Where America Works Out

Every January, gyms brace for the resolution crowd. Phone-location data suggest they are bracing for the wrong month.

Across the roughly 90,000 fitness centers tracked by the location-data firm Advan, visits per club in January ran about 1% below the average month from 2023 through 2025. February was the busiest month in all three years, about 9% above average, with March close behind. At Planet Fitness, the country's largest chain by locations, the peak came in June, when visits per club ran 19% above the chain's yearly average. From September through December they ran 17% below it.

The timing is one of several patterns in card-spending, phone-location and census data on the American gym. The budget end of the business is adding clubs fastest, and premium clubs are growing too, while mid-price chains and several boutique studio brands shrink. What a city has depends on who lives there: boutique studios cluster in young, affluent metros, and within New York City, gym density falls sevenfold from Manhattan to the Bronx.

Where the gyms are

The U.S. has about 26 fitness centers for every 100,000 residents, counting everything from Planet Fitness boxes to yoga studios, climbing gyms and YMCAs. Among the 54 metro areas with at least a million people, Miami (37.9 per 100,000), San Diego (37.7), Austin (37.0), Denver (35.8) and Boston (35.7) have the most. Fresno, Calif., has the fewest, at 19.3, followed by Riverside–San Bernardino at 19.8. Among smaller metros, Boulder, Colo., has 50.6, the most of any metro area.

The gaps inside a metro can be wider than those between metros. Manhattan has 52.7 gyms per 100,000 residents, the most of any large county in the country. The Bronx has 7.7, the fewest. Queens (12.6) and Brooklyn (13.5) also rank near the bottom of the 145 counties with at least half a million people. Manhattan's rate is flattered by commuters who work out near the office, which the per-resident measure doesn't count.

The mix differs too. Denver has 6.1 boutique studios (Orangetheory, Club Pilates, Pure Barre and the like) per 100,000 residents and Austin 5.6; Buffalo, N.Y., has 1.4. Planet Fitness is densest around Providence, R.I., at 1.65 clubs per 100,000, and scarcest around San Jose, Calif., at 0.30.

Who is opening, who is closing

Planet Fitness had 2,712 U.S. locations in Advan's July 2026 list, up from 2,350 three years earlier: 400 appeared and 38 dropped out. Club Pilates grew 49% to 1,223 studios. Crunch grew 43%, and EoS Fitness, a low-price chain in the West and South, doubled to 166 clubs.

Other names are shrinking. CycleBar, the indoor-cycling brand, fell from 272 studios to 118. Orangetheory lost a net 145 locations, or 11%. Snap Fitness and 24 Hour Fitness each shrank by about 15%, and 24 Hour Fitness added none. Mid-price big-box chains as a group, including LA Fitness, 24 Hour Fitness and Gold's Gym, fell 15%.

Card spending points the same way. In ConsumerEdge's card panel, spending at Solidcore rose 43% in the year to Aug. 9, at EoS 33% and at Crunch 14%, against 2.9% for all brands combined. Spending at Orangetheory fell 12%, at LA Fitness 9% and at Blink Fitness, which filed for bankruptcy in 2024, 68%.

What it costs

Gyms are a small line in most budgets, and the size of that line varies about sevenfold by metro. In the San Jose area, $6.02 of every $1,000 residents spent by card at local businesses went to gyms in the year through September 2025. In Virginia Beach, Va., it was 82 cents. Nationally, it was $2.43. Card customers of San Jose-area gyms spent about $111 a month there, against about $31 in Tucson, Ariz.

Those figures cover clubs that bill locally. Some chains bill centrally: in SafeGraph's card data, a single address in Irvine, Calif., takes in LA Fitness dues from more than 600,000 customer-months a year. Such accounts hold about 40% of the panel's gym spending and are left out of the city figures.

The price list has three tiers. Nearly half of local gym card transactions come from clubs whose typical charge is between $8 and $40, with spikes at $10, $15, $20 and $25, the monthly fees of budget and mid-price chains. Another 42% come from clubs whose typical charge is under $8, which buys a drink or a protein bar; more than half of those are at Planet Fitness. About 4% come from clubs whose typical charge is $100 or more, mostly boutique class packs.

Per customer, the spread is 15-fold. Planet Fitness card customers spent $21 a month at the club, Crunch customers $43 and LA Fitness customers $48. Orangetheory customers spent $130, Life Time's $261 and Equinox's $326.

When they go

January is busier at gyms than at other places. Visits to all U.S. places dip that month, so gyms stand out by comparison. But the peak for gyms as a whole comes in February, and boutique studios peak in March. After the summer, traffic falls, reaching its low in December.

The chains with a summer peak have something in common. Planet Fitness offers teenagers free summer memberships through its High School Summer Pass, and Life Time, which also peaks in June, runs pools and summer camps. EoS and 24 Hour Fitness peak in July. The data show the timing, not the reason for it.

Gyms are morning places. About 11% of gym visits happen between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m., against 9% for all places. Many chains advertise round-the-clock access, but the phone data can't reliably separate a 2 a.m. crowd from signal noise: studios that are closed overnight show about as much activity after midnight as clubs that are open.

Who pays

The fastest-growing studio brand in the card data sits at neither end. Solidcore, a Pilates-style chain, draws 18% of its spending from 18-to-24-year-olds, the most of any gym brand, and 55% from households earning more than $150,000.