The Industry Is Booming. So Why Aren't Coaches?
Gym memberships hit 81 million in 2025. Fitness industry revenue is up. So why is personal trainer pay still a black box?
The headline number is hard to ignore: in 2025, US gym membership
reached 81 million — a record high, according to the Health and Fitness Association. More than one in four Americans now belongs to a fitness facility. Revenue climbed roughly eight percent. Foot traffic hit its nineteenth consecutive quarter of growth.
By every public metric, the fitness industry has never been doing better. But personal trainer pay, gym instructor compensation, and fitness coach salary data across the industry remain almost entirely invisible. No benchmark. No index.
No way for a coach in Queens or an instructor in Brooklyn to evaluate whether what they're earning reflects what the market is actually paying.
That's the story behind the record membership numbers.
And it's the one nobody's telling.
By any external measure, this is a thriving industry.
77M US members in 2024
$46B US industry revenue
19 Consecutive growth quarters
And yet — if you've spent any time working in gyms or studios, you know the experience on the floor tells a different story. More members haven't automatically meant better pay for the coaches, instructors, and trainers making it all happen. The gap between what the industry earns and what it pays the people delivering the service is one of the least-discussed problems in fitness.
"The industry keeps setting revenue records. But nobody's tracking whether those gains are reaching the people actually doing the work."
■ What the Record Gym Membership Numbers Actually Mean
Budget and mid-market gyms are leading the charge right now, with high-volume, low-price operators seeing the sharpest foot traffic increases in 2025. Boutique studios aren't far behind — the segment is projected to hit $26.2 billion in US revenue this year, a full recovery from the pandemic dip and then some. Operators are optimistic: 91% expect revenue to grow again in 2025, and 83% anticipate profitability gains.
That's a lot of money moving through the system. The natural question is where it goes.
■ Why Fitness Coach Salary Data Doesn't Exist — and What Eightsets Is Doing About It
Some of it clearly goes to real estate, equipment, and technology. Some goes to marketing — every gym in America has figured out Instagram. Some goes to investors and franchise fees. But compensation for fitness professionals? That's largely a black box. There's no centralized data, no benchmark reports that a coach in Queens or a studio manager in Brooklyn can actually use to evaluate their situation.
That's the exact problem Eightsets was built to solve. The platform — available at eightsets.com — is a compensation transparency tool for the fitness industry, modeled after how tech workers have used tools like Levels.fyi to demystify pay in their field. The idea is simple: if fitness professionals share what they're actually making, the whole industry benefits from that information. Coaches can negotiate from a position of knowledge. Operators can benchmark honestly. Everyone stops guessing.
The timing matters. When an industry is growing this fast, compensation often lags. Membership is up, revenue is up, but pay structures haven't necessarily updated to reflect the new economics. The people least likely to know they're underpaid are those without access to comparison data, which, until now, has described almost every fitness professional in the country.
The more fitness professionals submit their compensation data on Eightsets, the more useful the benchmarks become for everyone. If you're a coach, trainer, instructor, or studio manager — your numbers matter. Visit eightsets.com to submit anonymously.
■ The Personal Trainer Pay Gap: What to Watch in 2026
The industry's growth is real and it's not slowing down. But growth that doesn't translate into better conditions for the workforce is a story worth telling honestly. Over the coming months, Superset will be tracking compensation data from Eightsets submissions, publishing pay reports by role, market, and facility type, and connecting those numbers back to the broader industry trends — so fitness professionals can finally see where they stand.
77 million members. $46 billion in US revenue. Nineteen straight quarters of growth.
The industry has more than enough to talk about. We're just going to make sure the conversation includes the people doing the actual work.
