How Many Gyms Are in the US? #
The US had 41,556 fitness and recreational sports centers with paid employees, employing 708,273 people (Census CBP, 2023). That is an average of seventeen employees per location.
It is the most precise count the federal statistical system offers for this industry, and knowing exactly what it counts is the difference between using it well and misquoting it.
The Count Is Wider Than the Word Gym #
Fitness and Recreational Sports Centers (NAICS 713940) comprises establishments primarily engaged in operating fitness and recreational sports facilities featuring exercise and other active physical fitness conditioning or recreational sports activities, such as swimming, skating or racquet sports.
Census names the members of the industry explicitly, and the list goes well past what most people mean by a gym: physical fitness centers and gymnasiums, but also aerobic dance and exercise centers, ice and roller skating rinks, swimming and wave pools, and handball, racquetball and tennis club facilities.
Some things that look adjacent are outside the industry entirely. Golf courses and country clubs are classified separately, as are bowling centers, and sports and recreation instruction is a different industry again. So the count neither isolates gyms nor sweeps in every recreational business.
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Solo Operators Are Missing, and Not Published Either #
County Business Patterns counts establishments with payroll. A personal trainer working alone, a coach renting floor space, a studio owner who employs nobody: none of them appears in the 41,556.
For most industries the Census answer is Nonemployer Statistics, which counts businesses without employees and is where the other counts on this site get their second half. It does not help here. Nonemployer Statistics publishes no row for 71394 or 713940. We queried both for 2023 and the API returns an empty response for each.
The finest level it does publish is the whole of other amusement and recreation industries, which bundles fitness centers with golf courses, bowling centers, marinas and ski facilities. That total cannot be attributed to fitness, so this page prints no combined figure rather than borrowing one that would be wrong.
How We Counted #
The figures are the national County Business Patterns totals for NAICS 713940 for 2023, the most recent year published. We queried the Census API directly on 2026-09-22; the 2024 endpoint returns a 404, so 2023 is the latest available rather than a stale choice.
County Business Patterns counts establishments, meaning physical locations, not companies. A chain operating forty clubs is forty establishments and one firm, so the count answers how many places there are to go rather than how many businesses own them.
Two further properties travel with it. The reference period is mid-March, so a location that opened in June is not in that year's count. And figures for small geographies are withheld where publishing them would disclose an individual business, which is why a state or county number is sometimes unavailable while the national total is complete.
What the Count Does Not Show #
A count of locations answers one question and is silent on the rest. It does not say how many members those locations have, how many of them make money, or how fast the number is changing.
The operating side is covered on our page on gym member retention, which is the metric that decides whether a club is a good business, and the cost side on gym profit margins.
| Benchmark | On this page | In the report |
|---|---|---|
| Centers and employment, national | Yes | Yes |
| Wage benchmarks and industry receipts | No | Yes |
| Five-year employment forecast | No | Yes |
| State breakdowns and market concentration | No | Not in the Basic report |
| Membership and retention figures | No | Discussed, not measured |
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