The Boston Globe ran a piece on August 9 about gyms in Massachusetts roaring back, and the headline number is real. The state had more than 150,000 more gym members last year than in 2021. Health and Fitness Association data puts Massachusetts at 1.9 million members in 2025.
Which is exactly what it had in 2019.
The club count tells the same story. Roughly 1,700 commercial health clubs and studios operate in the state, also matching 2019. Same members, same number of doors, five years later.
Is the gym market actually growing?
In this market, no. It has recovered. Membership and supply are both back where they started, which means the category returned to its prior size rather than expanding past it. That distinction is the whole story for operators, because growth inside a flat category has to come from somewhere, and the only place available is another operator's member list. Category growth is durable. Share gains are borrowed, and they can be borrowed back.
Now put the operator-level numbers next to the state-level ones. Healthworks, GymIt and Republic Fitness have each grown membership about 20% since 2019 and are at record highs. SoWa Health and Wellness went from 400 members to more than 2,000 since opening in September 2023. Planet Fitness reported $1.3 billion in 2025 revenue, up 12%, and now serves over 21 million members globally.
A flat category with record-setting operators inside it is not a rising tide. It is a redistribution.
— The Run RateWhat the numbers look like side by side
| Massachusetts | 2019 | 2021 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gym members | 1.9M | ~1.75M (derived) | 1.9M |
| Clubs and studios | ~1,700 | Reduced | ~1,700 |
| Net change vs 2019 | Baseline | Down | Flat |
The most useful sentence in the Globe piece is the one that reads like a throwaway. Operators told the paper they are having difficulty attracting customers away from small boutique studios. That is the transfer market described in plain language, and it names who is on the other side of it.
The number to check before you plan around this
Net new members means members gained minus members lost, and most operators track it. Almost nobody splits the gained side by origin. That split is the difference between knowing your market grew and knowing you took someone else's members.
Add one line to intake: does this person currently hold, or did they hold in the last six months, a membership somewhere else? Then segment joins three ways. Never had a membership. Lapsed returner coming back after time away. Direct switcher arriving from a named competitor.
If the first bucket is thin, your acquisition strategy is a positioning strategy whether you designed it that way or not. You are winning because you are more compelling than a specific alternative, and the moment that alternative renovates, repositions or discounts, the flow reverses. If the second bucket dominates, you are in the reactivation business and your marketing should look almost nothing like it does today.
This connects to something we flagged in July. Gym visits were running ahead of 2025 on the headline, but visits per member had fallen, which is the number that actually predicts churn. Put the two together and the shape of the market gets clearer. The same population of members, spread across the same number of clubs, showing up slightly less often, being fought over harder.
That environment rewards two things and punishes everything else. It rewards a reason to choose you that a competitor cannot copy by next quarter, which is a positioning problem before it is a marketing one. And it rewards retention economics, because in a flat market the cheapest member you will ever acquire is the one you already have.
The pricing question follows directly. In a share fight, discounting is the fastest available lever and the most expensive one, since it invites the same response from everyone else and resets the category's price expectation permanently. Our framework for pricing a boutique studio without racing to the bottom is built for exactly this condition. So is the argument that revenue per member becomes the operative lever when member growth stalls.
Massachusetts is one state, and the national picture varies. But 1.9 million and 1,700 are clean numbers, and they say the same thing twice. The recovery is finished. What comes next is a share fight, and the operators who name it as one will plan better than the ones reading the same headline as a tailwind.