Gym and Fitness Studio Valuation: What Gyms Sell For and Why

By Charlie Brennan • Published June 22, 2026 • Updated July 20, 2026 • Educational content only — not financial, legal, or tax advice.

Gyms and fitness studios average 2.48x-2.93x SDE, though the full range runs considerably wider, from about 1.5x up to 5.5x, depending on membership quality and lease terms. Boutique studios — CrossFit boxes, yoga, cycling, functional fitness — tend to sit in a 2x-4x SDE band of their own, since community loyalty and instructor relationships shift the calculus compared to a big-box gym. Once a gym reaches multi-location scale with professional management, the market shifts to EBITDA, typically 3.33x-4.34x, with larger operators reaching 4x-6x. A rougher revenue-multiple check of 0.65x-0.97x is sometimes quoted, but it's a sanity check at best — revenue tells a buyer almost nothing about a gym's actual margin structure.

Typical Valuation Range

Churn Is the Number That Actually Sets the Price

Every gym signs up new members and loses old ones constantly — that's structural, not a red flag by itself. What matters is the monthly churn rate against the active base. A gym with 500 members and 15% monthly churn is replacing 75 members every single month just to stand still, which means marketing spend has to run flat-out forever rather than compounding toward growth. A buyer should ask for the actual cohort data — signups and cancellations by month for the trailing two years — rather than accepting a single "current member count" figure, because two gyms with the same headline membership total can have completely different underlying churn.

EFT (electronic funds transfer) contracts matter here specifically because they create a real exit barrier a month-to-month membership doesn't. A member on a 12-month agreement has to actively cancel and often pay a fee to leave; a month-to-month member just stops showing up. A gym where two-thirds or more of members are on EFT contracts is meaningfully more valuable than an otherwise identical gym billing everyone month-to-month, because the buyer is underwriting real revenue durability, not just a snapshot of current dues.

Franchise Affiliation Changes the Deal, Not Just the Number

Franchise gyms — Planet Fitness, Anytime Fitness, F45, and similar brands — sell under a different process than independent gyms. The franchisor has to approve the buyer, ongoing royalties typically run 4-8% of revenue, and resale value is sometimes quoted by the franchise system as a revenue multiple rather than an SDE multiple. Always convert back to SDE before comparing a franchise listing to an independent one, since royalty payments come straight off the top and change what the business can actually support in debt service.

What Pushes the Multiple Up

• High EFT contract share with low documented churn: two-thirds or more of members on annual agreements, under 5% monthly attrition
• Diversified revenue beyond base dues: personal training, group classes, retail, and supplement sales spreading risk across multiple lines
• General manager in place handling staffing, scheduling, and member retention without the owner present day to day
• Long, favorable lease — buildout costs are substantial, and a lease with only 1-2 years left materially undercuts that sunk investment
• Strong community identity in boutique formats, which tends to hold churn down better than a commodity big-box gym

What Pulls the Multiple Down

• Membership base billed entirely month-to-month with no contract structure
• Owner personally handles sales, retention calls, and scheduling with no manager layer
• Short remaining lease term relative to the buildout investment already sunk into the space
• Undocumented or unreliable churn data — no monthly cohort records to verify retention claims

Financing and Deal Structure

SBA 7(a) financing is the standard route, with equipment providing partial collateral, but lenders scrutinize churn and lease term more heavily here than in most Main Street categories because gym revenue is entirely subscription-based and can decay quickly if member experience slips during a transition. Sellers typically stay involved for a defined handoff period — often 60-90 days — to introduce the buyer to staff and long-tenured members, which matters more in a boutique studio where the owner is often the face of the brand than in a big-box location run by hired staff.

Worked Example: What Twelve Months of Contract Conversion Is Worth

A boutique functional fitness studio reports $165,000 in SDE with 340 active members, but only 35% on annual EFT contracts and the rest month-to-month, plus 14% monthly churn. At that profile, the studio sits near the bottom of its band, around 2.25x, or roughly $371,000. Over the following year, the new owner-to-be watches the seller run a campaign converting existing month-to-month members to annual contracts at a modest discount, pushing EFT share to 68% and cutting monthly churn to 6% through better onboarding and a referral incentive. SDE holds essentially flat at $168,000, since the conversion campaign didn't grow revenue so much as stabilize it. But the multiple the market will support moves to roughly 3.25x for that same $168,000 — about $546,000. Nothing about the gym's day-to-day operation changed; the earnings simply became durable enough to underwrite with confidence, which is the entire point of running the EFT-share and churn numbers through the AcquireCalc calculator before setting a price, whether buying or preparing to sell.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did gym sale prices fall in 2025? Industry valuation data shows median revenue and earnings for gyms sold in 2025 down roughly 27% and 37% respectively from the prior year. That drop reflects a larger number of smaller, lower-earning gyms coming to market that year rather than a broad decline in what any specific well-run gym is worth. A buyer comparing a specific listing to the market median needs to check where that gym actually falls in the size distribution, not just the year-over-year headline.

Is a revenue multiple ever better than SDE for pricing a gym? Only as a sanity check, not a primary method. Revenue multiples for gyms typically run about 0.65x-0.97x, but revenue says nothing about margin, and gyms have wide swings in margin depending on payroll structure and lease cost. Two gyms with identical revenue can have SDE that differs by 2x, so relying on a revenue multiple alone risks badly mispricing a low-margin location.

How much does converting members to EFT contracts change the price? Meaningfully, because EFT (electronic funds transfer) contract members have a real exit barrier that month-to-month members don't, which directly lowers the churn rate a buyer has to underwrite. A gym that raises its EFT share from roughly a third of members to two-thirds of members, while holding SDE constant, typically moves from the bottom to the middle or top of its multiple band because the earnings become more predictable, not because the gym is generating more cash today.

Related

• Restaurant — similar high-labor, location-dependent model
• Car wash — membership model comparison
• All industry multiples

Sources & Further Reading

• BizBuySell Gym & Fitness Center Valuation Benchmarks — 2025 closed-transaction data
• Peak Business Valuation — Gym & Fitness Center Multiples
• CT Acquisitions Gym Business Valuation Guide (2026)