What the HFA Report Is, and How to Actually Use It

The Health & Fitness Association (formerly IHRSA) puts out the biggest benchmarking report in the gym industry. The latest one pulls data from 175 companies and over 17,000 gyms worldwide. It’s the closest thing the industry has to an official scorecard. Most operators have either never opened it, or skimmed the front page once and never went back.

The contrarian claim is this. Industry benchmarks are useful for two things: ruling problems out, and showing you the gap. Most operators try to use them for a third thing the data can’t actually do, which is grade them.

What’s in it. It covers the stuff you’d expect. Retention. New member growth. Revenue growth. Profit margin. Payroll as a chunk of revenue. What it costs you to get a new member. What each member is worth.

The numbers get sliced a few ways. By gym type (multipurpose, fitness-only, boutique studio). By revenue size. By region. By whether you run one location or several. There’s a month-by-month breakdown of when people sign up and when they walk.

The big numbers, roughly. Industry retention sits around 66%, meaning about a third of your members leave every year. New member growth runs in the mid-single digits. Revenue grows almost twice as fast as membership. Profit margin lands in the low-to-mid 20s. Cost per new member runs around $95 in the US, though it swings hard depending on what kind of gym you run.

How they figure the numbers. This is the part most people skip and shouldn’t. HFA measures retention annually, not monthly. It’s basically: 1 minus the percentage of members who cancelled or didn’t renew during the year. If you’re comparing your numbers to theirs, make sure you’re doing the math the same way. A lot of operators track monthly churn and stack it next to the annual industry number, and that’s apples to oranges.

The cost-per-new-member number is total sales and marketing spend divided by new members. It doesn’t account for the ones who cancel a few months later. If you want a more honest version for your own gym, factor in your early churn.

How to actually use it. It’s good for ruling things out. If your retention is in line with the industry, retention probably isn’t the thing to fix first. If your cost per new member is two or three times the industry number, that’s worth digging into. The report points you toward the next conversation more than it grades how you’re doing.

It’s good for seeing the gap. If you’re at 60% retention and the average is 66% and the top quarter is 76%, you can see how much room there is to grow and what good actually looks like.

It’s not a verdict. The number in the report is the middle of the pack. Being average means you’re average. That’s the floor, not the target. The mistake most operators make is treating the benchmark like a grade, then either celebrating being above it or panicking about being below it. Both reactions miss what the data is actually for.

It’s not going to help with sales-floor work. The report has nothing on close rate, tour conversion, how fast your reps respond to leads, or where your members actually come from. If you want to compare how your sales floor is doing to the industry, this report won’t help you.

What to do with it. Pull your own numbers for the four easiest things to compare. Annual retention. Net growth. Revenue growth. Profit margin. Calculate them the way HFA does. Compare them to the slice that fits your gym, your size and your category, not just the overall average. You’ll see where you’re solid, where you’re average, and where you’ve got real ground to cover.

The full report lives at healthandfitness.org. It’s behind HFA membership, which runs $400 to $1,200 a year depending on size. Worth it if you’re actually going to use the data.