The Gymdesk Benchmark
Six things the data told us
Read them in two minutes here, or take the scenic route through the chapters below.
Read these six findings together and they stop looking like six problems.
They're one.
The money never collected. The trials that fizzled. The members who quietly drifted off—and the growth left sitting on the table. Some of it is money leaking out, some of it is upside never picked up, but the root is the same: a gym doing by hand what the software was built to do on its own. The hopeful part: every one is also a lever. Walk the six chapters and you'll watch the same fix surface again and again.
The money you never collect
Ask an owner about failed payments and they picture declined cards. That turns out to be the wrong thing to worry about.
Last year, gyms collected about 92 cents on every dollar they were owed. You'd assume the missing 8 cents is the usual card trouble—expirations, banks saying no.
Nope.
Picture every $100 a gym is owed. About $8 of it never shows up. Barely 30 cents of that is a declined card—the rest was never charged at all.
And close to $6 of that $8 is the same story every time: the member never had a card on file. They signed up, nothing went on file to run, and the payment just… never happened.
When a gym does run a charge, it goes through about 99% of the time. The plumbing works fine.
So the leak isn't in the payments—it's at the front desk, the day a new member signs up and nobody asks for a card.
Two settings protect most of this money. Require a card on file before a membership starts, and leave automatic retries on. That's the difference between getting back 6 in 10 failed payments and waving them goodbye.
Turning trials into members
Trials convert better than most owners expect. The catch is how fast the window closes.
Out of 175,000 real free trials, 73% became paying members. That's far healthier than the usual gym-world worry that most trials just walk.
But timing runs the show. Sign-ups cluster in the first week or two, then fall off a cliff.
If a trial hasn't converted by day 14, it's probably already gone.
(We left comped and staff memberships out of this—they're not really trials, and they convert at a quarter of the rate.)
Speed is the lever here. A follow-up that fires on day one—automatically, before you've even thought about it—converts about 85%
of trials. Chase each one down by hand and you're closer to 71%. That gap isn't rounding: it's twice as many already-earned
members walking back out the door.
Why members stay
The clearest signal in the whole dataset is also the simplest: how often someone shows up.
Members who rarely show up quit about twice as often as the ones training three or more times a week. Put simply: show-up rate is retention.
And it's a number you can move. Get newer members onto the mat more often in their first few weeks and you'll do more for retention than almost anything else you could try.
Size plays in, too. The biggest gyms hold members best, while the mid-size 100-to-200 stretch struggles most—big enough that tracking everyone by hand starts to crack, not yet big enough to have the systems that fix it.
Those first weeks are where it's won or lost. Nearly one in five new members quits inside 90 days, and among the memberships that end, the typical one lasted just three months—the churn is front-loaded. Get a member past that first quarter and they're far likelier to stay.
After that, it settles into a steady drip: 2% to 3.5% a month, with one reliable spike every January, when the new-year sign-ups who were never going to last quietly cancel.
Retention is mostly won or lost in the first 90 days, and attendance tells you who's slipping before they ever cancel. When a member's visits start dropping, that's your window. Reach out then—not after they're already gone.
How gyms actually run
By now the pattern is hard to miss. The gyms that run by hand are the ones leaking time and money. The gyms that let the software run it keep both.
None of these gyms are doing anything wrong. They're just doing by hand what the software was built to handle—and paying for it in ways that never look like a crisis.
Look at the two biggest. Mark attendance by hand and you lose the early warning from Chapter 3—you can't see a member fading until they've already quit. Switch off auto-retry and you forfeit the 6-in-10 failed payments it would have clawed back for you (Chapter 1).
Here's the hopeful part: every one of these is on by default and works out of the box. The gyms that simply leave them running get the hours and the revenue back without doing anything clever.
The quiet tax only lands when a setting gets switched off. It never feels like an emergency—just a few hours a week, a couple percent of revenue, a member here and there slipping out the back. Flip the toggles and it's gone.
The highest-return thing you can do this week takes five minutes. Check three settings: is a card required at signup, are automatic
retries on, and is attendance being captured for you? Almost everything in this report traces back to those three toggles.
The economics of a gym
What members pay, what gyms earn, and why the gyms that scale fastest look a little different on paper—in a good way.
The typical member pays about $100 a month—list prices run higher, around $165, but family and multi-member discounts pull the average down. Total revenue still climbs hard as a gym grows.
Per-member revenue dips a little as you scale—and that's a feature, not a leak. It's the fingerprint of family plans, multi-member discounts, and kids pricing: the exact things that bring in more bodies and longer tenure.
So the gyms earning a touch less per head are usually the ones growing fastest. They traded a few dollars per member for a lot more members—a deal worth taking every time.
Almost 90% of gyms run more than one kind of pricing—usually monthly memberships next to drop-ins and trials. The monthly plan is the engine, about 63% of everyone enrolled.
Benchmark yourself against your own size tier, not the platform average. The fastest path to more profit isn't a price hike—it's the family-and-kids growth that scales your headcount, plus closing the billing and retention leaks from the earlier chapters. That's revenue you've already earned, just not collected yet.
The kids dimension
For most martial arts gyms, the kids program is the engine of the whole business.
More than three-quarters of gyms run a kids program—and those gyms are a lot bigger. Roughly 237 members each, against 107 adults-only gyms.
They hold members a little longer, too, at basically the same price per head.
So a kids program adds bodies without thinning out what you earn on each one. More members, longer tenure, same price.
If you're adults-only and weighing a kids program, the data is encouraging: more members, longer tenure, the same price per head. It's the most common way gyms on the platform grow, and it's not close.
Less admin. More members. Zero guesswork.
The problem in these six chapters belongs to every gym. The fix is the same one each time, and it's already built. Here's how Gymdesk turns each lever for you.