How Much Do Martial Arts School Owners Make?

Search how much martial arts school owners make and you'll get a number in about four seconds. Plenty of sites publish one.

Now try to find where it came from.

We went looking ourselves. Five federal statistical programs, a handful of industry associations, three years of one franchisor's disclosures, and a 53-page FTC complaint later, here's the result.

No government or industry-association dataset measures what martial arts school owners earn.

The single regulated disclosure that comes close covers 59 franchised studios. And in October 2026, the FTC alleged it overstated what a new owner could expect.

So you'll get that one number here, with every caveat attached, including the federal one.

Then comes the answer, built from what Gymdesk actually holds. That's Gymdesk platform revenue data (2022 baseline), 18 schools whose owners sat down on camera with us, and a calculator that runs your own numbers.

If you haven't opened yet, our guide to starting a martial arts school covers the setup that gets you to any of these numbers.

The Short Answer

There's no official figure.

The closest thing is Premier Martial Arts' 2022 Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD), the legal filing a franchisor hands to buyers. Its Item 19 covered 59 franchised studios open all of fiscal 2021.

Median EBITDA was $89,140 on median gross sales of $286,336.

EBITDA means earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. It's the pool an owner draws from before debt payments and taxes, and it's the only profit number in the filing.

The average was $75,950 on average gross sales of $315,850, a 24.0% margin.

That came with caveats from day one: franchisee-reported numbers, 31 studios left out for incomplete financials, a COVID-year fiscal 2021, and franchised units only.

The same franchise is the closest thing to a number for karate school owners, too.

Then the FTC added a bigger one. Its October 2026 complaint says 38 of those 59 studios were run by experienced "Legacy" owners, and the other 21 by new franchisees.

By the FTC's count, those 21 newer studios had a median EBITDA of $28,347.

These are allegations. The franchisor and its former sales organization agreed to a proposed settlement, and its orders still need a judge's approval.

But if you'd be opening a new school, $28,347 is the closer guide. The details are a couple of sections down.

The original disclosure had a bottom half too. The bottom 15 studios averaged negative $15,795.

For your own school, the answer is a range with your numbers in it.

Two schools with the same 150 students can pay their owners wildly different amounts, or nothing at all. It depends on your rent, your payroll, and whether you count your own teaching hours as a cost.

So we'll follow one school through the math. Tapped Out Martial Arts is made up for this post (the name is about the bank balance, not the submission). It has 112 students paying $85 a month, which is right on the Gymdesk platform average.

The calculator below runs your version. It's a short scroll.

Why Nobody Can Tell You What Martial Arts School Owners Earn

Every dataset you'd expect to have this number skips the owner, each for its own reason.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't cover owners. Its Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey (OEWS) is the go-to source for pay by job. Its own FAQ says the survey "does not cover the self-employed, owners and partners in unincorporated firms."

BLS counts 15% as self-employed among fitness trainers and instructors. None of them are in the wage data.

What OEWS does measure is still worth knowing, as long as you label it right. Median annual pay for fitness trainers and instructors is $47,160, and the middle 80% earn between $28,800 and $83,100 (May 2025).

That's instructor pay.

It's the right benchmark when you're setting a coach's wage, and our martial arts instructor salary guide has the full picture. To price a specific role, use the martial arts instructor pay calculator.

None of it tells you what the owner takes home. A site quoting these figures as owner income is quoting employee wages under a new label.

IRS Statistics of Income stops at "Educational services." Download the sole-proprietorship workbooks for tax year 2023 and go row by row. There's no line for martial arts instruction, and no breakout inside education at all.

The one line that exists averages $5,731 per return in net income less deficits, so the money-losers are averaged in. It lumps together every sole-proprietor education business, from tutors to music teachers.

As far as the IRS is concerned, your spinning back kick and a kid's piano lesson are the same line item. The line also leaves out anyone running an S-corp or a partnership.

Census Nonemployer Statistics has no row for you and no income field. The 2023 national file has zero rows for sports and recreation instruction (NAICS 611620), the code martial arts schools file under.

And a perfect row wouldn't help.

That file publishes receipts only. No profit, no owner draw.

The Annual Business Survey asks the wrong question. Its owner tables ask whether the business is the owner's main source of income. They never ask how much it pays.

County Business Patterns leaves owners out. It skips businesses with no employees, and its payroll figures don't include what proprietors or partners pay themselves.

Industry associations don't fill the gap. The Health & Fitness Association publishes a real compensation report with its method disclosed.

It covers about 50 job titles at 88 companies across the US and Canada. That's employee pay again.

No public owner-income data turned up from MAIA, the martial arts industry association, either.

And the sites that do cite a filing get it wrong. FranchiseOverview.com's Premier Martial Arts page says, as of November 2026, that Premier "does not provide an Item 19 financial performance representation in their FDD."

That's false. The FTC's complaint reproduces the 2022 Item 19 tables, and the same page's own summary box lists "Earnings Claim (Item 19): Yes."

The one regulated number has an asterisk now

The Premier filing has problems of its own, and the FTC complaint lays them out.

The 38 Legacy owners were mostly martial artists who'd been running their own studios under a license before the franchise existed. They converted to franchise agreements on different terms.

They didn't have to follow the set curriculum, and they paid a flat $1,000 a month in place of the 7% royalty everyone else paid.

Their studios were bigger, too. At least 19 of the 38 were 2,000 square feet or more. Most newer studios with known sizes were 1,200 to 1,600.

Put the two groups in one table and the median goes up. Here's how the disclosed figures compare with the FTC's count for the newer studios:

Source: FTC complaint against Premier Franchising Group and Franchise Fastlane (October 2026), paragraphs 41–43, 105, 111, and 118–121.

The new-franchisee rows are the FTC's figures from the franchisor's records, and they are allegations, not court findings.

The franchise website also advertised "$548,345" in average 2021 gross sales. Per the complaint, that was the top 15 studios only, with the explanation in a footnote.

🥋 Pro tip: If you're buying a franchise or an existing school, ask which locations are in the numbers, how long they've been open, and who runs them. Under the FTC's Franchise Rule, any earnings figure a franchise seller gives you belongs in Item 19 of the FDD. A number that isn't in there is your answer.

What a Martial Arts School Actually Brings In

Revenue is the part anyone can measure.

It's a different question from what you take home, but start here anyway, because everything after this is subtraction.

US martial arts schools on the Gymdesk platform average $114,657 in annual revenue with 112 members (2022 baseline). That's schools running on Gymdesk, not a random sample of every dojo in America, and the baseline is four years old.

The full breakdown by discipline is in the martial arts industry statistics roundup, from MMA at the top to kung fu at the bottom.

For market context, IBISWorld estimates the US martial arts studio market at $21.2 billion in 2026 across 76,364 studios.

Divide it out and you get about $278,000 a studio, which is closer to the franchise numbers above than to the Gymdesk average.

Across the 18 schools featured in Gymdesk Originals episodes, monthly rates run from $79.99 to $180. Nobody charges more than $180. At the ceiling is 10th Planet Long Beach, in a coastal metro.

Their Inland Empire location opened at $79.99 and stepped up by milestone: $100 at 50 members, $120 at 80, $140 at 100. Early members kept their original rate for good.

To model your own revenue before you touch costs, the gym revenue calculator handles the membership math.

From Revenue to What You Take Home

A school grossing $114,000 does not pay its owner $114,000. It usually doesn't pay them anything close.

That gap shows up in every discipline. Muay Thai gym owners run the same math, and so do boxing gym owners, even though boxing sits high in the Gymdesk revenue spread.

The Premier FDD is useful again here, because it itemizes. The cost lines are a fair picture of where a school's money goes, even if the profit line needs that asterisk.

Against median gross sales of $286,336, the cost lines looked like this:

Source: Premier Martial Arts 2022 FDD, Item 19, fiscal year 2021, 59 franchised studios. The EBITDA share is our math (median EBITDA divided by median gross sales), not a figure the FDD states. The FDD's average-based margin is the 24.0% above.

"Other costs" includes the royalty and system development fees franchisees pay and independents don't.

EBITDA is a rough stand-in for the owner's pool. Two bills still come out of it before you see a dollar.

Debt payments sit between EBITDA and your bank account. The franchisor has put the cost of opening one Premier studio anywhere from $100,553 to $421,800 over the years. If you borrowed any of that, the loan payment is not a rounding error.

Taxes come after that.

Here's Tapped Out's year, start to finish. It grosses $114,240. Rent takes $15,600, payroll $32,400, and everything else (ads, gear, insurance, software) $30,000.

That leaves an owner pool of $36,240. Say the owner borrowed $60,000 for mats and a build-out, at about $1,250 a month. That's $15,000 a year, which leaves $21,240 before taxes.

Now the hours. Tapped Out's owner teaches 20 hours a week and does another 10 of admin that nobody puts on a schedule.

That's 1,560 hours a year. Before the loan, the owner pool works out to $23.23 an hour, a hair above the $47,160 median instructor's $22.67. After the loan, it's $13.62.

Run your own take-home

So run yours.

It opens on Tapped Out's numbers, and they aren't invented. Students and revenue per member come from the Gymdesk platform average (112 members, $114,657, 2022 baseline).

Rent, payroll, and other costs are the Premier FDD's cost ratios applied to a school that size.

Turn on "I also teach" and the calculator pulls your own teaching hours out of payroll and shows the hourly rate you're actually working for. It's the fastest way to find out whether you have a business or a very demanding hobby.

The model leaves out taxes, debt payments, and seasonality on purpose. Add those yourself before you sign anything with the word "lease" on it.

Is your margin normal?

Two outside figures land near 24% EBITDA, before any owner pay.

One is Premier's franchised studios (24.0% average, fiscal 2021). The other is the Health & Fitness Association's 23.6% median for 175 health and fitness companies, which aren't martial arts schools.

In the Premier FDD, the top 15 studios ran 35.1% and the bottom 15 ran −10.4%.

Given the FTC's case, read the top of that range as a mature-studio number.

Tapped Out lands at 31.7%, which looks great until you remember where the costs came from. They're Premier's ratios, and its owner's 30 hours a week aren't in them.

How owners actually pay themselves

The owner pool is what's available.

How you take it depends on how the school is set up.

If your school is an S-corp, the IRS says you have to pay yourself "reasonable compensation" as wages before you take other distributions.

It weighs your training and experience, the time you put in, and what comparable businesses pay for the same work.

It gives no fixed percentage. That one's a conversation with your CPA.

How Much Martial Arts School Owners Make by School Size

The table below is modeled, because no dataset exists to build a real one.

It holds revenue at an $85 blended monthly rate per member (the 2022 Gymdesk platform baseline) at every size.

The 2026 Gymdesk Benchmark bands run from about $102 a member under 50 members to $66 at 200 or more, so read the bigger rows as generous. The cost load falls as you grow, because rent and insurance don't care how many students walk in.

The 112-student row is Tapped Out, the made-up school above. The curve assumes rent and insurance stay flat and payroll grows with headcount, which is an assumption, not an observation.

This table hides two things, and you should put them back.

Your own teaching labor isn't in the cost load. If you're the head instructor, you're working a full-time job that never shows up as an expense, and that flatters every row.

The 40-student row is a warning. Argyle Jiu-Jitsu set break-even at roughly 70 members and hit it in three to four months, on the back of a pre-sale campaign. Not everyone gets there that fast.

Below break-even, the owner pool goes negative and the difference comes out of your savings. The gym break-even calculator will tell you where your line is.

The Schools Running on Zero Owner Salary

Some owners take nothing, on purpose or otherwise.

Shogun West BJJ in Rochester opened with zero students. Asked on camera what the north star for the business was, one of its three owners didn't hesitate.

He talked about the kids who need somewhere to go after school, and the single parents calling in looking for a male role model.

Then he said this:

Part of where the money goes instead: the gym runs the Richard J. Ryan Scholarship Fund. It covers up to 80% of a membership for anyone who can't pay, and waives the rest when 20% is still too much.

Their next financial goal is paying their coaches.

Two other schools we filmed run on the owners' day jobs.

At Roll Society in Las Vegas, both owners work full time somewhere else. Joey has been at an architecture firm for 20 years, and Professor Santos teaches evenings after nine- to 11-hour workdays.

Forte Jiu-Jitsu bootstrapped out of a $500-a-month sublease paid for with freelance marketing work. Luke Boston still works a full-time corporate job, and the coaches volunteer.

Where the Extra Money Comes From

The schools with room to pay someone sell more than memberships.

NC Budo in Belmont, North Carolina runs an after-school program that's its main revenue driver, ahead of evening classes. School buses drop kids at the dojo from 2:30pm, and they rotate through martial arts, snacks, homework, yoga, and animal care.

King Tiger Taekwondo in Harrisburg bought a full ninja gym setup during COVID, because kids needed somewhere to move. The program outgrew the original space and now runs from a separate building five minutes away.

Argyle Jiu-Jitsu hosts about 50 homeschool kids at each of its two locations for PE twice a week. In a market with a lot of homeschoolers, that's paid hours on mats that would otherwise sit empty.

Triple 7 Jiu-Jitsu has grown its summer camp every year, from jiu-jitsu only in year one to bus trips, bowling, trampoline parks, and magic acts by year three. The summer camp profitability calculator will tell you whether yours clears its costs.

Sasaki Judo caps membership at 150 on purpose.

So growth had to come from somewhere other than headcount. He contracts out, teaching judo at BJJ schools a semester at a time, which pays him and puts him in front of new students in the same hour.

Most of these schools found something to do with the building between nine and five. Sasaki took the teaching somewhere else.

Tapped Out's mats sit empty until 4pm. One homeschool PE class like Argyle's, 20 kids at $60 a month, is $14,400 a year.

That's about two-thirds of what its owner clears after the loan, for two daytime hours a week.

If you're picking one, there's a longer guide to martial arts alternative income.

Where the Money Leaks

If the modeled table looked low, part of the gap is money you earned, or were about to lose, and never collected.

Two owners talked about this on camera.

Chai Sirisute, who founded 10th Planet Long Beach, ran it cash only for a stretch, with no contracts and no payment processing, out of a subleased church space. He calls it a mistake now.

Alma Fight Club went the other way and put every transaction through one system, so nothing gets collected by hand, or not at all.

The leaks are boring, and they add up. A card expires and nobody notices for six weeks. A member freezes in January and is still frozen in June.

Then there's the guy whose attendance dropped off a month before anyone called him.

At $85 a member, 12 leaks that each run a full year is a $12,240 hole. For Tapped Out, that's a third of its owner pool, or most of the loan payment. The billing leakage calculator will size yours.

Here's what normal looks like across 4,594 active gyms in the Gymdesk Benchmark, most of them martial arts and combat-sports schools:

• Payment collection. About 91.7% of owed revenue actually gets collected, and automatic retries recover roughly six in 10 failed payments.
• Members you lose each month. Between 2% and 3.5% once they're past the first 90 days (801,000 memberships). Nearly one in five quit inside those first 90.
• Trial conversion. Of real free trials, 73% become members (175,000 trials). It's 85.4% when software runs the follow-up and 70.8% when it's done by hand.
• Revenue per member. About $102 a month under 50 members, $92 at 50–199, and $66 at 200+. A lower per-head number at bigger schools is usually family and kids pricing.

Bands are observed across gyms with a payment or check-in in the last 90 days. Billing and retention look back 12–24 months, re-run in June 2026 after an internal audit.

To grade your own numbers against those bands, enter the counts you already have (members, trials, cancellations):

Most of that hole closes once somebody is watching it. The guide to martial arts business metrics covers which numbers to check and how often.

This is the part software is good at.

Recurring billing runs on schedule. Failed payments retry automatically, on a schedule you set, before anyone has to notice. Absent-member alerts tell you who stopped showing up while they're still reachable.

Gymdesk does all three.

If you're comparing options, the field is laid out side by side in the best martial arts management software. The martial arts gym growth diagnostic is quicker if you just want to know which lever matters most at your size.

Mostly it means the card that expired in March gets caught in March.

Your School's Number Is the Only Real One

So how much do martial arts school owners make? Nobody has counted. Plenty of sites publish a number anyway.

What does exist is one franchisor's disclosure (now with an FTC complaint stapled to it) and the Gymdesk platform data.

Then there are the 18 schools whose owners told us what they charge, what they built, and, in one case, that they've never paid themselves.

Between them, you can get to a real answer for your school in about five minutes with the calculator above.

That owner would cry if you looked at his books. By his own account, he's also having a great time.

Want to see where your money's leaking? Start a free trial of Gymdesk and run your own billing through it.