How much is a gym worth?

Short answer: buyers do not buy your equipment list — they buy members who keep paying. Realized sales put gyms and fitness centers at 2.54× SDE (BizBuySell, trailing five years), and the spread around that number is churn, contract mix, and lease debt on the equipment. Count your members first, then do the math. See Gyms and the valuation calculator.

The number

BizBuySell's realized multiples (closed sales, trailing five years through Q2 2026) report gyms and fitness centers at 2.54× SDE and 0.70× revenue, with a $204,000 median sale price — a reminder that most gyms that sell are small.

The size ladder from the IBBA Market Pulse, Q2 2026 is the frame for most small sales: 2.0× SDE under a $500,000 price, 2.8× at $500,000–$1M, 3.1× at $1M–$2M, then 4.8× EBITDA at $2–5M and 5.8× EBITDA at $5–50M. Size buys multiple because size usually means a team, systems, and less key-person risk.

For context only, large listed Recreation companies trade at 10.39× EV/EBITDA (Damodaran Online, January 2026). That is a proxy ceiling, not your price: public buyers get liquidity, audited books, and no owner behind the counter. Your buyer prices risk and opportunity cost at Main Street scale.

Worked example (assumptions labeled):

• Revenue: $600,000.
• SDE margin: 30% — an assumption for a staffed, owner-managed club.
• SDE: $600,000 × 30% = $180,000.
• Multiple: 2.54× SDE (BizBuySell, trailing five years).
• Math: $180,000 × 2.54 = $457,200.

If the treadmills are leased and the lease does not transfer cleanly, expect the buyer to subtract that fight from the price.

How buyers actually value a gym

The underwriting starts with members × dues × how long they stay. Buyers want active members with a payment and a check-in in the last 60 days — not everyone who ever signed up. Then:

• Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from electronic funds transfer billing, and its trend over 24 months, seasonality stripped out.
• Churn — monthly cancellations as a share of members. A gym replacing 8% of members a month is a marketing treadmill, not an asset.
• Contract mix — term contracts hold value differently than month-to-month; buyers also count paid-in-full memberships as a liability, because that cash is spent and the service is still owed.
• Equipment — owned vs. leased, age, and the refresh bill coming due.
• Ancillary revenue — personal training, small-group, and retail, and whether trainers take those clients when they leave.
• The lease — years remaining plus options, in a market where landlords hold the leverage.

What raises the price — and what kills it

Raises it: low, documented churn; a manager who runs the floor without the owner; growing MRR through a January and a summer, not just one; training revenue delivered by employed trainers; equipment owned with years of life left.

Kills it: a big-box or boutique competitor opening across the street; deferred equipment replacement priced into the buyer's offer; paid-in-full cash collected and spent; the owner as the star trainer whose clients follow him out; a short lease with a rent reset.

Move your number

Protect the dues stream: failed-card recovery and clean recurring billing are profit you already earned — the Finix payments team works on exactly that collection layer, and every recovered member is SDE. Cut churn with operations, not discounts: onboarding sequences, missed-week check-ins, and win-back follow-up run by systems are ClaroPro-team work; moving monthly churn even one point compounds member lifetime value all year. Know your numbers live: a dashboard of active members, MRR, and churn by cohort — instead of the billing company's month-end PDF — is a Nova engineering team build that also happens to be the first exhibit a buyer asks for. Run yours: valuation calculator for gyms.

This is an educational framework with shown math, not an appraisal; a real price is set by a real buyer on a specific day. The warnings in here exist to protect you, the owner — they are for your side of the table: so you never overpay for a member count padded with ghosts, undersell a club with genuinely low churn, or sign before the equipment leases are read. Honest caveats are how an owner keeps the money — ours is just to show the math.