If you price your gym wrong, your business is screwed.
Not “a little tighter than you’d like.” or “less profitable than it could be.” Structurally and mathematically, things will be quite literally… screwed.
Pricing is not a cute little admin task you knock out once and never revisit. It determines if your gym can pay you what you want, pay coaches well, sustain real margin, and eventually buy you the freedom you heard entrepreneurship was supposed to create in the first place.
The crazy part most gym owners miss: You can literally fill your gym and STILL lose money.
Packed sessions. Waitlists. Clients LOVE you. Reviews look great. But your bank account is bleeding.
Bad pricing makes all other measures of success irrelevant.
Gym owners we talk to don’t wind up here because they’re dumb. Pricing decision mistakes come down to what feels “intuitive”:
- Copying the gym down the street
- Guessing based on what seems “fair”
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Or they borrowed some “GYM BIZ GOO-ROO” random favorite number
Pricing strategy ≠ vibes (trusting your isn’t a great strategy to build a business).
How do we fix it? Well that is a DANG good question.
If you’re trying to figure out how to price your gym (or how to price gym memberships without quietly nuking your margins) this is the path we recommend. Use the math behind your actual model, not whatever mood you were in when you picked the numbers.
In this post, we’ll walk through what black hole pricing is, why it kills coach retention and owner freedom, and the math we’d use to price a gym so the business can support the life of your dreams. I mean… that’s why we got into this wake-up-early-as-hell-work-your-tail-off-to-change-lives fitness industry in the first place, right?
The 3 Ways Gym Owners Price Themselves Into a Corner
Copying the Competition
G.R. calls this the “peeking in the urinal” method, which in some states is considered a crime, lol… but it does make the point.
You look at the gym down the street and decide to charge a little less, a little more, or about the same as they do.
This only works if the other gym actually knows what the heck it’s doing. In this industry, that’s a more-than-dangerous assumption.
Most gym owners did not get into this business because they had a niche passion for service-business math. They got into it because they love coaching clients, lifting weights, and maybe because making doctor money in sweat pants sounded a heck of a lot better than riding a desk.
When you copy some other gym’s pricing sheet, there’s a very real chance you’re just copying someone else’s mistake….
The “Gut Feeling” Guess
This one sounds like:
“I think $249 feels fair.”
“I think $299 sounds about right.”
“I’d probably pay around this.”
Totally cool. We hear ya… but…
Guesses don’t pay rent.
Guesses don’t fund payroll.
Guesses don’t get you off the floor.
Guesses don’t magically create margin.
Don’t trust your gym’s livelihood to a wild-haired guess or a spur-of-the-moment gut feeling.
Listening to a Gym Biz Guru
When some coach, consultant, mentor, or internet smart person tells you what you “should” charge (without math)… run the other way.
To be clear: sometimes that guess is close. Every clock is right twice a day.
If somebody gives you a number without looking at your schedule, your capacity, your expenses, your owner pay, your target margin, and your actual model… it is still a guess.
Even if the guru is smart.
Even if it’s friggin’ G.R.
Even if it’s somebody with a big audience and a REALLY big truck.
Pricing is too important to guess at.
What “Black Hole Priced” Actually Means
If you are black hole priced, your rates are set in a way that makes it mathematically impossible (or close to impossible) for the business to hit the financial goals you actually care about.
Maybe the gym survives. Maybe it stays busy. Maybe it even looks solid from the outside.
But if the math that drives the model is broken you end up with a gym that keeps you coaching all the time, never really pays you enough, can’t comfortably pay coaches a living wage, can’t create healthy margin, and makes every hire feel stressful because there’s not enough money to go around.
Sometimes this issue kills a business fast. Sometimes it kills it slow. One hundred percent of the time, if not fixed, it kills the business… and it’s painful as hell.
Underpricing creates a vicious cycle.
You underprice the gym and can’t pay people well. A good coach realizes they can’t build a life on that pay and leaves. They open their own and then charge a little less to “get a bunch of clients.” 👈 Read: get a bunch of YOUR clients to follow them for something cheaper… Eventually they run into the exact same math problem…rinse and repeat.
Break the cycle and you can start stacking real advantages: better margins, better payroll, better coach retention, more room to invest, more room to acquire clients, and more room to grow (doesn’t sound too bad to me).
The 20% Margin Lie
Gym owner says they’re at 20% margin…BUT that “margin” doesn’t include paying themselves like an actual adult human working real jobs inside the business.
If you are coaching, selling, managing, fixing problems, cleaning things, and generally holding the gym together with your bare hands, then your owner pay has to be included in the model.
Otherwise, your margin is a straight-up fiction.
If you’d need to hire a manager and a coach to replace yourself, and your “profit” disappears the second you do that, then you don’t have the margin you think you have.
The Only Sane Way to Price Your Gym
We need to stop making decisions based on our feelings and start making decisions based on the numbers.
If math makes your eyes cross a little TOTALLY feel you. We got a super special spreadsheet for ‘ya to make it easy!
Click Here to Get the Profitable Gym Pricing Spreadsheet FREE
Step 1: Start With Your BOE
BOE = Base Operating Expense
This is the amount of money that needs to leave the business every month for the business to keep running (and yes, your pay counts.)
Your BOE should include normal operating expenses, payroll, software, rent, utilities, your current owner pay, and any additional owner comp you need to just be okay at home.
Not your big bajillionaire goal number two years from now. Your real number.
The amount you need the business to pay you so you’re not slowly melting your household down trying to prove you’re an entrepreneur.
A simple way to build this is to average your last three months of expenses and add any owner comp that still needs to be accounted for.
Step 2: Count Sessions, Not Spots
You wanna find the actual sessions on the schedule, not the total number of available spots inside those sessions.
So if you run 40 sessions a week, that’s 40. Not 240 just because you can fit 6 people in each one.
Monthly sessions = weekly sessions $\times$ 4.333 (you’d be surprised how often we get folks using 4 weeks per month in gym math!)
An accurate monthly session count is going to be muy importante for the rest of the pricing model to work.
Step 3: Find Your Break-Even Per-Session Number
Take your monthly BOE and divide it by your monthly sessions.
Break-even per session = monthly BOE ÷ monthly sessions
Now you know what each session has to produce in order to JUST keep the lights on. Insert the first big reality check here.
Step 4: Add Profit on Purpose
This is a stinkin’ business, not a charity with weights.
Once you know your break-even per-session number, add a real target margin.
20% is a solid minimum target. Around 40% is the typical top end of a healthy model where the owner is not doing every job forever.
If you’re barely profitable right now, don’t go full beast-mode and try to force 40% overnight. Pick a real target that’s reasonably achievable for your business right now. E.g. if you’re at 5% margin, set it at the minimum 20% target. If you’re at 20%, maybe you target 25 or 30%.
Once the target margin is set, we can figure out what we need to make every session to hit said target:
Target revenue per session = break-even per session / (1 – target margin)
So if your break-even number is $160 and you want a 25% margin, you divide by 0.75. Woohoo math! If the math is scary, click here to grab your free copy of the profitable free pricing worksheet and it’ll do all the scary stuff for you.
The math above gives you the real per-session revenue target.
Step 5: Use Realistic Attendance, aka NOT 100%
We’ve seen folks build pricing around a fantasy world where every session is full, everybody shows up, and the weird dead times in the schedule somehow fill themselves.
Any real gym owner knows there are poppin times and certain hours where it’s closer to crickets in the gym.
The pricing model we use has a margin of safety so this marketing mistake doesn’t come to bite ‘ya later.
For small group or semi-private personal training, model on about 66% attendance (for large group, we like about 50%.)
It’s way easier to keep a 6-person session full than a 20- or 30-person mega session at capacity.
If your small-group capacity is 8, do not build your business around getting all 8 spots full every single time. Build it around something more realistic.
Step 6: Find Your Minimum Per-Person, Per-Session Number
Once you know your target revenue per session and your realistic attendance target, divide one by the other.
Minimum per-person session rate = target revenue per session ÷ realistic attendance. This equation gives you your pricing floor and lets you design the membership structure around real math.
A Real Example (So This Doesn’t Stay ALL Theory)
We go over this sample math in the episode here if you want to follow along.
Say a gym has $25,000/month in average expenses and needs another $3,000/month in owner comp to actually be okay at home.
That gives us a monthly BOE (Break Even) target of $28,000.
Now let’s say the gym runs 40 sessions per week… multiply that by 4.333 and you get: 173 monthly sessions.
Now divide: $28,000 / 173 = ~$161.55
The gym needs to produce about $161 per session just to break even.
Now let’s say the owner wants a 25% profit margin.
So: $161.55 / 0.75 = $215.40. The target is therefore $215.40 per session.
If this is a small-group model with an 8-person capacity and a realistic modeled attendance of 6 people per session you divide one more time.
$215.40 / 6 = $35.90
The gym needs to average about $35.90 per person, per session.
There is your price floor.
If your pricing works out to less than that on average, you are either black hole priced or at least pricing yourself into suboptimal margins. NO BUENO!
The Break-Even Formula
Total Monthly Expenses / Total Monthly Sessions = Revenue Needed Per Session
Using our numbers: $28,000 / 173 sessions = ~$161.55
The gym needs to produce about $161 per session just to break even.
Now let’s say the owner wants a 25% profit margin.
How to Turn the Math Into Real Memberships People Actually Buy
Once you know the per-session floor, you can turn it into actual memberships.
If this gym sells:
- A 2x/week membership at roughly 9 sessions/month
- A 3x/week membership at roughly 13 sessions/month
- A 4x/week membership at roughly 16 sessions/month
Then the minimums look like this:
- 2x/week: 9 x $35.90 = $323.10
- 3x/week: 13 x $35.90 = $466.70
- 4x/week: 16 x $35.90 = $574.40
What this does NOT mean: you publish $323.10 and call it a day.
Buyer psychology comes into play at this point.
Maybe the math floor is $323, but the actual offer becomes $349. Or the floor is $467, but the actual offer becomes $499. You might go higher based on service level, demand, brand, and market.
The ultimate goal is more money and less headaches in your gym, not dialing in rounding percentages to the most perfect mathematical precision possible.
Use Pricing to Guide Behavior
Once the floor is set, your pricing should help people make the decision you want them to make.
If you want 3x/week to be your most popular membership, then the jump from 2x/week to 3x/week should feel like a strong value move.
If you want to preserve capacity, don’t make unlimited so attractive that everybody rushes into the hardest-to-scale option.
“Unlimited” sounds sexier than it often works in a small-group model in the real world. Capacity gets crushed fast.
Don’t default to unlimited just because it looks cool on a sales page (ask us how we know).
Billing Cadence Matters Less Than the Economics Underneath It
Monthly, weekly, every 28 days. The wrappers around price can all work… the real question is whether the underlying per-session economics make sense.
Weekly billing can absolutely help with buying decisions for prospects. A $499 monthly price can feel like a car payment but a $109 weekly number doesn’t sting so bad.
Same economics. Different psychology.
Click Here to Get the Profitable Gym Pricing Spreadsheet FREE
What If You’re Already Black Hole Priced
You are not the first person to do this and will not be the last.
There is not exactly a business school for first-time gym owners (though you can get pretty darn close with a 30-day free trial at GMM here.)
Best time to price the gym correctly = when you opened. The next best time is today.
The reality is there are only a few levers to pull at this point.
1. Raise Prices
This is usually the fastest, cleanest way to get it done. Not always emotionally easy, but it’s often is the mathematically necessary move.
2. Raise New Member Pricing First
If you don’t want to shock the system overnight, stop digging the hole deeper and implement correct pricing for new members now. Then decide how and when you want to address legacy members later.
“But how do I raise prices on new members?”
This one’s pretty darn easy – got a consult coming in this afternoon? Give them a higher price when you present your options to them. It’s literally as simple as jumping into your pricing doc, hitting backspace on the old numbers, and typing in your new ones.
3. Increase Capacity Per Session
This can work really well if you can maintain the same level of experience for your members.
More on that in a bit.
4. Cut Truly ‘Not Smart’ Expenses
Some gyms absolutely do have egregious payroll decisions or other obvious waste.
But most are not going to save their way to profitability unless something is wildly out of line here.
5. Add Sessions Carefully
Mathematically, this can make sense. Adding more sessions while keeping expenses the same lowers the amount you need to make per session.
In practice, it’s often not the best move.
If you’re not already close to full, adding more sessions often just creates more dead space on the schedule and more time trapped in the business.
Use this lever when demand already exists, not as a hope and a prayer that new clients will fill up new times.
The realistic first moves are pricing correction and smarter capacity to get the ball rolling.
No, Your Clients Do Not Care About Coach-to-Client Ratio
How to Roll Out a Capacity Increase Without Creating Drama
Delivery has to be on POINT for this to go well. Tighten up the programming flow, station setup, equipment usage, transitions, and coaching standards.
Test the format before you increase the cap then open a few more spots.
And for the love of all things holy, don’t send some dramatic email saying your business model is unsustainable and you’re increasing session sizes. You’re going to create objections from people who would not have cared otherwise.
Make the change. Deliver a great session. If somebody asks, sell the positive: you opened a few more spots to make scheduling easier and made sure the experience still feels great.
Quick Answers to Questions Gym Owners Usually Have
Should I copy competitors?
No. Competitive context matters, but it should not decide your prices. Your model has to work on its own math first.
Should I raise prices on everyone at once?
Not necessarily. Raising prices on new members first is often the easiest way to stop the bleeding without turning the whole thing into the Red Wedding (Game of Thrones references are still “in,” right?)
Should I offer unlimited?
Not automatically. In small-group models, unlimited can create utilization headaches faster than most owners expect. Make sure the capacity math works first.
What if my gym is busy but I still feel broke?
That’s one of the biggest warning signs that your pricing, capacity assumptions, margin target, or all three are off. Busy ≠ healthy.
Full Gym + No Money = sad…. (but fixable!)
The True North of Gym Pricing
NOT to be the cheapest gym in town, charge what feels nice, or avoid uncomfortable client conversations while you quietly work yourself into the ground.
The goal is to build a gym that pays you well, pays your team well, creates real margin, lets you grow without panic, and eventually gives you the freedom you wanted when you got into this thing.
Making doctor money in sweatpants while giving people an incredible experience is the dream. Kinda hard to invest in making your product better or keeping equipment up to date if you’re not making any money, yeah?
Run the numbers to see what’s true and adjust things from a basis of facts vs feelings.
Math > Vibes
Grab the Spreadsheet and See Where You Really Stand
If you want to find out whether your gym is priced intelligently or priced into a black hole, start with the Profitable Gym Pricing spreadsheet.
Click Here to Get the Profitable Gym Pricing Spreadsheet FREE
AND if you’d rather not play amateur CFO with a calculator on a Tuesday night, we can help!
Click Here to Start Your Free 30 Days
No bait-and-switch nonsense. No “just charge more, king” fluff. No scammy offers you feel gross about.
Go make money & change lives!