What happened
The most profitable gym operators spend less of their revenue on staff, according to the Health & Fitness Association (HFA). Its 2026 Fitness Industry Benchmarking Report, published on 7 October, draws on 2025 figures from 244 operators running nearly 27,000 gyms in 40 countries. Median revenue rose 10.7% and the median EBITDA margin was 22.1%. HFA singled out payroll, which took 32.4% of revenue at high-profit operators and 42.5% at lower-profit ones, and attributed the gap to productivity and operating efficiency.
What it means
“The headline finding is close to circular,” says Nick Mitchell, founder of Ultimate Performance, the world’s largest specialist personal training company. “They split operators by profit, then report that the less profitable ones spend more of their revenue on payroll. Lower revenue over broadly fixed staff costs gives a higher ratio. Put more revenue through the same gym and the ratio drops without anything changing.”
HFA’s high-profit group is the top half of respondents ranked by EBITDA margin. “So payroll ratio follows revenue. It doesn’t cause profit,” says Mitchell. “Reading it as ‘cut payroll to get profitable’ gets the cause backwards.”
“In personal training the people are the product, so payroll runs higher and behaves more like a variable cost,” he says. “A premium PT business shows a worse ratio than a big-box club and makes more per head. Anyone benchmarking a London PT operator against this report is measuring the wrong thing.”
“Payroll as a share of revenue tells you how much revenue you have, not how well you run your people,” he says. “For a PT business, look at revenue per trainer. That’s where the profit gap actually sits.”
HFA’s figures include a version of that measure. Its high-profit operators generated about 21% more revenue per full-time employee than lower-profit ones.
What to watch
The full report, available to HFA members, breaks the results down by club type, facility type, company size and geography. Studio and personal-training operators with high payroll ratios and healthy margins would confirm Mitchell’s argument. Margins that fall as payroll rises would say the opposite.
