Secrets of Above-Average Gym Owner Earnings

A proud gym owners stands in front of a client performing deadlifts.

I’m going to give you a sneak peek at what gym owners are making each month.

Our annual “State of the Industry” report will be out soon, and you’ll be able to evaluate the health of your business in about 10 different critical areas.

Perhaps the most important area of all: net owner benefit (NOB)/profit.

In 2024, the average owner of a gym that focuses on big-group training is earning between US$2,500 and $6,000 a month. That’s $30,000 to $72,000 a month in salary, benefits and profit.

And it’s not enough.

I want you to earn at least $100,000 from your gym every year—or about $8,333 per month. Great news: We can get the average gym owner to this level with just over two years of mentorship, no matter how poorly the gym is doing before a mentor digs in to help.

And $100,000 a year is really just a nice, round starting point. I actually want you to earn whatever you need to earn to live the life you want to live.

To show you what’s possible when you do the right things at the right time to grow your business, I’ll reveal our most recent leaderboard for monthly net owner benefit, then I’ll present insight from the leaders.

When you review this leaderboard, remember that these are rolling three-month averages, not one-hit wonders. All the gym owners on this leaderboard paid themselves very, very well for a quarter, and most sustain these levels all year.

In fact, here’s what they said when we asked them if these numbers were abnormal:

“We expect NOB to improve next month. Our NOB is actually down because of some investments in marketing infrastructure.”

“We have had this NOB for around six months or so and expect it to go up.”

“We expect the numbers to stay at this level.”

We had one gym owner who said a seasonal win gave her higher-than-normal NOB numbers, but remember we’re dealing with rolling three-month averages. She made our Top 20 when we ran our NOB Leaderboard back in April, so she’s not just making a guest appearance this month.

Here’s the Top 10:

A Top 10 leaderboard for net owner benefit, running from $16,937 to $37,507.


Tips From Our Leaders


We always ask our leaders “how did you do it?” Let me put their answers in context for you: Our top-earning gym owners used all sorts of creative strategies to generate the revenue they need to pay themselves.

Some invest in real estate so the gym pays them rent as landlord, some focus on corporate partnerships, some are marketing wizards, some have a solid number of clients with above-average revenue per member (ARM), and others have a smaller number of clients with monster ARM. And so on.

Here’s what they share: They all work with a mentor, and they all prioritize “paying myself first.” That’s not greedy. I know you got into the gym business to help people, but you can help more people for decades if a strong, profitable gym supports you, your family and your staff.

If you can’t pay yourself a great salary, you clearly can’t pay staff members properly. So build a career for yourself, then build careers for others. Then change your city or town for the better by helping people get fit.

Here’s how our leaders are generating amazing NOB:

Adherence/ARM: “We have seen very slow lead flow the past two months, so we are focusing on maximizing attendance for revenue.”

ARM/PT: “We do a lot of personal training for new clients, and every new member has an average of 10 to 12 PT sessions in the first months.”

Staff Communication: “We wrote down core values and teach our trainers to base decisions off that as a compass.”

Partnerships: “We built relationships for partnership agreements, which required a year’s worth of work. It was a lot more work than I had anticipated, but it was well worth it.”

Partnerships: “We have been quite successful with corporate clients and now have six different businesses that we do workouts for every week at their locations.”

Long-Term Planning/Real Estate: “We bought the building and are now paying rent to ourselves.”

Pay Yourself First/Retention: “We have been focusing a lot on retention and paying ourselves first for the last few years, and it has really paid off!”

And here’s one I love: “It made a massive improvement starting with Two-Brain Business. We took the gym from $25k months to $45k, but the biggest jump was when I committed to one hour a day of marketing after dialing in systems.”

Growing your gym in just 60 minutes a day is the theme of my new book, “The Golden Hour.” The top 12.5 percent of gym owners outperform everyone else because every day they do one thing to grow their businesses before they do anything else—and they always end up on our leaderboards.

Want to take big steps fast to improve your NOB? Work with a mentor: Let’s talk about it today.

Not ready for that? Let’s build some momentum together during my Golden Hour Challenge. For six weeks, I’ll help you establish entrepreneurial habits that will blossom into skills you can use for life. To take part, join the Gym Owners United group and watch for my posts starting Nov. 1.

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One more thing!

Did you know gym owners can earn $100,000 a year with no more than 150 clients? We wrote a guide showing 5 ways to do it.