Pick a region, any region. Someone is opening gyms there at a pace that would have seemed reckless five years ago.
PureGym is targeting 60 to 65 new sites in 2026 while simultaneously rebranding 56 former Blink Fitness locations across New York and New Jersey after a $121 million acquisition. Smart Fit added 341 gyms in 2025 alone and has guided for another 330 to 350 this year, including its first sites in Morocco. GymNation wants to double to 60 locations by the end of 2026. Anytime Fitness just signed a master franchise deal to open 60-plus clubs across Saudi Arabia. Basic-Fit, fresh from swallowing Clever Fit for €160 million, now runs 2,150 clubs across 12 countries.
The numbers are big, the ambition is bigger, and ... what exactly is the rush?
Different routes, different logic
What's interesting isn't just the pace of expansion. It's how different operators are choosing to grow, and why.
SATS, the largest fitness operator in the Nordics, made a deliberate decision in February 2023 to pause expansion and invest in understanding what its existing members actually wanted. Three years on, the results speak for themselves: full-year revenue up 9%, EBIT up 24%, and net profit up 46%. Group training sessions rose 11% in Q4. They've just started paying dividends! CEO Sondre Gravir didn't build 50 new clubs to get there. He made the 274 clubs he already had work properly and built a genuinely profitable business. The key? They used data and member insight to reshape their offering: more of what people actually valued, less of what they didn't.
JD Gyms took a similar approach. They've just hit 100 sites, with revenue up 21% and pre-tax profits up 42%. Yield per member is up £3 a month over the last 18 months, even with average fees below £30. They're planning 10 to 15 new sites this year, and CEO Alun Peacock describes the metrics as "sector-leading." He's not wrong. But those metrics didn't come from opening fast. They came from knowing what their members would pay for, and delivering it consistently.
These aren't operators who rejected growth. They chose to grow through depth before width.
Growth for growth's sake, or growth for exit's sake?
There's a pattern worth noticing here, and it has less to do with gym operations than it does with capital markets.
PureGym shelved an IPO in 2021 in favour of a £300 million equity investment from KKR, with Leonard Green & Partners retaining a majority stake. Four years on, those major US investors will be looking for a return. The aggressive push into the US (56 rebranded Blink sites, a target of 300 US sites over five years) starts to make more sense when you look at it through that lens. A listing is always an option in the wings. And American investors want American revenue. A UK gym chain with 700 clubs is a mid-cap play. A transatlantic gym chain with 1,000-plus clubs across two continents is a different proposition entirely.
GymNation's trajectory tells a different version of the same story. The founders completed a management buyout from JD Sports, backed by Tricap Investments and Ruya Partners. The push to 60 locations by year-end, the expansion into Bahrain, the Saudi launches: this is a growth curve designed to maximise valuation ahead of an eventual exit. CEO Loren Holland has openly discussed the possibility of a public listing, citing Saudi Arabia's Leejam Sports Company as inspiration. We'll need to see the impact of recent events in that part of the world, but the ambition is clear.
Even in the premium segment, the capital story matters. Third Space, London's luxury gym operator, secured a £75 million loan from OakNorth in October 2025 (the bank's largest leveraged finance deal to date) to fund new clubs including Oxford Street, Queen's Park, and Chelsea. That takes them to 13 sites and 42,000 members, with revenues up 90% since 2022. Then in February 2026, Sky News reported that KSL Capital Partners is preparing a potential sale at a valuation of around £700 million, with Goldman Sachs among the banks in the frame. Third Space has earned that valuation by understanding exactly what its members will pay a premium for. The question is whether a new owner can maintain that clarity at pace.
None of this is wrong, by the way. PE exits and IPOs are how the industry attracts the capital it needs to professionalise. But it does mean that when you see a headline about 50 or 100 new gym openings, the question worth asking is: who is that growth for? The members? Or the investors?
The question every growing operator has to answer
Whatever route you're taking, fast or measured, there's one problem that doesn't go away just because you opened another site. The UK fitness market now has a penetration rate of 16.9% and annual revenue of £5.7 billion. Growth is strong. But 75% of operators report facing local competition and 82% report challenges retaining members. That means roughly three in ten members leave every year.
That's a problem whether you run 13 clubs or 1,300. And it puts a very specific question in front of every operator chasing growth: do you actually know what your members value enough to stay for?
The operators posting the strongest numbers right now are the ones who can answer that. SATS invested in group training (up 11% in Q4), Reformer studios, Hot studios, and data-driven member engagement, because their data told them that's what members wanted. JD Gyms launched JD Engine, a coach-led conditioning class designed around what their members actually asked for, and pushed sites toward round-the-clock access. GymNation's 3,000 sign-ups in 24 hours for its Bahrain launch suggests they've read their market right too: affordable access for populations that never had a gym membership before.
Basic-Fit seems to be asking itself the same question from a different angle. After years of aggressive owned expansion, they're slowing to around 50 owned clubs in 2026 and shifting toward a franchise model following the Clever Fit acquisition. The details will come at their Capital Markets Day on 21 April - watch this space for my take on that. But the direction is clear: let someone else carry the capital cost of the new box, and focus on what happens inside it.
Where this leaves the industry
The gym industry in 2026 looks a bit like the restaurant industry did a decade ago. Rapid expansion, cheap(ish) capital fuelling a land-grab, and an assumption that whoever controls the most square footage wins. We know how that played out. Byron, Prezzo, Carluccio's, Jamie's Italian: all expanded aggressively through the mid-2010s, most PE-backed, and all hit a wall within a few years. Byron went from darling to CVA, shuttering two-fifths of its sites. Jamie's Italian collapsed entirely.
The brands that survived that period, and rewarded their investors handsomely, were the ones that grew at a pace their customer understanding could support. Nando's opens around 14 UK sites a year, not 50, and last year posted operating profits of £146.6 million on revenues of £1.48 billion. Chipotle owns and operates nearly all of its 3,700 sites and has returned over 6,000% since its 2006 IPO. The difference wasn't that they grew slowly. It's that they knew exactly what their customers would come back for, and they didn't outrun that knowledge.
There's nothing wrong with growing fast. GymNation is opening at pace because it identified a massive underserved population. PureGym is crossing the Atlantic because its low-cost model works and a bigger footprint creates a bigger opportunity. Third Space can command a £700 million valuation because its members will pay a premium for something specific. Speed isn't a problem.
The problem is growing without a clear answer to the question: what do our members actually value, and are we delivering it? The operators who can answer that, whether they're opening 10 sites or 100, are the ones building businesses that hold up. The ones who can't are just adding square footage and hoping the economics work themselves out.
In this land grab, the prize doesn't go to whoever moves fastest. It goes to whoever knows their customer best.
