The Xplor Fitness & Leisure Fitness Industry Growth Report 2027 surveyed more than 180 gym and leisure operators across 19 countries. The headline it was written around is a good one: 74% reported strong or moderate growth over the last three years, and just 2% reported a decline. 68% of them opened a new location in that window.
The number the release does not lead with is the one operators should read first. Only 37% plan to open a new location in the next two years.
What does the gap between 68% and 37% actually mean?
It means the growth is retrospective and the expansion plans are not. 68% describes what happened between roughly 2023 and 2026. 37% describes what operators intend to do between now and 2028. The windows are not identical in length, so this is not a clean like-for-like, but the direction is unambiguous and large. An industry that spent three years opening sites is telling a survey it is roughly halving the pace.
The constraint is supply-side, not demand-side
The report asked what was making expansion hard, and the answers are not about members refusing to join.
| Expansion pressure | Global | UK |
|---|---|---|
| Difficulty finding suitable sites | 59% | 67% |
| Rising member acquisition costs | 60% | 70% |
| Recruiting qualified staff | 56% | 67% |
The UK column runs seven to ten points worse on every line. That is a real regional signal and not a rounding artefact.
Rising member acquisition cost is the one that connects directly to unit economics. It is the same pressure we tracked in the shift toward revenue per member as the primary lever, and in Xponential's Q2, where studio count went up and revenue per studio went down. When it costs more to fill a club, each additional club is worth less, and the case for the next one gets harder to write.
Almost nobody is funding this with debt
The financing split is the most underdiscussed number in the report. Only 36% of operators would consider debt financing. 58% prefer to self-fund.
That single fact explains a lot of behaviour that otherwise looks irrational. Xplor reports that among operators who opened, most built a brand new club rather than acquiring an existing one. In an industry where clubs are visibly failing, buying distressed assets should be cheap. But an acquisition needs capital in a lump, on someone else's timetable, and a self-funding operator does not have that. A ground-up build can be staged against cash flow. The build-versus-buy decision here looks less like a view on assets and more like a consequence of the balance sheet.
One caveat on that comparison, stated plainly: Xplor has not published how it defines a brand new club against a conversion or a fit-out of an existing shell. That definition sits behind the report's download form. We are treating the build-versus-buy split as directional and the financing split as the harder number.
What operators said actually drove the growth
Asked what was behind the three good years, operators named marketing (64% globally, 68% in the UK), retention (57%) and group fitness (55%), followed by operational efficiency, personal training and technology. As WellNation put it, sustainable growth is still being built on less fashionable foundations.
Wellness services, recovery, retail and high-profile race affiliations did not make the list. That is worth sitting with, given how much of this year's industry conversation, ours included, has been about HYROX ecosystems and recovery build-outs. Those may still be good decisions. They are not what this sample credits for its growth.
Read the 2% carefully
Only 2% of respondents reported a decline. That number is almost certainly understated, and not because anyone is lying. This is a survey of operators who were still trading in early 2026 and willing to answer a software vendor's questionnaire about growth. Operators who closed did not fill it in. Survivorship bias (the distortion that appears when a sample only contains the entities that lasted long enough to be sampled) is unavoidable in any voluntary operator survey, and it means the 74% should be read as "74% of the survivors", which is a different and less comforting sentence.
The research was gathered between February and May 2026. Set against our own reading of the market at the time, when memberships had recovered to 2019 levels without clearly generating new growth, the picture is consistent: a real recovery, absorbed by existing operators, now running into sites, staff and the cost of filling the next room.