Gym membership or pay per class? The math, with real US prices

A gym membership feels like a commitment to yourself. You pay once a month, and the price per visit drops the more you go. The trouble is that “the more you go” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. For people who train regularly in the same place, a membership is the cheapest option. For everyone else, paying per class is often cheaper, and it comes without contracts, notice periods and annual fees.

This article puts real numbers on that choice. We use prices that US gyms and studios publish on their own websites, read in October 2026, and a well-known study on how people actually use their memberships.

What the research says about gym memberships

In 2006 the American Economic Review published a study called “Paying Not to Go to the Gym”. The economists Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier analyzed the contracts and the day-by-day attendance of 7,752 members of three US health clubs over three years.

Members who chose a flat monthly fee of over $70 went on average 4.3 times a month. They paid more than $17 per visit, when a 10-visit pass at the same clubs cost $10 per visit. On average they gave up about $600 in savings over their membership. The authors also found that people who chose a monthly contract stayed enrolled longer than people who committed for a year, even though monthly members paid more for the option to cancel.

The lesson is not that memberships are bad. It is that people tend to overestimate how often they will go. Before you sign, count how many times you trained in the last two months, not how many times you plan to train next month.

Drop-in price vs monthly membership: where the line is

The useful question is simple: up to how many visits a month does paying per class cost less than the membership of the same gym? Here is the answer for five US gyms and studios, using the prices on their own websites. The math is ours.

In other words: if you train once a week, or irregularly, paying per class costs less than or the same as the membership in every one of these examples. If you train three times a week or more, always at the same place, the membership wins, sometimes by a lot.

Class packs: the middle option

Many gyms sell packs of 5, 10 or 20 classes at a lower price per class. At Minneapolis Boxing Club, for example, a 20-class pack costs $369, about $18.45 per class against $25 for a single class. At Yoga Now in Chicago a 20-class pass costs $320, or $16 per class.

Packs are a good deal if you are loyal to one place. They have two catches. The first is the expiry date: at Underground Boxing in Brooklyn a 10-class pack must be used within 120 days, and at CrossFit DC within 90 days of first use. The second is that the money is spent in advance, so if you move, get injured or simply change discipline, the unused classes are often lost.

The costs people forget

Comparing prices is not enough, because a membership often comes with costs that are not in the headline price.

• Sign-up and annual fees. Many martial arts schools charge a registration fee, for example $120 at East Valley Martial Arts in Arizona or $50 at Denwakan in Colorado. Some boutique gyms add an enrollment or initiation fee, like the $99 initiation fee at Thai Boxing Institute in Los Angeles.
• Notice periods. At Chicago Strength you need 30 days’ notice to cancel; at New Moon Yoga in Tennessee it is 30 days in writing.
• Four-weekly billing. Some studios bill every four weeks instead of every month, which means 13 payments a year. At Kalā Yoga in Brooklyn the $195 unlimited plan is billed every four weeks, which works out at about $211 a month.
• Card fees. Some gyms add a fee for card payments, like the 3.7% on credit cards at Chicago Strength or the 3% at Underground Boxing.

None of these costs apply when you pay for a single class.

If you do more than one activity

A membership ties you to one place. If you like to mix, the math changes quickly. Take someone in Chicago who does CrossFit once a week at Chicago Strength and yoga once a week at Yoga Now. Over four weeks:

• Paying per class: 4 × $30 + 4 × $28 = $232 a month.
• Two memberships: $210 + $165 = $375 a month.
• Two 10-class packs: about $178 a month, but tied to those two places.

Packs are the cheapest option here, as long as you stay loyal to both studios and use the classes before they expire. Paying per class costs a little more but lets you change studio, city or activity whenever you want.

When a membership is the right choice

We build an app for single classes, but we would be doing readers a disservice if we pretended a membership never wins. It does, clearly, when:

• you train two or three times a week or more, every week;
• you always train at the same gym;
• you use the extras that come with the membership, such as open gym hours, saunas or included workshops.

Even then, single classes stay useful: to try a studio before joining, to train while traveling, or to add a different activity now and then without a second membership.

A simple way to decide

1. Count your real visits in the last two months.
2. Find the single-class price and the monthly price at the gym you want.
3. Divide the monthly price by the single-class price. If you train fewer times than that number, pay per class.
4. Add sign-up fees, notice periods and expiry dates to the comparison.

For more examples across yoga, Pilates, boxing and personal training, see our guide to what a single fitness class costs, or our comparison of drop-in vs gym membership.

Where FlexDropin fits

FlexDropin is an app for the pay-per-class side of this choice. You find gyms and studios near you, see the real price of a single class and book it in the app, with no membership and no sign-up fee for the athlete. Gyms set their own prices, so what you see is what the gym decided to charge. If you are deciding whether you really need a membership, it is an easy way to test your real training rhythm for a month before committing.