisee across five states, taking Flynn Fitness to 141 clubs in seven states.
- Fitness Ventures · Athens, Georgia area
Crunch Fitness clubs bought in whole-market portfolios, three in Portland here, twenty-three from another franchisee there, the buyer that resets gym pricing in any metro it targets.
- Three South Texas Crunch clubs · 2025 · Crunch Brownsville, North Brownsville, and Edinburg, per its own release.
- 1 more confirmed on the firm's profile
Buyers is the shelf these come from, ordered by who closed something most recently.
How Big This Market Is
There are about 41,556 businesses in this industry. 23,416 of them (56%) have 5 to 99 employees: the band big enough to have something to sell, small enough to finance. Most of the rest are owner-operators with a job rather than a business to hand over.
Census County Business Patterns (2023). How often they change hands, and where they concentrate, is in Market Depth.
What It Costs to Replace the Owner
The multiples above are quoted on SDE, which adds the owner's pay back into earnings, so they hold only if you do the owner's job. Hire someone instead and the going rate for the role comes back out. For this trade that is usually the manager of a personal-service floor, paid a median of $48,590 a year nationally. Subtract it from SDE before applying any multiple, because at a 3x multiple that wage also takes about $145,770 off what the business is worth to you.
First-line supervisors of personal service workers, BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (2025), national, all industries, before payroll taxes and benefits. Every role, and the same arithmetic worked end to end, is in Manager Wages.
How Often These Loans Go Bad
Of the 197 SBA acquisition loans in this industry that are old enough to have failed, 24 were charged off: a rate of 12.18%. Across every industry we can measure, the pooled rate is 4.20%, so this one runs hotter than the average acquisition.
Computed from SBA loan-level data on a seasoned cohort. It counts loans already written off, so read it as a floor and as a ranking. Every industry's rate.
The Numbers That Run This Business
- Monthly member churn
- Active members from the billing system, not the CRM
- Average revenue per member
- New joins by channel
- Deferred-revenue balance