The Industry Is Booming. So Why Aren't Coaches?
Gym memberships just hit an all-time high. Everyone's celebrating, everyone except the people actually running the sessions.
Let's start with the headline number, because it's legitimately impressive. In 2024, 77 million Americans held a gym or studio membership — the highest figure ever recorded, according to the Health & Fitness Association. Add in non-member users, and the industry served close to 96 million people in a single year. Global memberships rose 6% year-over-year. Revenue followed, climbing roughly 8% on average. Foot traffic hit its 19th consecutive quarter of growth.
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."
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.
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 Austin 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 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.