How Much Do Muay Thai Gym Owners Make?

Ask the internet what a muay thai gym owner makes and one of the first answers it hands you is a fighter's purse. Rodtang, reportedly around $493,000.

That number is real. It's also useless to you, because Rodtang is a world-famous fighter in Thailand, not a guy who signed a lease near a strip mall and now owns the mats.

That's the whole problem in one search result.

Every source is answering a different question. One quotes a fighter's pay, the next a generic "gym owner" salary scraped off a job site, the third a franchise teaching kickboxing to a spin-class crowd. Every one of them slaps the muay thai label on it.

So we went looking for the real answer.

Federal wage data, industry benchmarks, a full sweep of franchise disclosure filings, and the places actual owners talk when nobody's selling anything.

Here's the short version up front: no survey, no franchise filing, and no reliable dataset measures what muay thai gym owners take home. What exists instead is more honest than a made-up average. It's the owners themselves, telling you it's usually a modest living, sometimes no living at all, and that the kids' class is what pays the rent.

The Short Answer

There's no number to give you, and the sources pretending otherwise are the ones to distrust.

The closest tracked figure for any combat sport is boxing, where the gyms running on our platform average $152,544 a year in revenue (2022 baseline).

Muay thai isn't measured on its own at all. It gets folded into the broad "martial arts studios" bucket with karate, taekwondo, and the rest, so nobody publishes a muay-thai-only cut.

And revenue was never the answer anyway.

Pull in $150,000 and you still don't pay yourself $150,000. Rent, coaches, insurance, and gear all get paid before you do.

What you'll actually keep is smaller than the top line suggests.

One owner with staff on payroll said he clears about $10,000 a year. Another, freshly open, called his best month "400 euros, before bills."

So the honest answer is a range with your own numbers in it. The calculator below builds it. Everything before it is about reading the numbers you'll find elsewhere without getting played.

Why Nobody Can Tell You What Muay Thai Gym Owners Earn

This surprised us too, so we'll show the work.

The datasets that skip owners entirely

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is the go-to source for what jobs pay, and it says so itself. Its own FAQ states the survey "does not cover the self-employed, owners and partners in unincorporated firms." Owners are excluded by definition.

What it does measure is coaches. Median pay for exercise trainers and group instructors is $47,160 a year (OEWS, May 2025).

That's the right number for setting a coach's wage. It tells you nothing about the owner's.

Every page quoting a trainer's salary as "muay thai gym owner pay" is handing you an employee's paycheck and calling it the boss's.

The rest of the federal system misses owners the same way.

IRS sole-proprietor data bottoms out at a category too broad to mean anything and skips anyone running through an S-corp, which is how most real gyms are held. The Census business surveys either have no row for a muay thai gym or publish no income field at all.

The same dead end turns up for martial arts school owners. The muay thai answer is identical.

Nobody even agrees on how many muay thai gyms exist. One industry directory lists 1,724 in the US; a market-research estimate says 2,208. They're off from each other by nearly a third, and neither traces back to anything you could check.

The data isn't hiding. It was never collected.

The franchise disclosures that don't exist for muay thai

There's one regulated exception, and for muay thai it comes up empty.

When a company sells franchises, the FTC makes it file a disclosure document. If that company wants to claim what its locations earn, it has to put real figures in a section called Item 19 and stand behind them under penalty of law.

That's the one place actual gym financials show up for real.

So we read the filings. Every fitness and recreation franchise document in the public library, searched one by one.

Not a single muay-thai-branded franchise discloses unit financials, because muay thai barely franchises at all. It's a coach-owned, independent sport, built by fighters who opened a room, not operators who bought a territory.

The kickboxing brands that come closest all decline to give a number.

9Round, CKO, iLoveKickboxing, Jabz, Mayweather Boxing + Fitness. Every one leaves Item 19 blank. Some are shrinking while they do it: per their FDD outlet counts, 9Round dropped from about 445 locations to 200 in two years, and iLoveKickboxing went from 84 to roughly 30.

A franchise with strong economics tends to brag about them. A franchise closing doors tends to keep that box empty.

One boutique brand does disclose real revenue.

It's KickHouse, at about $355,000 a year per studio. Read the fine print, though: KickHouse is cardio-kickboxing, not muay thai.

Its own filing never uses the word.

It's a group-fitness format built around a heavy bag and a playlist, a genuinely different business from a fight gym. Quoting it as muay thai would repeat the exact mistake this whole post is trying to fix.

What a Muay Thai Gym Can Bring In (On Paper)

Revenue is the one piece you can actually model. Just label it for what it is. A projection, not a survey.

Start with what you can charge.

An unlimited monthly membership at a muay thai gym usually runs $100 to $200, and drop-ins land around $40 (self-reported across roughly 154 US gyms on muaythaiclasses.net, so treat it as a sense of the market, not gospel).

Now multiply. Put a hundred members on $150 a month and you're at $180,000 a year; eighty at $120 lands a little over $115,000. Add fight-team dues, private sessions, and merch, and your top line moves again.

The catch is the number you can't look up: how many members you'll actually hold. That's the whole ballgame, and it's the one variable no average can hand you.

The only top line worth planning around is your own.

The gym revenue calculator and the membership pricing calculator run it on your rates and your roster.

For a benchmark, the nearest tracked combat sport is boxing, where independent boxing gyms on our platform average $152,544. Keep in mind what that figure is: boxing gym revenue, and revenue is not take-home.

From Revenue to What You Take Home

Model $150,000 and you still pay the landlord first.

Muay thai needs real square footage and ventilation, and if you want a ring, that's anywhere from nothing to $25,000-plus for the signal that you're a serious room.

Heavy bags cap how many people you can train at once, so they're a cost and a ceiling at the same time. Then coaches, insurance, and gear that wears out on a schedule. The start a muay thai gym guide walks the full build-out if you're costing it from scratch.

Across the fitness industry, the median gym runs an EBITDA margin around 23.6% (HFA, 2025).

Use it as a rough industry frame, not a muay thai promise. But it makes the point: most of the top line is already spoken for before you see a cent.

And then there's the cost nobody puts on the spreadsheet.

You are the head coach, and you're not charging the gym for it. You'll teach most of the classes yourself, and you won't put your own labor on the books. Almost no owner we read does. So "profit" and "owner pay" quietly become the same line, and it's a small one.

Run yours with the gym profit calculator.

What Owners Actually Say They Make

No dataset counts this, but owners will tell you straight if you find the rooms where they talk shop. The story is consistent.

The modest-income majority

The take-home most owners describe is modest, and a lot of them say so cheerfully.

One owner with trainers on payroll laid it out: after everything's paid, he keeps about $10,000 a year. His words for it were "a cool side hustle." Another who'd just opened reported his highest month yet at 400 euros, before bills and taxes had their turn.

These aren't failing gyms.

They're normal ones, run by people who love the sport and priced it like they love it.

Why kids' programs keep the lights on

Ask a room full of gym owners what actually pays the bills and you'll get the same answer over and over.

"Kids programs is what keeps the lights on for most gyms."

That was the single most-agreed-with thing owners said, and it lines up with what we've heard from martial arts owners across every discipline.

Parents pay reliably, sign up siblings, and stay for years. Your packed adult sparring class is the soul of the gym. Your after-school program is the revenue.

See what a program could add with the kids program revenue projector.

The "don't quit your job" consensus

When someone shows up in those rooms saying they want to quit their corporate job to open a gym, the response is nearly unanimous, and it isn't gentle.

One owner put it bluntly: "nearly every gym owner I know would walk away from their gym if they could secure a $150k corporate job."

Another, running a mixed gym with a couple hundred members, described stretches where the owners drew nothing at all, then a month or two at about $1,500.

The advice that comes back, almost every time, is to keep the paycheck a while longer.

The Owners Who Do Get Paid

Some owners do reach a full-time living off the gym. The how is never a magic price increase.

Two bridges and a sanitation truck

Two Bridges Muay Thai sits in Lower Manhattan, and three fighter-coaches built it with no outside money at all.

For the first couple of years, one of the owners, Dillan, kept a sanitation job on the side—night shifts, finishing at three or four in the morning, then coaching. He didn't quit it until the gym could finally cover him full-time and his partner told him to hang up the day job and come teach.

Now all three coach full-time.

That's what getting paid looks like in this sport. Not a survey figure. Years of unpaid grind that finally clears, and a gym busy enough to carry the people who built it.

What separates the paid from the unpaid

The owners who make a living aren't charging double. They're doing two things you can copy.

The first is selling past the adult membership.

Kids' classes are the obvious one, but you also want fight-team dues, private sessions, and fitness-framed daytime classes for the people too intimidated to call it fighting. Two Bridges leads its marketing with "fitness" instead of "martial arts" for exactly that reason, to get nervous first-timers through the door.

Muay thai gym marketing is half the job of getting paid.

And they collect every dollar they're actually owed. That's where most of the take-home quietly leaks out.

Where the Take-Home Actually Leaks

The gap between what your gym earns and what you keep isn't only rent and payroll. A surprising slice of it is money you already earned that never quite lands in the account.

Two Bridges hit this one directly.

Their old software only allowed a single recurring charge per member, so they couldn't bill for a membership and a locker at the same time. Every month, money they'd earned just didn't get charged.

That's the whole category: failed cards nobody retried, members who freeze and quietly never come back, charges you meant to set up and didn't.

Good software closes that gap without you thinking about it. Billing runs on schedule. Failed payments retry themselves automatically, and if you leave that on, the retries recover a meaningful share of what would otherwise be lost.

A member who stops showing up gets flagged while you can still call them.

This is the boring foundation, not a feature you have to babysit. The point of automated billing and member marketing is to get you off the laptop and back on the mats.

Size your own leak with the billing leakage calculator. Most owners are startled by it.

What Muay Thai Owners Actually Take Home

No survey counts muay thai owner pay.

The franchises that could show real books leave the box blank. Even the gym count is a guess—one source says 1,724, another 2,208.

But the owners who'll talk all tell the same story.

For most, it's a modest income and a labor of love. Run kids' programs, sell past the adult membership, and collect every dollar you're owed, though, and it can turn into a full-time living—the way it did for three fighters who started out training under a bridge.

The real answer is your rates, your roster, and how much of it you actually collect. It's the same story across every gym-owner vertical we've run the numbers on, BJJ gym owners included.

Run your own numbers, and if you want the software that plugs the leaks while you coach, start with a free trial.