ISSA published its 2026 Fitness Hiring Report this week, and the top-line numbers are genuinely arresting.
Anytime Fitness reports a 1,300-coach deficit across 2,300 US locations. Snap Fitness needs 4,000 additional trainers globally. Equinox wants 500-plus new coaches over five years. LeeJam, in Saudi Arabia, needs 400 with capacity for 1,000 under Vision 2030. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 12% job growth for trainers and instructors between 2024 and 2034 — about 74,200 openings a year.
The report's explanation for all of this is a readiness gap — the distance between holding a certification and being ready to contribute on day one. Operators, it says, aren't short of applicants. They're short of applicants who can sell a membership, retain a client, and understand a P&L.
Here's what the report does not contain: a wage figure. Not one. No pay ranges, no compensation benchmarks, no turnover rate, no retention data. A document about a labor shortage, running to dozens of statistics, that never once says what the job pays.
Is the fitness industry's trainer shortage a skills problem or a pay problem?
Until someone publishes the wage data, assume it's a pay problem. Every industry with a labor shortage reaches for "skills gap" first, because a skills gap is someone else's fault — the schools, the certifiers, the kids. A pay problem is the employer's fault. When a report can name a 1,300-person deficit at a single chain and never mention what that chain pays, the omission isn't a gap in the research. It's the answer to the research question.
The tell is in the one operator who discloses
Look at what each operator in the report is willing to say out loud.
| Operator | Stated need | What they disclose about investment in the role |
|---|---|---|
| Anytime Fitness | 1,300 coaches across 2,300 US locations | Nothing |
| Snap Fitness | 4,000 trainers globally | Nothing |
| LeeJam (Saudi Arabia) | 400 trainers, capacity for 1,000 | Nothing |
| Equinox | 500+ coaches over five years | 50–200 hours of paid education per tier |
One operator on that list is investing visibly in the person. It's the one charging the most for the membership. That is not a coincidence, and it's not a story about curriculum. Equinox doesn't compete on price — so it can afford to build the coach it wants instead of waiting for the market to deliver one pre-assembled. Everyone else is hoping a certification body ships a finished professional at an entry-level wage.
Who benefits from the diagnosis
Worth reading the sequence slowly. ISSA certifies more than 49,000 coaches. ISSA then publishes research finding that certified coaches aren't job-ready. ISSA then reports that 94% of its gym partners want access to a pre-vetted pipeline of job-ready trainers — a pipeline ISSA is building.
That's not fraud; it's marketing, and it's competent marketing. But it means the "readiness gap" is a term coined by the party selling the remedy, measured among its own partners, and then repeated across the trade press as though it were a finding about the labor market rather than a finding about ISSA's product roadmap. A meaningful share of the report isn't labor research at all — it's satisfaction data from ISSA's inaugural summit, where 1,226 attendees rated the sessions.
None of which makes the deficits fake. Anytime is genuinely 1,300 people short. The question is only ever why.
What the shortage actually looks like from inside
Ask an operator why they can't hire and you'll hear that candidates lack business acumen. Ask what the role pays and the conversation gets structural fast: it's hourly, it's split-shift, it's commission-weighted on a base that assumes the person is doing this for love, and the comp model quietly assumes they'll leave inside two years — which is why nobody invests in developing them, which produces exactly the unpolished candidate the report is complaining about. The gap is manufactured upstream by the pay design, and then diagnosed downstream as a character flaw in twenty-four-year-olds.
We've argued before that paying every instructor the same is the wrong fix — the answer is tiering pay and freedom to the people who actually drive revenue, not a flat raise. This report is the other half of that argument. You cannot demand sales capability, retention ownership and business literacy at a wage set for someone who counts reps. Those are three jobs. The market prices them separately, and the market is not confused.
And the cost of getting this wrong isn't abstract. 57% of studio members churn in year one, and the single largest input into whether a member stays is the person who greets them. Underpay that role and you don't save money on labor. You pay for it in acquisition, forever, and you call that a marketing problem too.
The industry has a hiring report with no wages in it. That's not a data gap. That's a confession with the sound turned off.