Club prices below were read on planetfitness.com on 15 September 2026. The 2024 price history is sourced separately and linked where it appears.
On 15 September 2026 we read the published offer page for seven Planet Fitness clubs. A year of the Classic membership costs between $170 and $288 depending on which one you walk into. Black Card runs from $349.88 to $456.88.
Those are complete first-year numbers with the startup fee and the annual fee in them. The advertised monthly rate across those seven clubs ran from $10 on Classic to $37.99 on Black Card, which is why a single national answer to this question does not exist.
Planet Fitness does publish a floor. Its fine print reads “Classic memberships begin at $15 and PF Black Card memberships begin at $24.99, billed monthly” (planetfitness.com), with a $49 annual fee on top. Take those at face value and a year is $229 on Classic and $348.88 on Black Card. Three of our seven clubs charged more than that on Classic. The other four charged less.
My position, stated flat: quoting “$15 a month” as the price of Planet Fitness is the mistake every article about this makes, our own homepage included until today. The number to carry into a comparison is your own club’s twelve-month total, and the only way to get it is to open that club’s offer page.
What seven real clubs were charging on 15 September 2026
Every figure in this table came off the club’s own /offers page on planetfitness.com, read on 15 September 2026.
| Club | Classic | Black Card | Annual fee | Startup | Classic year one |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manhattan, Midtown West, NY | $19 | $37.99 | $59 Classic, none on Black Card | $1 | $288 |
| Brooklyn, East New York, NY | $19 | $37.99 | $59 Classic, none on Black Card | $1 | $288 |
| Bronx, Fordham Rd, NY | $19 | $37.99 | $59 Classic, none on Black Card | $1 | $288 |
| Newark, NJ | $10, from $15 | $29.99 | $49 | $1 | $170 |
| Houston, Spring Branch, TX | $10, from $15 | $24.99 | $49 | $1 | $170 |
| Fort Worth, Alliance Town Center, TX | $10, from $15 | $24.99 | $49 | $1 | $170 |
| Oviedo, FL | $15 | $29.99 | none | $1 | $181 |
Read that table again, because four separate things in it contradict what almost every other page about Planet Fitness pricing tells you.
The annual fee is not $49 everywhere. The three New York clubs charged $59 on Classic and waived it entirely on Black Card. Oviedo waived it on both tiers. Only the New Jersey and Texas clubs matched the $49 in the national fine print.
There is a startup fee, and it was $1 at all seven. Nobody publishes that nationally, which is why so many articles say the fee is unknown. It is not unknown. It is on every club’s offer page.
The commitment is not consistent either. Six of the seven offers were no-commitment on both tiers. Fort Worth was the exception: Classic with no commitment, Black Card on a 12-month term.
And every one of these is a promotion with an end date. Six said “Offer Expires September 16th” or September 30th. Oviedo’s said “Offer Expires July 31st”, which had already passed by six weeks when we read it, so the page was stale. That is worth knowing before you treat any of these numbers, ours included, as the price next month.
The spread, in one line
Cheapest first-year Classic in our sample: $170, at Houston, Fort Worth and Newark. That’s $14.17 a month once everything is counted.
Priciest: $288 in all three New York clubs, or $24.00 a month. A New Yorker on Classic pays 69% more across a year than someone in Spring Branch for the same tier of the same chain.
On Black Card the gap is narrower in percentage terms and wider in dollars. Houston and Fort Worth came to $349.88 for the year, or $29.16 a month. The New York clubs came to $456.88, or $38.07. That’s $107 a year for the identical membership.
We went through that tier on its own, club by club, in what the Black Card tier costs over a year.
What the Classic membership actually includes
Classic gets you unlimited access to one club. Not any club, the one you signed up at, which Planet Fitness calls your home club.
Inside that building you get the equipment, free WiFi, free in-club fitness training, workouts in the PF app, and partner rewards and discounts (planetfitness.com). That’s the list. It’s short, and for a lot of people it’s also complete, because most gym members use one gym and use maybe six machines in it.
What Classic leaves out catches people. You cannot bring a friend. You cannot use the tanning beds or the massage chairs. If you drive two towns over for work and there’s a Planet Fitness across the street, your card won’t open the door.
That last restriction is the one Planet Fitness leads its own Black Card pitch with: “use of any Planet Fitness worldwide,” ahead of every amenity. It’s a fair guess that’s the line that converts.
What Black Card costs, and what the upgrade buys
At the published floors, Black Card is $9.99 a month more than Classic, or $119.88 across a year. At our seven clubs the real gap ran from $14.99 a month in Oviedo to $18.99 in the New York clubs, so check the actual spread at your club before you use $119.88 for anything.
Six things come with Black Card that Classic doesn’t have (planetfitness.com).
Access to every Planet Fitness location, which the company puts at 2,900-plus worldwide. A guest every single visit. The Black Card Spa, which covers massage chairs, HydroMassage, tanning, Total Body Enhancement, the wellness pod and the recovery lounge. PF+ app workouts, walled off from the Classic version of the app. An upgraded “premium perks” tier of partner rewards above Classic’s plain perks. And 50% off select drinks from the cooler.
Two caveats sit on that list, both from Planet Fitness’s own fine print.
The first is “participating locations only.” The Black Card Spa is not a standard fit-out. A club in a converted retail unit with a low ceiling may have the massage chairs and no tanning beds. Nobody publishes a per-club amenity list, so the only reliable check is to walk in and look. If the spa is why you’re upgrading, go and look first.
The second is tanning. Planet Fitness notes that “state and local restrictions on tanning frequency” apply. That restriction comes from state law rather than from Planet Fitness, so it changes when you cross a state line. In some states minors can’t use commercial tanning beds at all. A Black Card sold on tanning may deliver less tanning than you expect.
Is the upgrade worth it? The honest answer depends on a number Planet Fitness doesn’t publish: what your club charges a walk-in for a day pass. If you bring someone twice a month, the guest privilege is two day passes you didn’t buy, and at most clubs that will clear $15 to $19 a month comfortably. Ask your club for its day-pass price and do that arithmetic yourself. If you train alone at one club and have never used a massage chair, skip it.
There is a free way to try a club before any of this applies, which we cover in how to get inside before you pay for anything.
The annual fee, and why it isn’t always $49
Planet Fitness’s national fine print says “Subject to an annual fee of $49” (planetfitness.com). Our club sample says that’s the common case and not the rule: $59 at three New York clubs, $49 at three others, and waived entirely at Oviedo and on New York Black Card offers.
This is the charge behind the confused search at 7am when someone opens their bank app. People assume their rate has gone up or the club has double-billed them. Neither. It’s a separate yearly charge with its own calendar.
That calendar is the part worth writing down. Planet Fitness refers to an “annual fee date” and sets the deadline to stop the fee at “the 25th of the month prior to the annual fee date” (planetfitness.com). Your annual fee date is not your join date and not your monthly billing date. Ask at the desk what it is, because it’s the one date nobody volunteers.
It also recurs. Year two has one too, so the first-year totals in the table above are not inflated numbers that settle down later.
Is there a sign-up fee?
Yes, and it was $1 at all seven clubs we checked.
Planet Fitness publishes no startup fee on its national pages. Not on the memberships page, not in the customer service section. That absence is why most articles about this either guess a number or say it can’t be known.
It can be known. Every club’s /offers page names it, and on 15 September 2026 every one of our seven said “$1 Startup Fee.”
The caveat is the same one attached to everything else on those pages: it’s promotional and it has an expiry date. A $1 startup fee is a $1 startup fee this week. What Planet Fitness charges when no promotion is running, we haven’t seen, because we have not yet found a club page without one. If you see a club advertising a startup fee above $1, we’d like the link.
Why your club charges something different
Planet Fitness states it twice on the same page: “Prices may vary depending on location” and “Locations independently owned and operated.”
The second line explains the first. Most Planet Fitness clubs are franchises. A franchisee signs an agreement with the corporate brand and then runs a business with its own rent and its own local competition. Corporate sets the floor. The franchisee sets the price.
Our table is what that looks like in practice. Same chain, same two tiers, same week: $10 a month in Spring Branch, Houston and $19 in Midtown Manhattan. The Manhattan club is also the one charging the higher annual fee, so the gap compounds rather than evening out.
State and local taxes go on top, which Planet Fitness flags with “state and local taxes may apply.” Three of our seven club pages spelled this out further as “plus taxes & fees” next to the monthly rate.
Is Planet Fitness still $10 a month?
At three of our seven clubs, yes, this week. Which is a strange answer, so here’s the history.
Planet Fitness held the Classic membership at $10 a month for 26 years. That was the brand, not a promotion anyone expected to end. In May 2024 the company announced it would move to $15 for new members signing up that summer. The interim CEO put it plainly: “it is not going to come as a shock to anybody that we are moving a price that’s been in effect for a long, long time.”
The part that gets skipped: the increase applied to new sign-ups only. Existing members were reported at the time to keep their $10 rate, and Black Card stayed at $24.99.
So $15 is the floor now. But Newark, Houston and Fort Worth were all running a promotional $10, displayed on the page as a struck-through $15 next to a live $10. The old number came back as a discount off the new one, which is what a price rise usually looks like after eighteen months.
If your friend insists Planet Fitness is $10 and they joined in 2019, they’re probably right about their own bill. Whether they still are, I can’t tell you. Franchisees set their own rates, the company doesn’t publish when a legacy rate gets revised, and a $10 membership at an independently owned club is exactly the kind of thing that quietly gets looked at. If yours is still $10, leave it alone.
Do you have to sign a contract?
Sometimes, and you have to read the offer to find out.
The national fine print says “memberships may include 12-month commitment.” May. Alongside that, Planet Fitness sells No Commitment memberships it says can be cancelled “at anytime without paying a fee.”
Our seven clubs came out overwhelmingly no-commitment: thirteen of the fourteen offers we read carried “No Commitment” on the card. The one exception was Fort Worth’s Black Card, sold on a 12-month term while its Classic tier had none. So the commitment can differ between the two tiers at the same club on the same day.
If a membership does have a minimum term and you leave early, Planet Fitness states the price directly: “if your membership has a minimum term and is ended prior to end of contract term, a $58 buyout fee is required.”
The question to ask at the desk is not whether there’s a contract, because you’ll get a shrug about flexibility. Ask whether this membership has a minimum term and how many months, then check the agreement says the same thing.
The $58 is fixed, which is a small mercy. It doesn’t scale with months remaining. Leaving in month two and leaving in month eleven cost the same $58.
What a full year costs
Two ways to answer this. Here’s the published floor, which is what the national fine print adds up to.
| Classic | PF Black Card | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly rate, published floor | $15.00 | $24.99 |
| Twelve monthly payments | $180.00 | $299.88 |
| Annual fee | $49.00 | $49.00 |
| Year one at the floor | $229.00 | $348.88 |
| Effective per month | $19.08 | $29.07 |
And here’s what we actually observed across seven clubs on 15 September 2026.
| Cheapest observed | Priciest observed | |
|---|---|---|
| Classic, year one | $170.00 (Houston, Fort Worth, Newark) | $288.00 (three NY clubs) |
| Classic, effective per month | $14.17 | $24.00 |
| Black Card, year one | $349.88 (Houston, Fort Worth) | $456.88 (three NY clubs) |
| Black Card, effective per month | $29.16 | $38.07 |
The effective monthly figures are the ones to compare against another gym’s advertised rate, because they’re the only numbers with every published fee already inside them.
Here is every named fee in one place.
| Fee | Amount | When it’s charged |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly membership, Classic | $10 to $19 observed; floor $15 | Monthly, on the 17th |
| Monthly membership, Black Card | $24.99 to $37.99 observed | Monthly, on the 17th |
| Annual fee | $0, $49 or $59 observed | Once a year, on your annual fee date |
| Startup fee | $1 at all seven clubs, promotional | At signup |
| Buyout fee | $58 | Only if you end a minimum-term membership early |
| State and local tax | Varies | Added to the monthly charge where applicable |
Neither table includes tax, because there’s no honest national number for it.
What taxes add on top
Planet Fitness says “state and local taxes may apply,” and three of our club pages went further with “plus taxes & fees” printed next to the monthly rate.
Whether gym dues are taxable in the United States is decided state by state, and in places city by city. Some states tax health club memberships outright. Others exempt them. Two clubs 40 miles apart across a state line can charge the same $15 and bill different totals.
There’s no national number to give you here, and anyone publishing one is making it up. Yours is on the first monthly charge that hits your account, and on the agreement you signed. If your state does tax dues, add roughly 7% to the monthly line before you compare Planet Fitness against anything else, which on a $180 year is about $13.
What two years and five years look like
Take the Houston club at $170 for year one. Year two is $169, because the $1 startup fee doesn’t repeat. Five years there runs $846.
Do the same at a New York club and five years of Classic comes to $1,436, a difference of $590 for the same tier of the same chain.
One number is worth pulling out on its own. At $49 a year, five years of annual fees is $245, which is more than a full twelve months of monthly payments at the $10 promotional rate. The charge people dismiss as “just $49” is the second largest line item in a long Planet Fitness relationship.
All of this assumes your club never raises its price. Franchisees can, and the company doesn’t publish when they do, so treat these as a floor and not a forecast.
Does switching between the tiers cost anything?
You can move from Classic to Black Card, and most people who do it want the guest privilege or the all-club access more than the massage chairs.
What Planet Fitness doesn’t publish nationally is whether the switch carries a fee, whether it restarts a minimum term, or what happens to your annual fee date when you change tiers. The club offer pages don’t cover it either; we looked at all seven.
Downgrading has less written about it and more potential to go wrong. If you signed up on a Black Card offer with a minimum term, like Fort Worth’s, dropping to Classic partway through is a change to a committed agreement, and committed agreements are the ones with the $58 attached.
Ask before you switch. Does this change my commitment? Does it move my annual fee date? Get those answers from the club holding your agreement, because the national help pages don’t address either one.
The three dates that decide what you pay
Three dates and a processing delay.
The 17th. That’s when the monthly membership fee is drawn (planetfitness.com). Not your join date, not the first of the month.
The 10th. To stop the monthly billing, Planet Fitness says “the club must receive notice of your request to end your membership by the 10th of the month.” Received by, not sent by. A letter posted on the 9th that arrives on the 12th has missed it, and you’ll be billed on the 17th.
Those dates now have a page of their own, with the annual fee dates the clubs publish: the deadlines that decide whether you pay again.
The 25th. To stop the annual fee, “your request must be received by the club by the 25th of the month prior to the annual fee date.” How much warning that actually gives you depends entirely on where in the month your annual fee date falls: about a week if it lands on the 1st, about five weeks if it lands on the 30th. Which is another reason to find out that date early.
The delay is separate. Planet Fitness says billing changes can take “up to 7 business days” to process, which is nine to eleven calendar days with weekends in it. That’s the company’s own processing window and not an extra deadline on you. The published cutoff is still the 10th. It is a good reason to give notice in the first week rather than on the 10th itself.
How you actually cancel
Three methods, and Planet Fitness names all three: “send written notification via mail to your home club requesting to end your membership, visit your home club in person, or log into your account online through the member portal.”
Note where the mail goes. Your home club, not a corporate address. The club holds your agreement and the club has to receive the notice.
The online route has become the one clubs advertise. Two of our seven offer pages, Houston and Brooklyn, carried “Cancel Online, Anytime!” on the membership card itself. That’s a franchisee-level promise on a franchisee-level page, so it isn’t a guarantee every club honours the portal the same way, but it’s now common enough that Planet Fitness puts it in the sales pitch.
Whichever route you take, generate something with a date on it. A certified mail receipt, a portal confirmation screenshot, or a dated copy of the cancellation form from the front desk. The 10th is a receipt deadline, and if the club says it never received notice, the date on your side is the entire argument.
Can you pay with a credit card?
At a lot of clubs, no.
Planet Fitness notes that many locations “accept payment through checking accounts only,” billed by electronic funds transfer. The Houston club’s offer page said it outright on the membership card: “Billed monthly to a checking account.”
For most people this is a shrug. For some it’s a wall. If you don’t have a US checking account, or you’ve been keeping subscriptions on a card so you can kill them by replacing the card, an EFT-only club is a problem to find out about before you’re at the desk with your ID out.
There’s a consequence people don’t think through. Cancelling a card stops a card charge. It does not stop an EFT, and closing a bank account to escape a gym membership tends to end in collections. With EFT billing the cancellation process is the only exit, which raises the stakes on the 10th.
What happens if you just stop paying
Nothing good, and Planet Fitness doesn’t publish the specifics.
Stopping payment is not cancelling. A membership stays active until the club receives notice by the 10th. Until that happens the club has a signed agreement saying it can bill you, and at an EFT club it holds your bank details, not a card number you can replace.
If your membership has a minimum term, walking away early also triggers the $58 buyout, and that obligation doesn’t disappear because the payments stopped landing.
What a club does after a failed payment is not on any Planet Fitness national page, and it wasn’t on any of the seven club pages we read either. Late fee, reinstatement charge, collections referral: all of it is franchisee-level and all of it will be in the agreement you signed. That document is the only place with a real answer, which is the second reason on this page to keep a copy.
Who can join, and at what age
Planet Fitness sets the floor at 18 in its fine print: “must be at least 18 years old to enroll, or 13-17 with parent/guardian.” Its longer wording of the same rule is that you can join at 13 or older with a parent or legal guardian’s permission.
Clubs can be stricter, and state law can be stricter still, particularly on which equipment minors may use and whether they can use tanning beds at all. A 15-year-old with a Black Card in Texas and a 15-year-old with one in New York do not necessarily get the same access.
What a non-member can do
Planet Fitness clubs sell day passes. The eligibility rule its customer service material gives is 18 or over with valid photo ID, with under-18s unable to buy one.
The price isn’t published nationally and it wasn’t on any of the seven offer pages either, which by now will not surprise you. It’s a club-level number. Call and ask, and if you’re weighing up Black Card, that number is the one that decides it.
The other route in is a Black Card member. Black Card includes bringing a guest every visit, so if you know someone on the upgraded tier you can train alongside them as often as they’ll take you, at no cost to you.
How joining actually works
You can sign up on a club’s own offer page or at the front desk, and both routes end with an agreement carrying your name and your bank details.
Bring photo ID and a payment method the club takes, which at many clubs means checking account details instead of a card. Pick your tier first. The Houston club’s page said plainly that membership is “Billed monthly to a checking account”, and finding that out at the desk with a debit card in your hand is a wasted trip.
The offer page is doing more work than people realise here. Whatever is on it this week is the offer, down to the startup fee and the date it expires. On 15 September our seven clubs were showing expiry dates of 16 and 30 September. Screenshot the page before you sign, because the price you were shown and the price on the agreement should match, and the page will have changed by next month.
Then read the agreement at the desk while somebody who can answer a question is still standing in front of you. It names your tier, your monthly rate, your minimum term, your startup fee and your annual fee date, and it is the only document where all five appear together. Ask for a copy, and if the club emails it rather than printing it, check the email arrived before you leave.
How to find out what your own club charges
Skip the national memberships page. It only carries the floor.
Go to planetfitness.com, find your club, and open its offer page. The URL pattern is planetfitness.com/gyms/[your-club]/offers, and that page carries the live local rate for both tiers, the startup fee, the annual fee, the commitment and the expiry date. It is the single most useful page Planet Fitness publishes and almost nobody links to it.
Then call, for the two things the page doesn’t tell you: the day-pass price, and your annual fee date. Write the answers down with the date and the name of whoever gave them to you.
Then check the offer page’s expiry date before you rely on it. Oviedo’s was six weeks stale when we read it.
The cheapest honest way to use Planet Fitness
If the goal is the lowest number, here’s what our seven clubs point to.
Check more than one club if you have a choice. The Houston and Fort Worth clubs were $118 a year cheaper on Classic than the New York ones, and a member near a franchise boundary may have two very different prices within driving distance.
Take Classic unless you’ll bring a guest or use a second club regularly. Get your club’s day-pass price first and let that number decide it rather than the amenity list.
Take the no-commitment option where it’s offered, which at our seven clubs was thirteen offers out of fourteen. It’s worth a dollar or two a month to never owe a $58 buyout.
Find your annual fee date in the first week and set a reminder for the 20th of the month before it. That gives you five days of margin on the 25th deadline, which is the only deadline here with no second chance.
And if you’re not sure you’ll still be going in March, don’t join in January because everyone else is. A membership you stop using in February still bills in March, and again when the annual fee lands.
What we could not confirm
These are the gaps we hit, and we won’t put a number on any of them until we can point at a source.
What the startup fee is when no promotion is running. The freeze or hold policy, which appears to be handled club by club. The refund policy, which isn’t in the customer service material at all. The day-pass price. Whether switching tiers carries a fee, restarts a term, or moves your annual fee date. What a club does after a failed payment. Per-club amenity lists for the Black Card Spa. Which payment methods a given club takes. And student, teen, military, family or couples pricing, none of which appeared on any of the seven offer pages we read.
If you have a current Planet Fitness agreement in front of you and any of these are named in it, we’d like to see it. Our method is on the how we research gym prices page, and the short version is that we publish what the gym publishes, date it, and say so when the gym publishes nothing.
The seven-club table at the top is the part of this page no other pricing article carries. It took about forty minutes to build and it will be wrong by October, which is the honest problem with every price on the internet and the reason we date everything. We’ll re-read those seven pages and republish the table. If you want a club added to it, say which one.
Sources: Planet Fitness memberships · Planet Fitness gym memberships · Planet Fitness customer service and FAQ · the seven club offer pages linked in the table above · Athletic Business on the 2024 price increase · ConsumerAffairs on who the increase applied to