🏋️ Gym membership — what each visit really costs
A $20 a week membership is $1,040 a year. Go three times a week and each visit costs $6.67; go once a fortnight and it costs $40. Put in what the membership costs at the frequency you pay it, and how often you actually go, and see what a visit comes to — and whether paying at the door would have been cheaper.
Results
The membership against the door
Both bars are the cost of a single visit, drawn to the same scale, so the taller bar is the dearer way to walk in.
If you go this often
Kept for one year to five
An estimate, not advice, and only as good as the number of visits — which is the one figure here that nobody can know in advance, and the one people are worst at predicting. Going half as often doubles what each visit costs. A joining fee is not in this arithmetic: it is paid once, so add it to the first year's cost, or spread it over the years you expect to keep the membership. Classes, personal training, parking and the trip to get there are counted only if they are part of what you pay the membership for — the page divides the money you spend by the visits you make, and nothing else. A cheaper gym further away wins on this page and can still lose in a life, which is not something a division can settle.
Why use this calculator?
A membership is the rare thing you buy by the month and use by the visit, and the two numbers are set by different people: the price is on the contract, and the number of visits is decided later, by you, on a wet Tuesday in July. That is the whole reason the same membership is a bargain at three visits a week and a waste at one a month, with nothing about the gym changing in between. This page does the one division that shows it — what you pay a year, divided by the visits you make a year — and then answers the question underneath it: how often would you have to turn up for this to beat paying at the door?
What the research says about memberships
Paying for visits you never make has been studied closely, and its arithmetic is old:
- The word gymnasium comes from the Greek gymnos, naked: a gymnasion was where athletes trained without clothes, and English borrowed the word in the sixteenth century for a place of exercise. The building is ancient — the monthly direct debit is not.
- The best-known study of what happens next is Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier's Paying Not to Go to the Gym, published in the American Economic Review in 2006. At a US gym whose pay-per-visit price was $10, members who chose monthly contracts paid the equivalent of roughly $17 a visit and attended about four times a month. The finding was not that they were lazy but that people systematically overestimate how often their future selves will turn up — which is the mistake a cost per visit makes visible.
- The arithmetic is what makes it expensive. At $20 a week a membership costs $1,040 a year, so reaching $1 a visit would take 1,040 visits — twenty a week, every week of the year. A membership is a bet on a habit, and the habit is the part that is not for sale.
How does this calculator work?
Both sides are counted over a year, and then one is divided by the other:
cost per visit = what the membership costs a year ÷ the visits you make a year
Everything else on the page is that figure read from another angle:
- A weekly payment is 52 a year, a fortnight 26, a month 12, every 3 months 4, every 6 months 2. That is what turns any frequency into a yearly figure, so $20 a week and $87 a month are directly comparable.
- Going 3 times a week is 156 visits a year, twice a month is 24, once a day is 365 — so a rate of going and a total are the same kind of figure. "In total" is divided by the years you keep the membership, which turns it into a rate as well.
- The visits needed to match the door price is the membership a year ÷ what one visit costs at the door, rounded up: the point at which the membership stops being the dearer way to walk in.
- The table of habits spreads the same membership over several habits — once a week, twice, three times — because the cost of a visit moves far more with how often you go than with what you pay.
- The years table is the same money over one to five years. Keep paying without keeping going and the cost of each visit climbs instead of falling, which is the half of the story a yearly figure on its own cannot tell.
Frequently asked questions
How do I count a visit?
A visit is one trip through the door, whatever you do once you are in: a workout, a swim, a class, twenty minutes on a bike. Going in the morning and again at night is two visits, or one long one — the count is yours, but it has to be the same kind of count every time, because it is the figure that decides the answer. A session you would have skipped counts as nothing.
Should the joining fee be in the cost?
Yes, but it arrives once rather than every week, so put it on the first year: a $60 joining fee plus $20 a week is $1,100 for the first year and $1,040 a year after that. Over a long enough membership the fee stops mattering — which is exactly the trade-off a no-fee gym with higher weekly payments is asking you to make.
What about classes, personal training and parking?
Only what you pay the membership for belongs in the cost. If classes are included, they are part of why the membership is worth more than the price suggests; if you pay per class on top, add those payments in and the cost per visit rises with them. Petrol, parking and a trip across town are real costs of going, but they are not part of the membership, so the page leaves them out — put them in the cost if you want the door-to-door figure, and see whether the answer changes.
What if I go more in January than in July?
Then a year is the right window and a fortnight is not. Use the visits you expect across the whole year — or the visits you actually made last year, which is the better guide — and read the table of habits downwards from there. The row for one visit a week is the honest one for most people who joined planning to go three times.
Is the cheapest membership the best one?
Not necessarily, and this page cannot settle it. A $12 a week gym an hour away can cost more than a $25 one five minutes from the door once the travelling is counted — but the page divides money by visits and nothing else, so it compares memberships, not lives. What it can tell you is what the cheaper one has to be worth to you at each visit to make up the difference.
There are two of us on one membership — how does that work?
Put in the combined cost and the combined visits, and the figure is what a visit costs the two of you together. For a per-person figure, run the page once for each of you with that person's share of the cost, since money divided by visits only means something when the same period is on both sides of the sum.
Why is my cost per visit higher than I worked out?
Because the visits were a hope and the payments were a fact. That is the mistake the research above describes, and it is not a personal failing — it is why a cost per visit is worth looking at before you sign rather than after. Count the visits you have actually made in the last four weeks, put that rate in, and see what each one has cost you so far.