Yes, Planet Fitness is a franchise. About 90% of clubs are franchisee-owned. Fee, royalty, Item 7 range, and Item 19 club revenue from the FDD.
Quick answer Yes. Planet Fitness franchises most of its system: 2,298 franchised clubs against 270 company-owned at December 31, 2024, per the September 2025 FDD. The initial franchise fee is $20,000, the royalty is 7% of membership dues drafted by EFT, and Item 7 puts one club at $1,525,000 to $5,221,500.
Planet Fitness sells one of the cheapest gym memberships in the country and builds one of the most expensive rooms to sell it from. The quarterly report attached to the September 2025 FDD describes the standard Classic Card as starting at $15 per month for new members. Item 7 of that same document prices a single club at $1,525,000 to $5,221,500 before anyone pays for land.
That gap is the business. Yes, Planet Fitness is a franchise, and most of the purple boxes in strip centers belong to private operators rather than to the company. Whether it is a franchise you can buy has less to do with the brand’s willingness to sell than with whether your capital plan survives collecting dues fifteen dollars at a time.
Every figure below comes from the September 2025 disclosure document in our library, issued June 27, 2025 and amended September 4, 2025. Planet Fitness refiles annually, so a newer document exists, and our Planet Fitness cost guide works that later filing line by line. This post answers the structural question instead: who owns the clubs, what the franchisor charges, and what the disclosure will and will not tell a buyer.
Item 20 counts the system three years deep.
| At December 31 | Franchised | Company-owned | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 2,082 | 232 | 2,314 |
| 2023 | 2,201 | 254 | 2,455 |
| 2024 | 2,298 | 270 | 2,568 |
Franchised clubs were 89.5% of the system at the end of 2024. The interesting line is the middle column. Company-owned clubs went from 110 at the start of 2022 to 270 three years later, growth of roughly 145% while the franchised base grew about 12%. A franchisor that is also building its own operating footprint is a different counterparty from one that only sells territories, and Item 12 makes the consequence explicit.
The franchisor itself is Planet Fitness Franchising LLC, a Delaware company formed in June 2018 that took over from a predecessor, Pla-Fit Franchise LLC, which had sold franchises since February 2003. Company-owned clubs are run by an affiliate, Planet Fitness Assetco LLC. The fitness equipment you are required to buy comes from another affiliate, PF Equipment. The ultimate parent, Planet Fitness, Inc., is publicly traded, which is why the disclosure document carries a quarterly report as an exhibit. That exhibit puts the global system at 2,741 clubs and about 20.6 million members as of March 31, 2025, with roughly 900 clubs under contractual commitment to open.
| Term | September 2025 FDD |
|---|---|
| Initial franchise fee | $20,000 |
| Royalty | 7% of membership dues drafted by EFT |
| National advertising fund | 2% of monthly membership fees, capped at 3% of the EFT dues draft |
| Local advertising | greater of $60,000 a year or 7% of cumulative monthly EFT |
| Join fee | 20% of the regular monthly membership fee, or 5% of a prepaid membership |
| Franchise term | 12 years from the day you open |
| Exclusive territory | none |
| Total investment, one club | $1,525,000 to $5,221,500 |
Two lines in that table behave differently from the fast-food franchises most buyers compare against. The royalty base is narrower than gross sales: it is the EFT dues draft, so retail, paid-in-full memberships, and other revenue fall outside it. The local advertising obligation is wider, because $60,000 a year is a dollar floor rather than a percentage. A club having a bad year still owes it.
The 12-year term is short by category standards, and it sits inside a remodel obligation the franchisor may impose as often as every 12 years at a current cost of $250,000 to $1,200,000. Re-equipping the floor is separately disclosed at $363,000 to $1,103,000. Both are Item 6 fees, which means they are contractual obligations rather than discretionary upgrades.
Pull the full Planet Fitness data sheet if you want the fee schedule and Item 7 lines in one page rather than scattered across a 300-page PDF.
The $3.7 million spread in Item 7 confuses almost everyone who quotes it. It is not a big-club-versus-small-club range. The cover page splits it by how you pay for the fitness equipment: $1,525,000 to $3,706,700 if you finance it, and $2,537,500 to $5,221,500 if you purchase it outright. Financing moves $326,700 to $772,100 of equipment cost off day one and onto a loan.
Leasehold improvements are the dominant line either way, at $1,250,000 to $2,142,000 for a building of roughly 15,000 to 25,000 square feet. Three months of additional funds are estimated at $68,000 to $469,000, and Note 10 says that estimate is calculated from company club operations rather than from franchisee reporting. One more constraint sits in Note 11 and rarely makes it into third-party summaries: franchisees are not permitted to borrow more than 80% of the initial investment. On a $2 million build that is $400,000 of equity before working capital.
Item 19 reports franchised clubs in performance thirds rather than as one system average, using 2,197 clubs open for all of calendar 2024.
| 2024 annual EFT revenue | Bottom third | Middle third | Upper third |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average | $1,205,580 | $1,803,265 | $2,613,753 |
| Median | $1,255,397 | $1,794,689 | $2,493,416 |
| Low | $283,269 | $1,537,067 | $2,093,692 |
| High | $1,536,894 | $2,093,010 | $5,280,380 |
| Clubs | 733 | 732 | 732 |
Read the low and high corners before the middle. The weakest club in the sample collected $283,269 in dues for the year. The strongest collected $5,280,380. Those two clubs cost roughly the same to build, sit inside the same fee structure, and carry the same remodel clock. Site quality and market density, not brand strength, produce an 18-fold spread.
The disclosure also grades itself. Of the 733 bottom-third clubs, 424 met or exceeded their own third’s average. In the upper third, only 291 of 732 did, which tells you the top band is pulled upward by a small number of very large clubs.
Item 19 contains a full operating statement, with payroll, marketing, royalties, utilities, rent, and EBITDA. It covers 252 company-owned clubs. The franchisor states the reason directly: it has not included franchisee information because it does not receive complete expense information from its franchisees.
For those company clubs in 2024, average EBITDA was $266,824 in the bottom third, $683,438 in the middle, and $1,089,084 in the upper, on margins of 21%, 35%, and 42% of net revenue. Rent averaged $293,570 to $420,244 depending on the third. Those figures come before debt service on a build that started at $1,525,000, and before any reserve for the equipment replacement the same document requires.
One more line deserves attention from anyone modeling a membership business. At company-owned clubs in 2024, monthly declines and returns ran from 3.0% to 34.8% of gross membership EFT. Members signed and dues collected are not the same number, and the gap between them is wide enough to swing a year.
The gym industry splits cleanly. The big-box operators that never franchise, including LA Fitness, keep every club corporate and fund growth off their own balance sheet. Planet Fitness went the other direction and built a system where private operators carry the construction risk while the franchisor collects a percentage of dues plus equipment revenue through an affiliate. Both models produce clubs on the same corner. Only one of them sells you the corner.
If the seven-figure build is the obstacle rather than the concept, the franchised fitness category has entries an order of magnitude cheaper, and our ranking of fitness franchises under $200,000 scores each one off its filed FDD rather than its recruitment page.
Get the current disclosure document, then work four items in order. Item 5 for the fee and whether the area development waiver applies to you. Item 7 for your format, with the footnotes, because the finance-versus-purchase split changes the number by more than a million dollars. Item 12 for territory language, which currently grants none. Item 19 for what the franchisor will stand behind, remembering that the profit statement describes its own clubs and not yours.
Then call franchisees off the Item 20 exhibit list, including operators who left the system. On a build this size, the reference calls are worth more than the tercile table.
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About this analysis The franchise data in this article is drawn from VetMyFranchise's structured analysis of 2,300+ Franchise Disclosure Documents filed with U.S. state regulators. See our data & methodology.
Yes, Planet Fitness sells franchises, and roughly 90% of its clubs are franchisee-owned. Item 20 of the September 2025 FDD counts 2,298 franchised clubs and 270 company-owned clubs at December 31, 2024. The system also had 84 franchise agreements signed for clubs that had not yet opened, and projected 78 new franchised openings in the following year. The constraint on a buyer is capital rather than availability.
The September 2025 FDD sets the initial franchise fee at $20,000 and Item 7 puts total investment for one club at $1,525,000 to $5,221,500, excluding real estate purchase. Leasehold improvements alone run $1,250,000 to $2,142,000 on a building of roughly 15,000 to 25,000 square feet. Note 11 adds a financing limit most guides skip: franchisees are not permitted to borrow more than 80% of the initial investment. Our cost guide works the newer 2026 filing line by line.
Median annual EFT revenue for franchised clubs in 2024 was $1,255,397 in the bottom third, $1,794,689 in the middle third, and $2,493,416 in the upper third, across 2,197 clubs open the full year. EFT revenue counts recurring monthly and annual membership dues only. Paid-in-full memberships, retail sales, and other income sit outside it, as do returns and taxes. The lowest club in the sample drew $283,269 and the highest $5,280,380.
No. Item 12 of the September 2025 FDD opens with the sentence "You will not receive an exclusive territory," and states that a franchisee may face competition from other franchisees, from company-owned clubs, and from other brands the franchisor controls. The Franchise Agreement licenses one club at one approved address. There is no right of first refusal on adjacent sites and no protected radius, so market defense is a site-selection problem rather than a contractual one.
Yes, the Franchise Agreement covers a single club at a specific location, but the fee structure pushes toward multi-unit development. Item 5 states that initial franchise fees are currently being waived for franchise agreements issued under an Area Development Agreement, where a developer instead pays $10,000 per committed location. A single-unit buyer pays the full $20,000. Item 15 also requires the owner or a designated Responsible Owner to manage the club as a primary occupation unless the franchisor approves a separate operator.
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