When you’re looking to join a gym or health club, there is no shortage of options to choose from. You’ll likely find local facilities, worldwide chains, basic workout spaces, massive complexes featuring every activity you could imagine, recreation centers with a variety of programs, and everything in between.
This means that you can choose a fitness club that meets your needs for location, cost, and programming, as well as the facilities and opportunities you need for the rest of your family.
Because everyone needs something different as far as their fitness journeys go, health clubs are a big business, and now there are a number of chains that stretch across states and even the world.
Here are the ten largest fitness club chains in the U.S., ranked by their 2019 revenues:
The names on this list vary from luxury lifestyle centers to bare-bones workout facilities, with some even offering restaurants and living spaces. One thing they all have in common, though, is that they provide a space for their members to exercise and live healthy lifestyles.
LA Fitness. Irvine, California
2019 Revenue: $2.15 billion
Founded in 1984, LA Fitness has over 690 gyms across the U.S. and Canada. You can find LA Fitness facilities in most major cities, usually in shopping malls or other high-traffic areas. This easy access is one of the reasons people choose to become members here.
Membership costs about $30 a month, plus extra fees for those who want to be able to use more than one LA Fitness facility. The fitness club offers group classes, basketball, racquetball, heated pools, personal training, and kids’ activities, in addition to access to its exercise equipment.
In January 2020, LA Fitness announced that it would be rebranding several of its gyms as Esporta Fitness.
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Lifetime Entertainment Services. Chanhassen, Minnesota
2019 Revenue: $1.9 billion
Founded in 1993, Life Time runs over 150 fitness clubs that feature exercise facilities, pools, spas, cafes, tennis courts, and boutiques. In addition to these, the organization also has a number of locations that have housing facilities and coworking spaces attached to its fitness centers, furthering its goal of helping people live healthy lives.
Life Time offers several different membership levels, including a digital option that gives members the option to access virtual training, Apple Fitness+, on-demand and live streaming fitness classes, and more.
There are two other in-person options: a standard one that gives you everything a digital membership provides plus access to fitness clubs and a signature level that adds on unlimited group training classes.
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24 Hour Fitness. San Ramon, California
2019 Revenue: $1.47 billion
24 Hour Fitness was founded in 1983 and had over 280 clubs in 11 states. These locations offer a variety of exercise equipment and even turf zones for members to use for their workouts, in addition to personal training and virtual fitness classes.
As the name implies, 24 Hour Fitness locations are open 24 hours a day, allowing members with unusual schedules to still have the opportunity to improve their health and meet their fitness goals.
24 Hour Fitness also offers an app that allows users to track their workouts and their progress and check in to the gym. It even offers live workout classes for its users to participate in at home.
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ClubCorp. Dallas, Texas
2019 Revenue: $1.2 billion
Taking a bit of a turn from companies that mainly offer gyms and workout facilities, ClubCorp runs over 200 private golf, country, city, and stadium clubs. Founded in 1957, it’s one of the largest private club owners and operators in the country.
Its properties feature swimming pools, golf courses, restaurants, workout facilities, tennis courts, and even workspaces. A few of ClubCorp’s locations are even regular hosts for PGA Tour Champions tournaments.
ClubCorp employs about 20,000 employees during its peak season and has over 430,000 members. It also boasts 3,753 holes of golf and 955 tennis courts across all of its facilities. ClubCorp also has locations in two foreign countries.
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Equinox. New York City, New York
2019 Revenue: $1.18 billion
Equinox Holdings is a holding company that owns a number of health and fitness brands, including Equinox, Equinox Hotels, Precision Run, PURE Yoga, Blink Fitness, and SoulCycle.
The first Equinox club opened in Manhattan in 1991, and since then, the company has expanded to 106 locations across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. It’s known as a luxury fitness and lifestyle brand, and its membership prices reflect that. It costs at least $2,500 a year to be a member, and that’s only if you want to have access to one location.
Equinox clubs aim to make their steep prices worth it to members by providing a wide variety of classes and making their gym locations as convenient as possible. This is especially true in Manhattan in New York City, where you can find an Equinox club about every eight blocks.
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Planet Fitness, Inc. Hampton, New Hampshire
2019 Revenue: $689 million
On the opposite end of the spectrum from Equinox, Planet Fitness prides itself in its low-cost memberships ranging from $10 to $23 per month, plus fees. Even the most basic tier gets members to access free fitness training as well as standard workout facilities.
The company offers these perks because it wants to make it easy for people who don’t have a lot of experience in a gym to feel comfortable coming to work out. To further reflect this, Planet Fitness’s motto for all of its locations is “The Judgement Free Zone.”
Founded in 1992, Planet Fitness is a franchisor that operates over 2,000 fitness clubs across the U.S., Canada, Dominican Republic, Panama, Australia, and Mexico.
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Town Sports International Holdings. Jupiter, Florida
2019 Revenue: $467 million
Founded in 1973, Town Sports International is a holding company that owns subsidiaries such as New York Sports Clubs, Boston Sports Clubs, Washington Sports Clubs, Philadelphia Sports Clubs, Around the Clock Fitness, Palm Beach Sports Club, LIV Fitness Clubs, and Christi’s Fitness.
Town Sports International offers exercise equipment and fitness classes at all of its locations and swimming, basketball, tennis, and children’s programs at some as well.
The company has over 600,000 members and mainly operates in states on the East Coast of the U.S., but it also has locations in Puerto Rico and Switzerland.
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Bel air bay Club. Pleasanton, California
2019 Revenue: $303 million
Bay Club is a luxury lifestyle fitness club that serves its members on the West Coast, specifically in California and Oregon. The company’s goal is to provide the best hospitality possible through its facilities that feature exercise equipment, fitness programs, dining options, spas, childcare, and business lounges.
It costs anywhere from about $172 to $535 a month to join Bay Club, not including initiation fees that start at $100. Members can choose to join a single Bay Club site or get access to all of the facilities within an area, which Bay Club calls a “Campus.”
Bay Club was founded in 1977, has 24 locations, and serves over 50,000 members.
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United PF Holdings. Austin, Texas
2019 Revenue: $246 million
United PF Holdings was founded in 2016 when five Planet Fitness franchisee platforms joined forces to form the single largest Planet Fitness franchisee in the U.S. The organization has Planet Fitness locations in Alabama, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, and West Virginia.
United PF Holdings grew its portfolio quickly, as it started with just 59 Planet Fitness clubs and now has over 150 clubs with which it serves about 1.1 million members. The organization also holds the rights and plans to build more Planet Fitness locations in the future.
Orangetheory Fitness. Boca Raton, Florida
2019 Revenue: $243 million
Orangetheory Fitness, unlike many other health clubs, doesn’t offer exercise facilities for members to use when and how they please. Instead, it operates more like a studio that offers fitness classes members can sign up for throughout the day.
The gym creates a unique High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) workout for each class, and members wear heart rate trackers so that they can make sure that their heart rate is staying in the zone that yields the most results.
Orangetheory Fitness was founded in 2010, but it came from a Pilates studio called Ellen’s Ultimate Workout that began in the 1990s. Ellen Latham of Ellen’s Ultimate Workout is one of the founders.
Membership rates are based on how many classes you want to take per month, and once you become a member, you can use any of Orangetheory Fitness’s more than 1,200 locations around the world.
