How we check gym prices

Every price on TrueGymCost comes from the gym’s own website, or for a chain from that club’s own page on the chain’s site. Every number must appear there word for word, or we do not publish it. This page explains how, step by step.

The first-year cost

First-year cost = the monthly dues × 12 + the joining fee + the annual fee, plus any fee every member must pay (a key card, a “rate lock”). A plan billed every two weeks is counted as 26 payments, which is more than two a month. A plan paid once a year counts once.

The headline number on a gym’s page is its cheapest standard plan. Student, military, senior and other discounted rates are listed in the table but never used as the headline, because not everyone can buy them.
When a gym publishes its dues but not one of its fees, the total is shown as “at least”: it counts only what the gym publishes.
What leaving costs is worked out the same way: the cancellation fee, the dues still owed during a notice period, and on a contract that cannot be left early, the months that remain.

How the list of gyms is built

The list starts from open data (Overture Maps Places, which includes Foursquare OS Places and the chains’ own club finders), limited to the county and to places where you can join and train. Duplicates are merged, and every business is checked against its own website.

For chains, the chain’s own list of its clubs is the authority. A club the chain no longer lists is marked closed, with that list as the evidence; a club listed twice becomes one. Nothing is taken from Google Maps, Yelp or other directories.

How a price is read

We open the gym’s website and follow its own links to its membership, pricing, rates or join pages (and its sitemap), reading at most 15 pages per gym, one page every three seconds, as “TrueGymCostBot”. A site’s robots.txt is always obeyed.
When prices only appear once a page’s scripts run, we read the page in a real browser. For chains, we follow the club’s online join steps up to the screen that shows the plans and fees, and never past it: we never type anything but a ZIP code, never log in, never click “pay” or “join”, and never solve a captcha.
An AI model reads only the parts of those pages that mention prices, and must return, for every number, the exact words it read it from.

The check every number must pass

Its quote must appear on one of the gym’s own pages we read.
The number must appear literally in that quote (“$29” is not in “$29.99”).
It must be within sane limits: monthly dues up to $400, fees up to $300, a day pass up to $60.
It must make sense: an “annual fee” equal to twelve months of dues is annual dues misread, and is refused.

All or nothing: if any number of a gym fails, none of that gym’s prices are published and a person checks it. A half-right price table is a wrong one. Numbers read from a photo of a price board always wait for a person.

What the labels mean

Verified: read from the gym’s or chain’s own page and passed every check above, on the date shown.
Out of date: checked 46 to 120 days ago. After 120 days a price is hidden until it is re-checked.
Not published: the gym does not put its prices online. We never guess and call it a price.
Estimate: for a gym with no published price, the middle half of the first-year costs of at least 5 checked gyms of the same type in the same city (each chain counted once). Always a range, always labelled.
Member report: what a member told us they pay, after we checked it. Never shown as verified.
Closed: the gym’s chain no longer lists it, or its own site says it closed.

How often prices are re-checked

Every gym is re-checked automatically on the first day of each month. An unchanged price gets that day’s date. A change that passes every check goes live; anything doubtful (a large change, a plan that vanished, a site that closed) keeps the old price and its old date until a person has looked.

Corrections

Every gym page has a “Something wrong? Tell us” link. We check every report against the gym’s own page, and gyms can send their prices directly on our page for gyms. See our corrections policy.

Money never changes the data

Some links may earn a commission (how we make money). No payment ever changes a price, a label, a “cheapest” ranking or the order of gyms.

Last updated Sep 28, 2026.