No. Life Time Group Holdings owns every athletic club it operates and sells no franchises. The gym brands you can buy: Crunch, Planet Fitness, Club Pilates.
Quick answer No. Life Time does not franchise. Life Time Group Holdings, a public company trading as LTH, owns and operates every athletic club it runs, more than 160 of them as of a mid-2021 count. No FDD exists for the brand, so there is no Item 7 investment range and no Item 19 sales table to read.
Sort American gyms by what a membership costs and the franchising line draws itself. At the top are Life Time and Equinox, corporate at every location. Below them sit Crunch, Planet Fitness, Gold’s Gym, and Anytime Fitness, all of which sell franchises to private buyers. Life Time has been on the corporate side of that line since it started, and it is still there.
The consequence is procedural rather than philosophical. Selling a franchise in the United States triggers the FTC Franchise Rule, which forces the seller to hand every prospect a Franchise Disclosure Document before taking any money. Life Time offers nothing, so no such document sits at any state registration office. There is no Item 5 fee, no Item 7 investment range, and no Item 19 sales table carrying the brand’s name. Any page quoting a Life Time franchise cost is quoting a number nobody filed. The same holds for LA Fitness, the other large chain people search this way.
Life Time Group Holdings is a public company, listed as LTH. It develops, owns, and staffs its athletic clubs, and the most recent count we verified put the system at more than 160 clubs as of mid-2021. No franchisee has ever appeared anywhere in that structure.
Being public changes what a curious buyer can read, though less than it sounds. Consolidated filings report revenue, membership counts, and margins for the whole portfolio. They do not report what the weakest club in that portfolio took in last year, and they cannot report a sample of independently owned locations, because none exist. Item 19 does exactly that job inside a franchise system: a stated sample size, a stated measurement period, a stated definition of revenue, and usually a disclosed low performer. Consolidated results and an Item 19 answer different questions, and only one of them describes a single site at the bottom of the range.
Franchising is a financing decision before it is a branding one. The franchisee writes the check for the build, signs the lease, and carries the operating risk. The franchisor collects an initial fee and a royalty on revenue it never had to fund. That trade is worth making when capital is the constraint on how fast a brand can grow.
A public operator with equity and debt markets available does not face that constraint. Building the club itself costs more up front and keeps the entire club-level margin afterward, which is the better deal for anyone who can afford the up-front half. Franchising also gives away control, and the resort format is where control matters most. A 4,000 square foot club with identical equipment in every market replicates cleanly across hundreds of owners. A large amenity-dense club does not, because the experience is the product and every operator decision shows up in it.
Crunch is the ceiling of what a private buyer can actually purchase in the big-box category. The 2026 FDD puts a Crunch Fitness club at $2,147,500 to $5,367,000 on a site of 20,000 to 60,000 square feet, against a $35,000 initial franchise fee, a 5.0% royalty on monthly gross sales, and a 2% brand marketing fund contribution. New franchisees paid between $0 and $35,000 in initial fees during 2025, since the brand discounts into developing markets. Franchised Crunch Fitness clubs went from 415 to 481 across 2025 while company-owned units fell from 8 to 5.
The Item 7 footnotes carry the more useful disclosure. “We cannot estimate your real estate costs,” the document states, which puts the largest line in a 20,000 to 60,000 square foot build outside the published range entirely. Leasehold improvements start at $950,000, equipment down payments run $850,000 to $1,500,000, and the land or the lease underneath all of it is yours to price and yours to finance.
The membership math shows where the tier line actually falls. Crunch’s Item 19 describes a base membership at $9.95 per month and a Peak option at $19.95, with pricing across the network reaching $49.95 depending on location. A franchised big-box club is engineered to sell volume inside that band. The athletic resort tier is not competing in it. Same industry, different business model, and the difference explains the ownership structure better than any brand-positioning argument does.
Pull the full Crunch Franchising data sheet for the fee table and the three-year unit counts, or read the Crunch cost breakdown for how the two club formats compare.
| Tier | Brands | Franchised | What a buyer can read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Athletic resort | Life Time, Equinox | No | Public filings only, nothing club-level |
| Big-box | Crunch, Planet Fitness, Gold’s Gym, Anytime Fitness | Yes | Full FDD with Item 7 and Item 19 |
| Boutique studio | Club Pilates and similar formats | Yes | Full FDD with Item 7 and Item 19 |
Gold’s Gym is the closest a franchise buyer gets to a full-service club with the older gym-culture positioning. Its 2025 FDD, issued June 6 and amended October 30, puts total investment at $1,793,500 to $4,537,000. Planet Fitness occupies the value end of the same band with a very different royalty design. Every brand on those two lower rows had to publish an investment range, a fee schedule, and a three-year unit table before it could take a dollar from a buyer.
The boutique studio is where the higher price per visit and the franchise model finally meet. Club Pilates charges a $65,000 initial franchise fee against a $403,289 to $1,029,811 investment. Its 2026 FDD counted 1,179 US studios open on December 31, 2025, every one owned by a third-party franchisee. Of the 1,005 studios that qualified for the earnings table, the median reported $978,300 in gross revenue, inside a range running from $146,300 to $2,302,000.
Set that beside Anytime Fitness, whose 2026 Item 19 reports a $398,982 median across 1,683 centers for the 12 months ended February 28, 2026. The Club Pilates box is a fraction of the size and roughly a third of the build cost, and its median unit takes in more than twice the revenue. Price per member, rather than square footage, drives the top line in this industry. That is the same economic logic keeping Life Time corporate, running in the one format small enough to hand to independent owners.
The floor is the other half of the lesson. A qualified Club Pilates studio at $146,300 in annual revenue, against a build starting at $403,289, is a real outcome inside a system with more than a thousand units. Knowing the shape of the bottom of the range is most of what disclosure actually buys you, and it is precisely what a corporate chain’s filings will never contain, because it has no franchisees whose results it is required to describe.
Most people typing this phrase are not shopping for the Life Time name. They walked through a busy club, watched the volume of members coming through the door, and wondered whether the business behind it is for sale. This one is not. The versions that are for sale carry an obligation the corporate chains never take on: a document stating a build cost with a low and a high, a fee schedule you can model, a unit count with three years of history behind it, and a sales table with a floor printed in it.
Weigh that document against brand prestige before deciding the bigger name was the better business. Compare the fitness franchises with a smaller entry cost and check where the disclosed numbers land. We read Items 5, 6, 7, and 19 of the filing itself rather than the franchisor’s opportunity page.
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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.
No. Life Time sells no franchises anywhere in the United States, and it never has. Life Time Group Holdings develops, owns, and staffs each athletic club itself, which is why no Franchise Disclosure Document for the brand exists at any state registration office. Any site quoting a Life Time franchise fee or investment range invented the figure, because the company offers nothing for a prospective franchisee to buy.
Life Time Group Holdings, a publicly traded company listed under the ticker LTH. It operates a company-owned athletic resort model rather than a franchised one, and the last count we verified put the system at more than 160 athletic clubs as of mid-2021. Ownership sitting with public shareholders rather than a private family is one reason the franchising answer stays no: the company can fund new clubs from capital markets.
Franchising solves a capital problem that a public company does not have. A franchisee funds the build, signs the lease, and carries the operating risk, and the franchisor collects a fee plus a royalty on revenue it never financed. A company with equity and debt market access can build the club itself and keep the entire club-level margin. The large amenity-heavy format also resists standardization across hundreds of independent owners in a way a small equipment-driven box does not.
Crunch, in the big-box category, and Gold's Gym for a full-service club. The 2026 Crunch FDD puts a Crunch Fitness club at $2,147,500 to $5,367,000 against a $35,000 initial franchise fee, a 5% royalty, and a 2% brand marketing fund. The 2025 Gold's Gym FDD, issued June 6 and amended October 30, puts total investment at $1,793,500 to $4,537,000. Neither one sells the athletic resort experience, and both exclude real estate from the disclosed investment range.
No, and no public company does. Consolidated filings report revenue, membership figures, and margins for the entire portfolio, which tells you how the company is doing rather than how one club performs. An Item 19 in a franchise document does the opposite: it names a sample size, a measurement period, a definition of revenue, and usually a low performer. Crunch discloses a $2,848,462 middle-third median across 331 reporting franchised clubs. Nothing comparable exists for a corporate chain.
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