Is LA Fitness a Franchise? No, Every Club Is Corporate

LA Fitness does not franchise, and it never has

Planet Fitness, Crunch, and Anytime Fitness sell franchises to private buyers. LA Fitness, Life Time, Equinox, and 24 Hour Fitness do not. That split is the whole answer. Life Time owns and operates every athletic club it runs, so no FDD exists for the brand.

LA Fitness sits on the corporate side. The brand belongs to Fitness International, LLC, a privately held company that owns and operates more than 700 clubs across 27 states and Canada. Every one of them is a company location. The company builds the club, signs the lease, hires the staff, and keeps the revenue.

That has a specific consequence for anyone searching for a cost figure. Selling a franchise in the United States triggers the FTC Franchise Rule, which forces the seller to hand a buyer a Franchise Disclosure Document at least 14 days before any money moves. LA Fitness sells nothing, so no such document exists at any state registration office. There is no Item 5 fee, no Item 7 investment range, no royalty rate, and no Item 19 sales disclosure. Any page quoting an LA Fitness franchise cost made the number up.

What Fitness International actually owns

Three brands run under the same ownership: LA Fitness, City Sports Club at the value end, and Club Studio in the boutique format. A fourth, Esporta Fitness, was wound down starting in 2024, with those clubs either rebranded back to LA Fitness or closed outright.

The Esporta wind-down is worth sitting with, because it shows what corporate ownership buys. Retiring an entire brand meant a signage order and an internal decision. Had those clubs been franchised, the same move would have required renegotiating or terminating hundreds of franchise agreements, each carrying a 10 or 20 year term and a franchisee who paid for the right to use the name being retired. Operators who want to test formats and kill the ones that miss have a strong reason to keep every location on their own books.

Corporate club, franchised club

	LA Fitness club	Franchised gym
Who funds the build	Fitness International	You
Who signs the lease	Fitness International	You
Who employs the staff	Fitness International	You
Disclosure document	None, none required	FDD delivered 14 days before signing
Published unit economics	None	Item 19, when the brand files one
What you can buy	A membership	A territory and a franchise agreement
Asset at exit	None	A business you can sell or transfer

The row that decides everything is the disclosure row. A private corporate chain owes the public nothing about how a single club performs. A franchisor that makes any financial performance claim has to put it in Item 19 with a stated sample, a stated period, and a stated definition of revenue. That is the trade you are actually evaluating when you move from the brand you cannot buy to the brands you can.

The three big-box gym franchises with filed FDDs

	Anytime Fitness	Planet Fitness	Crunch Fitness
Franchisor	Anytime Fitness Franchisor LLC	Planet Fitness Franchising LLC	Crunch Franchising, LLC
FDD vintage	2026	September 2025	2026
Initial franchise fee	$42,500	$20,000	$35,000
Item 7 investment	$539,329 to $905,482	$1,525,000 to $5,221,500	$2,147,500 to $5,367,000
Typical footprint	4,000 to 7,000 sq ft	15,000 to 25,000 sq ft	Strip center or freestanding
Royalty	Flat $842 per month	7% of membership dues	5.0% of gross sales
Marketing	$900 per month	Up to 3% national, 7% local	2% brand fund plus local minimum
Franchised units	2,271 US at year-end 2025	2,298 US at year-end 2024	481 at year-end 2025
Item 19 headline	$398,982 median	$1,794,689 middle-third median	$2,848,462 middle-third median
Item 19 sample	1,683 centers	2,197 franchised clubs	331 franchised clubs

Anytime Fitness is the only one of the three a single-unit buyer can realistically finance. Its 2026 FDD puts a 4,000 to 7,000 square foot club at $539,329 to $905,482 on a vanilla shell lease, against a $42,500 fee that actually ranged from $22,500 to $42,500 in 2025 depending on veteran status and multi-unit commitments. Its fee structure is also the odd one out: rather than a percentage royalty, franchisees pay a flat $842 per month, plus $900 per month to the brand fund and $799 per month for the technology package, with the franchisor reserving the right to switch to a royalty of up to 8% of gross revenue. On a club doing $400,000 a year the flat structure beats a percentage. On one doing $1.5 million it is not close. Our Anytime Fitness cost breakdown works through the quartile data behind that.

Planet Fitness sits in the middle on capital and at the top on ongoing load. The fee is $20,000 and currently waived for agreements written under an area development commitment, but the recurring stack is where the money goes: a 7% royalty on EFT dues, a national fund capped at 3%, and a local advertising requirement of 7% of cumulative monthly dues in a normal year. Add those and roughly 17% of membership revenue is spoken for before payroll or rent. Item 6 also discloses a re-equipment obligation currently running $363,000 to $1,103,000 and a remodel obligation of $250,000 to $1,200,000 that can recur as often as every 12 years. Those are capital events, not operating expenses, and they land on the franchisee. The Planet Fitness cost guide covers how that reshapes a ten-year model.

Crunch is the most expensive build and the highest revenue. The Crunch Fitness format runs $2,147,500 to $5,367,000 before real estate, with leasehold improvements alone at $950,000 to $3,000,000 and fitness equipment at $850,000 to $1,500,000. A separate Crunch Select format runs $3,192,500 to $5,277,000. Against that, the 2026 Item 19 reports 331 domestic franchised clubs, 94% of those that qualified, sorted into thirds: a $4,731,483 median in the upper third, $2,848,462 in the middle, and $1,666,443 in the bottom, with the single highest club at $7,614,726 and the lowest at $812,737. The Crunch cost analysis separates the two formats.

Pull the full Crunch Franchising data sheet for the Item 6 fee table and the state-level unit counts behind those numbers.

Read the revenue definition before the revenue number

Three medians sitting in one table look comparable. They are not, because each franchisor defines the top line differently.

Crunch counts Gross Revenue as everything: recurring dues, cash sales, personal training, and retail. Anytime Fitness counts membership revenue, coaching revenue, and pay-per-visit fees, but explicitly excludes enrollment fees and vending income. Planet Fitness counts the narrowest slice of all, reporting Annual EFT Revenue, which is recurring monthly and annual dues drafted from members and nothing else. Paid-in-full memberships, retail, and every other source sit outside the figure. A Planet Fitness club doing $1.8 million in disclosed EFT revenue is taking in more than $1.8 million in total.

The definitions also explain the royalty design. Planet Fitness charges 7% on the same EFT base it reports, which keeps the royalty tied to the recurring line. Crunch charges 5% on everything, including personal training, which is why its clubs carry a higher disclosed top line and a lower stated rate.

The floor matters more than the median

Every one of these disclosures publishes a low number, and the low number is the one to underwrite against.

Crunch’s weakest reporting club did $812,737 against a build that started at $2.1 million. Planet Fitness’s weakest franchised club drafted $283,269 in 2024 EFT revenue, in a system where the bottom third averaged $1,205,580. Anytime Fitness’s weakest center did $90,337 against a median of $398,982, and 66 centers closed permanently during the 12 months the Item 19 measures.

That last figure deserves its own line. Anytime Fitness reported 2,318 US franchised centers at the start of 2023 and 2,271 at the end of 2025, a net decline in all three years. Crunch went the other direction, from 415 franchised clubs to 481 during 2025 alone. Neither number tells you whether a specific club in a specific market works, but a system contracting for three straight years is a question to bring to validation calls rather than a detail to skip past.

The question behind the question

Most people searching this phrase are not attached to the LA Fitness name. They walked into a busy club, watched the members come through the door, and wondered whether the business behind it is buyable. The honest answer is that this particular one is not, and that the buyable versions of it come with a disclosure document the corporate chains never have to produce. 24 Hour Fitness sits on the same corporate side, and LongRange Capital acquired the chain in January 2026.

That document is the real difference. It gives you a build cost with a stated low and high, a fee schedule you can model, a unit count you can track, and a sales table with a floor in it. LA Fitness offers none of that outside its own finance department. Weigh the two before you decide the bigger brand was the better business.

Compare the fitness franchises that fit a smaller budget, or browse every brand with a filed FDD. We read the document itself, Items 5, 6, 7, and 19, rather than the franchisor’s opportunity page.