Last checked: 15 September 2026
The Planet Fitness Black Card cost everyone quotes is $24.99 a month, and the upgrade from Classic gets described as about ten dollars more. We priced both tiers at seven Planet Fitness clubs. Across twelve months the upgrade added between $168.88 and $239.88, and the Black Card itself came to between $349.88 and $456.88 for year one.
One thing first, because the name collides with something else: the PF Black Card is a gym membership tier, not a credit card.
Planet Fitness puts Classic at “begin at $15” and the Black Card at “begin at $24.99” on its memberships page, with a $49 annual fee on both tiers. Run that and the upgrade costs $119.88 a year. Not one of the seven clubs came close to it.
Every club figure below was read off that club’s own offers page. Planet Fitness clubs are independently owned and each franchisee sets its own rate, so yours will differ. The last section shows how to check it in about a minute.
What the PF Black Card is, and what Classic leaves out
Planet Fitness sells two tiers. Classic covers unlimited access to your home club, PF App workouts, free in-club fitness training, free WiFi and partner rewards. That last item on the list surprises people: the free training sessions are on both tiers, so they are not a reason to upgrade.
The PF Black Card adds eight lines on top of all of that:
- “Use of any Planet Fitness worldwide”, which the company puts at 2,900+ clubs
- “Bring a guest anytime”
- PF+ exclusive app workouts
- Massage chairs and HydroMassage
- Tanning
- Total body enhancement, the wellness pod and the recovery lounge
- 50% off select drinks
- Premium partner rewards and discounts
So what Classic leaves out is the travel, the guest, and the spa side of the building. What it does not leave out is the gym floor. A Classic member and a Black Card member use the same treadmills.
That list is the whole pitch. What it will not tell you is the price, because the price is not national.
How much is the Black Card at seven real clubs
We picked seven clubs across New York, New Jersey, Texas and Florida, and read the monthly rate, the startup fee and the annual fee off each club’s own offers page, not off a national one.
| Club | Black Card monthly | Annual fee | Startup | Year one | Effective monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manhattan (Midtown West), NY | $37.99 | $0 | $1 | $456.88 | $38.07 |
| Brooklyn (East New York), NY | $37.99 | $0 | $1 | $456.88 | $38.07 |
| Bronx (Fordham Rd), NY | $37.99 | $0 | $1 | $456.88 | $38.07 |
| Newark, NJ | $29.99 | $49 | $1 | $409.88 | $34.16 |
| Oviedo, FL | $29.99 | $0 | $1 | $360.88 | $30.07 |
| Houston (Spring Branch), TX | $24.99 | $49 | $1 | $349.88 | $29.16 |
| Fort Worth (Alliance Town Center), TX | $24.99 | $49 | $1 | $349.88 | $29.16 |
Only two of the seven sold the Black Card at the $24.99 national floor. Three charged $37.99, which is 52 per cent above it. Two sat in between at $29.99.
None of those numbers include tax. Every offer page carries the line “plus taxes & fees”, and the memberships page adds that “state and local taxes may apply”, so your card statement will read higher than the table above.
How much is the Black Card per year
Twelve monthly payments, plus the annual fee, plus the startup fee. That is the whole calculation, and the total is the only number worth comparing between clubs.
Year one came to $349.88 at Houston and Fort Worth, $360.88 at Oviedo, $409.88 at Newark and $456.88 at the three New York clubs. As an effective monthly cost that is $29.16 at the bottom and $38.07 at the top. A $107 spread for the same card, described the same way on every one of those pages.
The national floor math gives $348.88 for year one. Houston and Fort Worth landed a dollar above it because of the startup fee, and every other club we read was higher. We priced the Classic tier the same way in what a Planet Fitness membership costs across a year.
Black Card vs Classic: what the upgrade really adds
This is the part that changed our mind about the tier. Comparing the two year-one totals at the same club gives the number that decides anything.
| Club | Classic year one | Black Card year one | Monthly gap | What the upgrade adds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manhattan (Midtown West), NY | $288.00 | $456.88 | $18.99 | $168.88 |
| Brooklyn (East New York), NY | $288.00 | $456.88 | $18.99 | $168.88 |
| Bronx (Fordham Rd), NY | $288.00 | $456.88 | $18.99 | $168.88 |
| Oviedo, FL | $181.00 | $360.88 | $14.99 | $179.88 |
| Houston (Spring Branch), TX | $170.00 | $349.88 | $14.99 | $179.88 |
| Fort Worth (Alliance Town Center), TX | $170.00 | $349.88 | $14.99 | $179.88 |
| Newark, NJ | $170.00 | $409.88 | $19.99 | $239.88 |
Newark was the worst of the seven. Classic there runs a promotional $10 against a $15 list price, the Black Card sits at $29.99, and both tiers pay the same $49 annual fee. The gap is $19.99 every month with nothing offsetting it, so the upgrade costs $239.88 across the year. That is more than a whole Classic membership at the same club, twice over, with $69.88 left.
The promotional Classic rate is what does it. Discount one tier to $10 and leave the other alone, and the gap widens without anybody announcing a price rise.
Notice also that the monthly gap and the yearly gap do not agree anywhere except Newark. That is the annual fee moving underneath the comparison, which the next section is about.
Does the Black Card have an annual fee?
Sometimes. Three of the seven clubs charged $49 on the Black Card. The other four charged nothing on that tier.
All three New York clubs sold the Black Card at $37.99 with the annual fee set to $0, under the line “No Annual Fee! Only $1 Down!” Classic at those same clubs was $19 a month with a $59 annual fee. Oviedo charged nothing on either tier.
Work that through and something odd falls out. The New York monthly gap is $18.99, which over twelve months would be $227.88. The real year-one gap is $168.88, because the Black Card member skips a $59 charge the Classic member pays. New York has the highest Black Card price of the seven and the smallest upgrade premium of the seven, at the same time.
Anyone printing “$49 annual fee” as a flat national fact has not opened a club page.
When is the Black Card annual fee charged?
On a date your club publishes, which is the part almost nobody uses. Four of the seven offer pages printed it. Newark, Houston and Fort Worth all said the annual fee “will be billed on or shortly after November 1st”. Oviedo said 1 September instead, and at Oviedo the amount is $0 anyway.
That date is what makes the cancellation deadline real. Planet Fitness says a request to stop the annual fee “must be received by the club by the 25th of the month prior to the annual fee date”, so for a 1 November fee the last useful day is 25 October.
The full set of deadlines, including the separate one for monthly billing, is in how to cancel a Planet Fitness membership.
We do not know whether a $0 annual fee survives into year two or resets at renewal. The offer pages do not say and we are not going to guess.
Is there a startup fee for the Black Card?
All seven clubs charged $1, on both tiers, and it was advertised, not hidden. Three of the pages led with “Only $1 Down!” as the headline on the Black Card offer.
Here is the thing worth knowing about that dollar. It appears nowhere on Planet Fitness’s national pages. The enrollment fee is a club-level disclosure only, which means an article written from the national pages cannot tell you it exists, and most of them do not.
What we could not establish is what the startup fee is when no promotion is running. Every one of the seven pages we read was running one. A club with no current offer may charge more, and we have no source for how much.
Why your club charges more than $24.99
Because the franchisee sets the rate, and $24.99 is a floor, not a price. Planet Fitness says as much in its own fine print: “Prices may vary depending on location” and “Locations independently owned and operated.”
What that means in practice is a $13 monthly difference between a club in Houston and a club in Manhattan for a card described identically on both pages. If you have seen $24.99 quoted somewhere and your club wants $37.99, nobody has raised the price on you. You were reading the floor.
It also means a price you find on a comparison site is close to worthless unless it names the club and the date.
Does the Black Card have a contract?
At six of the seven clubs, no. Both tiers were sold as No Commitment, under the line “you may cancel at anytime without paying a fee”.
Fort Worth (Alliance Town Center) was the exception, and it is worth looking at closely. That club listed Classic as No Commitment and the Black Card on a 12-month commitment. Same club, same page, same afternoon.
Planet Fitness says ending a membership with a minimum term before the term is up requires a $58 buyout fee. So at Fort Worth the upgrade does not only add $179.88 to the year. It swaps a membership you can walk away from for one that costs $58 to leave early, and the commitment length is printed in smaller type than the price.
Check that line on your own club’s page before you upgrade. It is the single most likely thing to differ from what you assumed.
Can Black Card members bring a guest every time?
Yes. Planet Fitness says Black Card members “are welcome to bring one guest with them each time they visit”. One guest, every visit, with no monthly cap that the company publishes anywhere.
Two conditions. The guest must be 18 or older, and you have to arrive together. A Classic membership carries no guest privilege at all, which is the single hardest difference between the tiers to work around.
This is the benefit with real money behind it. If you train with a partner who would otherwise buy their own Classic membership, the upgrade at Houston costs $179.88 a year against their $170. Those two numbers are close enough that the decision comes down to whether they ever want to go without you.
One detail that cuts the other way. If your guest eventually joins that club themselves, the day fee they might otherwise have paid is credited back: Planet Fitness says “the full amount of the day fee applies towards membership fees if the visitor joins that location within 30 days of the visit”. The guest privilege saves them a fee that was partly refundable anyway. The rest of the non-member rules are in the Planet Fitness free trial and day pass rules.
Can you use the Black Card at any Planet Fitness?
That is what the tier is for. The memberships page calls it “Use of any Planet Fitness worldwide”, and the company puts its network at 2,900+ clubs across the US and Canada.
Classic gets your home club only. If you move between two towns regularly, that single line is most of what you are buying, and the spa amenities are the part you may never touch.
Your home club still matters on the Black Card, because it is the only club that can process a cancellation. People who train across three locations forget which one holds the paperwork.
What is in the Black Card Spa
The spa side covers massage chairs, HydroMassage, tanning, Total Body Enhancement, the wellness pod and the recovery lounge. Black Card members also get 50 per cent off select drinks, and PF+ app workouts that a Classic member cannot open.
PF+ is the part worth a second look before you count it as value. Classic already includes PF App workouts. What the Black Card adds is the exclusive tier of the same app, so if your reason to upgrade is the app, you are paying the premium for a subset of it, not for access.
Tanning carries its own restriction. Planet Fitness notes that “state and local restrictions on tanning frequency” apply, so how often you can use a bed depends on which state you are in, not on the tier you bought. If tanning is the reason you are upgrading, check your own state’s rule first.
“Participating locations only” is doing a lot of work here
Every amenity line on the memberships page carries a footnote. Every single one. Planet Fitness marks them with a superscript and says items so marked “are available at participating locations only”, then adds that services and perks are “subject to availability and restrictions”.
What none of that tells you is which amenities your club actually has. We looked for a per-club amenity list on all seven offer pages and found none. Planet Fitness does not publish one anywhere we could find, so the only way to know whether your gym has a wellness pod is to walk in and look at the room.
That matters, because the amenities are most of what the $168.88 to $239.88 is buying.
If you upgrade and then find the amenity you wanted is not at your club, we could not find a published remedy either. No refund policy, no downgrade window, nothing. Ask before you sign, not after.
How to upgrade from Classic to Black Card
Ask your home club. That is the honest answer, and it is shorter than we would like.
Planet Fitness publishes three ways to end a membership and no published process for changing tier. We could not find whether upgrading carries a fee, whether it starts a fresh 12-month commitment at a club that uses one, or whether it moves your annual fee date. At Fort Worth, where the two tiers carry different commitment terms, that last question has $58 attached to it.
Get the answer in writing before you agree to the change.
How old do you have to be for a Black Card?
The membership rule is the same on both tiers. Planet Fitness says you must be “at least 18 years old to enroll, or 13-17 with parent/guardian”, and its policies page adds that members aged 13 and 14 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian whenever they work out.
The guest rule is stricter than the membership rule, which catches people out. A Black Card member can hold the card at 16 with permission, and still cannot bring a 16 year old guest, because guests have to be 18.
Is the Planet Fitness Black Card worth it?
For two kinds of member it pays for itself, in our reading of the seven clubs.
The first is anyone who brings somebody. The guest privilege is worth roughly a second Classic membership, and a Classic membership at these clubs ran $170 to $288 for the year against an upgrade of $168.88 to $239.88. That is the clearest case in the data, and the only one where the arithmetic is not close.
The second is anyone at a club that waives the annual fee on Black Card while charging it on Classic. In New York that turns an $18.99 monthly gap into a $168.88 yearly one, the best value of the seven clubs, and it happens to be the club group with the highest headline price.
We should be straight about a case people assume qualifies and does not. Travelling between cities sounds like the obvious reason to upgrade, and on price it usually loses. Two Classic memberships at Newark rates come to $340 against one Black Card at $409.88, so you would be paying $69.88 for the convenience of one card instead of two. The Black Card wins on money only once you need a third club, or once the clubs you use charge more for Classic than Newark does.
Frequency is the other thing people get wrong. The amenity set does not get cheaper the more you use it, because there is no per-visit charge on either tier. Going four times a week instead of once does not change the $179.88. It only changes whether you feel it was worth paying.
Who should stay on Classic
If you train alone at one gym and you use the treadmills and the weights, Classic is the right tier. The upgrade is a bad purchase.
At Newark that decision is worth $239.88 a year. A Classic member there pays $170 for twelve months and a Black Card member pays $409.88, and the second one is buying tanning beds and a massage chair.
Two more groups should think twice. Anyone at a club with no wellness pod or HydroMassage, because the spa line is most of the premium. And anyone signing at a club that attaches a 12-month term to the Black Card and not to Classic, because the upgrade then costs $179.88 plus a $58 exit.
We cannot tell you whether a wellness pod is worth $240 to you. What we can tell you is what it costs, which is more than the “$10 a month” framing suggests.
Did the Black Card price go up?
We could not find a published price history for this tier. Planet Fitness raised its Classic rate from $10 to $15 for new members in 2024, after 26 years at the lower figure, and that was reported widely at the time. We found nothing equivalent for the Black Card.
Because clubs set their own rates and every offer carries an expiry date, a rate that changes at your club may be a promotion ending, not a national increase. Six of the seven pages we read carried an offer expiry inside the next two weeks. The offer page tells you which is happening, if you read the expiry line.
Every Black Card figure on one page
| What | Value | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| National floor rate | “begin at $24.99” | planetfitness.com memberships page |
| Observed club rates | $24.99 · $29.99 · $37.99 | seven club offer pages |
| Startup fee | $1 at all seven | club offer pages |
| Annual fee | $0 or $49 depending on club | club offer pages |
| Annual fee billing date | on or shortly after 1 November at three clubs; 1 September at Oviedo | club offer pages |
| Year one total | $349.88 to $456.88 | our calculation from the above |
| Effective monthly | $29.16 to $38.07 | our calculation |
| Premium over Classic | $168.88 to $239.88 a year | our calculation |
| Commitment | none at six clubs; 12 months on Black Card at Fort Worth | club offer pages |
| Buyout if a term applies | $58 | PF customer service page |
| Access scope | “Use of any Planet Fitness worldwide”, 2,900+ clubs | memberships page, PF newsroom |
| Guest privilege | one guest each visit, guest must be 18+ | PF policies page |
| Enrolment age | 18, or 13-17 with a parent or guardian | gym memberships page |
| Tax | “plus taxes & fees”, not included above | club offer pages |
| Day fee amount | not published | we could not confirm |
| Per-club amenity list | not published | we could not confirm |
Five things we could not confirm
Planet Fitness does not publish these anywhere we could find, so we are not printing a number for them.
- The day fee a non-member pays. Without it nobody can put a dollar figure on the guest privilege, including us.
- Which amenities any given club actually has.
- Whether upgrading from Classic costs anything, and whether it starts a new commitment.
- Whether the annual fee date moves when you upgrade.
- What happens to a $0 annual fee at renewal, and what the startup fee is when no promotion is running.
If you find a Planet Fitness page that answers any of these, send it to us and we will update this page and say where it came from. That is how we check every figure on this site.
How to check the Black Card price at your own club
Go to planetfitness.com and find your club. Open its offers page. The URL looks like planetfitness.com/gyms/your-club-slug/offers, and that page carries the Black Card monthly rate, the startup fee, the annual fee, the commitment length and the date the offer expires. It is the most useful page Planet Fitness publishes and almost nobody links to it.
Then do the arithmetic yourself. Monthly rate times twelve, plus the annual fee, plus the startup fee. Do the same for Classic. The difference between the two totals is what the upgrade costs you, and it is the only figure worth arguing about with anyone at the front desk.
One warning before you trust that page. When we checked, the Oviedo club’s page was still advertising an offer that had expired six weeks earlier. These pages are not always current, so read the expiry date before you read the price above it.