Life Time Spends 1.3% on Marketing. Planet Fitness Franchisees Spend 9%.

Two of the largest fitness operators in the United States published their 2025 marketing numbers this year. Life Time spent 1.3% of its revenue. A Planet Fitness franchisee is contractually required to spend 9% of member dues.

Both are rational. Neither number is a target you should copy. The gap between them is the most useful thing in this guide, because it shows that a marketing budget is an output of your business model and your retention rate, not a statement of ambition.

This page sets out what the published filings actually say, why the two figures are so far apart, and how to work out the number that belongs in your own budget.

What counts as a marketing budget

Before any benchmark is useful, it has to be comparing the same things. Operators count marketing in at least three different ways, and the differences are large enough to make a published percentage meaningless on its own.

The narrow definition is paid media only. Ad spend on Meta, Google, out of home, radio, and local print. This is the number most studio owners have in their head when they say "we spend about two grand a month on marketing".

The broad definition adds the people. Salaries for a marketing manager, a social media coordinator, the agency retainer, the photographer, the design subscriptions. For most independent studios this doubles the narrow figure, and sometimes triples it.

The widest definition adds the cost of the offers. Free trials, discounted joining fees, the first month at half price, referral rewards, the complimentary personal training session that comes with a new membership. These are real acquisition costs, and they rarely sit in the marketing line of a profit and loss statement. They show up as discounts against revenue, which is why they hide.

When you compare your spend to a published benchmark, check which of the three you are looking at. The two figures below are not the same shape as each other, and we say so in each case.

What the two largest operators actually spend

Life Time Group Holdings reports marketing as part of a combined line called general, administrative and marketing expenses, and then discloses the marketing portion separately in the notes. Its FY2025 annual report gives three years.

Read the right-hand column again. Life Time grew revenue by about 35% across those three years, and the share of revenue going to marketing fell in each one. The absolute spend rose. The percentage did not.

Planet Fitness works in the opposite direction, because most of its clubs are owned by franchisees rather than the company. Its FY2025 annual report describes two separate obligations. Franchisees and corporate clubs contribute approximately 2% of gross monthly and annual membership dues to the national advertising funds. On top of that, the filing states a requirement that franchisees spend 7% of their monthly membership dues on local advertising.

That is 9% of dues, set by contract. In 2025 the national funds spent $98.1 million, of which $10.5 million came from corporate-owned clubs. Counting the national funds and the local requirement together, the filing says the company and its franchisees spent over $360 million combined in 2025.

One detail is worth holding on to. For 2026, Planet Fitness franchisees voted to increase their contribution to the national funds from 2% to 3%, and to decrease local marketing from 7% to 6%. The total stayed at 9%. What changed was who controls the money, moving a point of spend from the operator's own market to the national campaign.

A caution on arithmetic, because this is where most comparisons of these two companies go wrong. Planet Fitness reported total revenue of $1.324 billion in 2025, but that is franchisor revenue: royalties, equipment sales, and its own corporate clubs. It is not the system-wide member dues that the $360 million is spent against. Dividing one by the other produces a number that means nothing. The honest comparison is the contractual rate against the revenue share: 9% of dues versus 1.27% of revenue.

Why does Planet Fitness spend seven times more than Life Time?

Because it sells a cheaper membership to a member who leaves sooner. At roughly $15 to $25 a month, a Planet Fitness membership generates a fraction of the revenue per member that a Life Time membership does, so each one is worth far less and the model needs many more of them. High volume and high churn mean the top of the funnel never gets a rest. Life Time charges several hundred dollars a month, keeps members longer, and sells more to each one once they are in the building. It can fill its clubs with a smaller share of revenue because it loses fewer people.

This is the mechanism behind the whole guide. Marketing spend is the price you pay for the members you failed to keep, plus the members you are adding on purpose. Lower the first number and the second gets much cheaper to fund.

Our retention benchmark guide covers the churn side of this in detail, and the revenue per member pillar covers the value side. A marketing budget sits downstream of both.

So what should an independent studio spend?

The honest answer is that there is no published, methodologically sound benchmark for independent studios, and you should be suspicious of anyone who quotes you one.

We went looking. The Health & Fitness Association's benchmarking report does collect operator financials, but the marketing line items sit behind member access, so there is no public figure to cite. Outside the association, the numbers in circulation come from vendor blogs, and they disagree by a factor of ten. One widely cited page puts gym customer acquisition cost between $63 and $713 depending on segment. Another puts paid acquisition at $60 to $130. Neither states a method, a sample size, or a year. They are not benchmarks, they are estimates with a confident font.

What you can take from the two filings above is a defensible range and the logic that sets your place in it. A high-price, low-churn, high-revenue-per-member operator can run at 1% to 2% of revenue. A low-price, high-churn, volume operator needs something closer to 8% to 10%. Most independent studios sit between those poles, which in practice means somewhere around 3% to 7% of revenue, with newer studios at the top of that band and mature studios with strong referral flow at the bottom.

Treat that as a sanity check, not a target. The number that matters is the one you calculate from your own figures.

Work out your own number

Three calculations give you a marketing budget you can defend to a bank, a landlord, or yourself.

Start with what a member is worth. Take your average monthly revenue per member, including the extras they buy, and multiply it by the average number of months a member stays. If your average member pays $150 a month and stays 14 months, that member is worth $2,100 in revenue. Apply your gross margin to get the contribution: at 70%, roughly $1,470.

Then set what you will pay to acquire one. The common planning heuristic is a lifetime value to acquisition cost ratio of at least 3:1. On $1,470 of contribution, that caps acquisition at about $490 per member. This is a ceiling, not a goal. Paying less is better, as long as you are still filling the floor.

Then multiply by the members you actually need. This is the step most studios skip. You do not need your growth target. You need your growth target plus everyone who will leave. A studio with 400 members, 3% monthly churn and a goal of 450 by year end needs about 144 new members over twelve months: 50 to grow, and roughly 94 to replace. At $490 each, that is a $70,000 annual marketing budget. Against $720,000 of revenue, just under 10%.

Now run the same studio at 2% monthly churn. Replacement drops to about 62 members, total need falls to 112, and the budget falls to around $55,000. One point of monthly churn moved the marketing budget by $15,000 a year without changing the growth target at all.

When a rising marketing share is really a retention problem

If your marketing spend is climbing as a share of revenue while your member count is flat, you are paying to stand still, and the price goes up every month that churn stays where it is.

The diagnostic is simple. Split your new members into those who replace a leaver and those who grow the base. If replacement is more than two thirds of your intake, your marketing budget has become a retention subsidy. Spending more on ads will keep the lights on and will not fix it, because you are refilling a bucket rather than mending it.

This is the same structural trap we described in Orangetheory's royalty mechanics, where the charge is levied on gross sales rather than profit, so the cost holds steady in a year the operator loses money. A contractual marketing minimum behaves the same way. Planet Fitness franchisees owe 9% of dues whether the campaign worked or not.

Independents have the advantage here, and most of them waste it. You are not bound by a franchise agreement, so your marketing spend is genuinely discretionary. You can move money from paid acquisition into onboarding, programming, or staffing the first ninety days, and watch the required acquisition volume fall. A franchisee cannot.

Where the cheap members actually come from

Across the operators we have looked at, the pattern holds: the cheapest members come from people who already know you. Referrals, members returning after a lapse, and walk-ins from the immediate catchment consistently cost a fraction of what cold paid media costs, because the trust is already built and the conversion step is short.

This is why the local marketing requirement in the Planet Fitness agreement is set at 7%, well above the 2% national contribution. Memberships are sold within a few miles of the door. National brand campaigns make the name familiar, and the local work converts.

For an independent, the implication is direct. Before raising the ad budget, check what share of your intake already comes from referral, and what you are doing to earn more of it. We covered the shape of this in our piece on where new members actually come from, and the referral gap among women aged 45 to 64 is a worked example of an underfunded source sitting in plain sight.

What this means for you

Start by measuring the right thing. Decide which of the three definitions of marketing spend you are using, then apply it consistently for a year. A number that moves because you changed what you counted is worse than no number.

Set the budget from the arithmetic, not the benchmark. Lifetime value, a 3:1 ceiling, and replacement plus growth will give you a figure specific to your studio. Use the 1% to 2% and 8% to 10% poles only to check that your answer is not absurd.

Then watch the ratio rather than the total. A marketing budget rising in absolute terms while falling as a share of revenue is the Life Time pattern, and it is what growth looks like. A budget rising as a share of revenue with a flat member count is a retention problem wearing a marketing costume, and no amount of additional spend will resolve it.

The 9% figure measures the price of a model built on churn. Treat it as a warning rather than a target. If you can stay out of that model, your marketing budget is one of the few costs in a studio that genuinely gets cheaper as you get better at the rest of the job.