Last checked: 15 September 2026
Yes, there is a Planet Fitness free trial, and it is one day. You claim it in the PF App or at the front desk, no card details are taken, and it is a different thing from the day pass most articles quote a price for.
Three separate ways into a Planet Fitness get muddled together everywhere. Here is the short version before the detail. The free day pass costs nothing. The day fee is what a walk-in pays, and Planet Fitness does not publish the amount. Coming in as a Black Card member’s guest costs the guest nothing at all.
Everything below was read from Planet Fitness’s own pages. Clubs are independently owned and operated, so the club nearest you may run this differently.
| Route in | What it costs | How long | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free day pass | Nothing | One day | Anyone, claimed in the PF App or in club |
| Day fee | Not published | One day | A non-member walking in, 18+ with photo ID |
| Black Card guest | Nothing to the guest | Every visit | Guests 18+, arriving with a Black Card member |
| High School Summer Pass | Nothing | 1 June to 31 August | Teens aged 14 to 19 |
Does Planet Fitness have a free trial?
It has a free day pass, which is the closest thing to one. Planet Fitness runs a page at planetfitness.com/daypass that says “Get your free day pass in the PF app!” and tells you to “download the PF App or stop by a club near you”. The page describes it as one free day.
That is the whole offer.
One thing it is not: a seven-day trial. It is also not a free week or a free month. We looked for a multi-day trial on the memberships page, the gym memberships page and the day pass page and found nothing. If your local club has one advertised on a banner outside, that is a club promotion, and every club promotion we read carried an expiry date. Read it.
How to get the Planet Fitness free day pass
Two routes, both named on that page. Download the PF App and claim the pass inside it, or walk into a club and ask at the desk.
The app route is the one the company leads with, and it is the one that gives you something to show. No payment details are requested for the free pass, which is worth knowing because the usual objection to a gym trial is that you are handing over a card you will then have to cancel.
The day pass page points you to participating Planet Fitness locations, not to every club. Since every club is independently owned, it is worth a phone call before you drive somewhere.
How long is the Planet Fitness free trial?
One day. Not one day per club, not one day a month, as far as anything published goes. The page says one free day and stops there.
Whether you can claim it again later, or at a second club, is not published either, and we are not going to tell you it works when we have not seen a rule that says so.
The day fee is a different thing
Planet Fitness defines it plainly on its policies page: the day fee is “the fee a non-member/non PF Black Card guest pays for use of the gym for one day”.
So it is the paid version of a single visit, for somebody who has no free pass and no member to arrive with. It has its own age rule, which the free pass does not: day pass purchasers must be at least 18 and bring “a valid driver’s license or photo ID”.
How much is a Planet Fitness day pass?
Planet Fitness does not publish the amount. We checked the policies page, the customer service FAQ, the memberships page, the gym memberships page and all seven club offer pages we had open. Not one of them carries a dollar figure.
Plenty of articles will give you one anyway, usually somewhere between $5 and $20. We have no source for any of those numbers and we are not going to repeat them as though we did.
Your club can tell you in about thirty seconds on the phone, and that answer will be right for your club, which is more than a national average would be. Since the franchisee sets the monthly rate and the annual fee independently, there is no reason to expect the day fee to be uniform either.
The day fee comes off your membership if you join within 30 days
This one is genuinely useful and almost nobody mentions it. 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”, and adds that a valid receipt is required.
So a paid visit costs you nothing in the end, as long as you join. Keep the receipt. Join the same location, and do it inside the 30 days.
Note the words “that location”. The credit follows the one club you visited. If you try the gym near your office and then join the one near your flat, the money does not travel with you as far as we can tell.
It also means the sensible order is free pass first, paid visit second, and only then a membership. The free day tells you whether the room is any good; the paid day is a second look that you get back.
Can you bring a friend to Planet Fitness?
If your friend has a PF Black Card, yes, and it costs you nothing and has no time limit. Planet Fitness says Black Card members “are welcome to bring one guest with them each time they visit”.
One guest, every visit, for as long as your friend keeps the membership. You arrive together, and the guest has to be 18 or older.
This is the only route on this page with no expiry, no receipt and no app involved, which makes it far and away the best one if you happen to know the right person.
Can a Classic member bring a guest?
No. A Classic membership carries no guest privilege at all, and the wording on the policies page is specific about which tier it applies to: PF Black Card members.
So a friend on the cheaper tier cannot sign you in, however often they go. The tier that carries the privilege ran from $24.99 to $37.99 a month at the seven clubs we priced, and we went through what it actually adds over a year separately.
How old do you have to be, for each route
The three routes have three different age rules, and that is what trips people up.
For a paid day pass you must be at least 18 and bring a valid driver’s licence or photo ID. For guests, Planet Fitness says “guests must be 18 years or older”, with 13 to 17 year olds admitted when a parent or guardian comes along. To join as a member you can be 13 or older with a parent or legal guardian’s permission, and members aged 13 and 14 have to be accompanied whenever they work out.
The free app day pass is the gap in that list. Planet Fitness publishes an age rule for day pass purchasers and for guests, and we could not find one for the free pass. Take the 18 and photo ID requirement as the safe assumption and ask the club, instead of treating the free pass as looser.
Can a 16 year old use Planet Fitness?
Three different answers to what sounds like one question.
A 16 year old cannot buy a day pass alone, because that route is 18 and over. They can visit as a guest if a parent or guardian comes with them. They can hold a membership of their own with a parent or legal guardian’s permission, and they do not need to be accompanied at 16, since that requirement stops after 14. And in summer they are inside the Summer Pass window, which is the section after next.
The pattern is that Planet Fitness is more relaxed about teenagers who are members than about teenagers who are visitors.
What to wear and bring on your free day
Planet Fitness publishes a dress code, and it is more specific than most people expect. Athletic footwear and appropriate clothing must be worn at all times. Shorts have to be full coverage, which the policies page defines as longer than your glutes. Open-toed shoes are out, and so are jeans with grommets.
Bring photo ID. It is required for a paid day pass and it is the sensible thing to have on you for any of these routes.
If you are paying the day fee instead of using the free pass, take the receipt home and keep it. That piece of paper is worth the whole day fee for the next 30 days.
Is Planet Fitness free for teens?
For three months of the year it is. The High School Summer Pass gives 14 to 19 year olds free access from 1 June to 31 August, and 2026 was its sixth year. Planet Fitness announced this year’s edition on 20 May 2026 and put it at 2,900+ clubs across the US and Canada.
Registration runs through PlanetFitness.com/SummerPass. Anyone under 18 signs up with a parent or guardian. The pass includes the same free in-club fitness training members get, plus app workouts built for that age group.
There is one restriction worth knowing before a teenager plans a summer around it: “teens must work out at the location they sign up at and are not permitted to use other locations”. Pick the club carefully, because the choice is locked for the summer.
If you are reading this outside June to August, the window has closed until next year. The company calls the 2026 edition its sixth annual, which puts the first in 2021, so a June start next year is the reasonable expectation. Planet Fitness has announced nothing for 2027 and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Can you use a day pass at any Planet Fitness?
The day pass page points you at participating locations, which is not the same as all of them. With 2,900+ independently owned clubs, participating is doing real work in that sentence.
Worth noticing how differently the three free routes treat this. The Summer Pass is locked to a single club for the whole summer, in the company’s own words. The Black Card guest privilege travels, because the member it belongs to can use any location. The free day pass sits in between, tied to whichever participating club you claim it at.
Call the club you actually want to visit. That one call settles the day fee, the free pass and the amenities in the same thirty seconds.
One more thing about that phone call. Ask whether the club runs the Summer Pass, because participation is described as being at participating locations only, the same hedge that covers the amenities. A teenager who registers at a club that does not run it has wasted the only three months of the year this is free.
If your club will not accept the app pass
Every Planet Fitness is independently owned and operated, and the day pass page points at participating locations, not at all of them. A club declining the pass is not necessarily doing anything wrong.
Ask what the day fee is instead, and ask whether it comes off a membership if you join within 30 days, because that credit is published company policy, not a local promotion.
The $1 offer is not a free trial
This is the one that costs people money, so it is worth separating from everything above.
All seven clubs we read were advertising a $1 startup fee, and three of them led with it as the headline: “No Annual Fee! Only $1 Down!” Read quickly, that looks like a way to try the gym for a dollar. It is not. It is the enrolment fee on a full membership, and the monthly rate starts immediately underneath it.
Take Newark as the example. A dollar down, then $10 a month, then a $49 annual fee billed on or shortly after 1 November. Sign up on 20 October and the dollar is followed within two weeks by the annual fee, because that fee runs on the club’s calendar, not on yours.
Every one of those $1 offers also carried an expiry date. Six of the seven showed an expiry inside the next two weeks. So the dollar is a promotion with a deadline attached, and the membership it starts has deadlines of its own.
If what you want is to try the gym, the free day pass is the thing that does that. The dollar joins the gym.
Why Planet Fitness gives a day away
Because the free day is cheap for the club and the paid day is refundable, which together make the whole funnel low-friction in a way most gyms will not copy.
Look at what the company gives up. No card details on the free pass. The full day fee credited back if the visitor joins that location inside 30 days. A guest privilege on the Black Card that lets an existing member bring the same person in repeatedly at no charge.
Every one of those is designed to get somebody through the door without a decision attached, which is the opposite of how the membership itself works once you are inside it. Joining takes a dollar and a minute. Leaving takes a letter, a deadline on the 10th and a second deadline on the 25th of the month before your annual fee date.
That asymmetry is not a complaint, it is just the thing to know before you use the free day.
Does the free day include the Black Card amenities?
Not published, and we looked. Neither the day pass page nor the policies page says whether a visitor reaches the massage chairs, the HydroMassage, the tanning beds or the wellness pod, or only the gym floor.
There is a second layer to that question. Even for paying Black Card members, Planet Fitness marks those amenities as “available at participating locations only”, so the club you walk into may not have them for anybody. Assume the gym floor, ask at the desk about the rest, and treat anything more as a bonus.
What it costs once the free day is over
The number to look at is not the monthly rate on the poster. It is the twelve-month total with the annual fee and the $1 startup fee in it.
At the seven clubs we priced, a Classic year came to between $170 and $288, and a Black Card year came to between $349.88 and $456.88. The spread is that wide because each franchisee sets its own rate, its own annual fee and sometimes its own commitment length. We worked all of it out in what a Planet Fitness membership costs across a year.
And if you join and then change your mind, the deadlines matter more than the price does. They are in how to cancel a Planet Fitness membership.
Every free-access rule on one page
| What | Value | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Free day pass | “Get your free day pass in the PF app!” | planetfitness.com/daypass |
| How to claim it | “download the PF App or stop by a club near you” | planetfitness.com/daypass |
| Length of the free pass | one day | planetfitness.com/daypass |
| Age rule for the free pass | not published | we could not confirm |
| Day fee definition | “the fee a non-member/non PF Black Card guest pays for use of the gym for one day” | PF policies page |
| Day fee amount | not published | we could not confirm |
| Day fee credit | full amount applies to membership if you join that location within 30 days, valid receipt required | PF policies page |
| Day pass age and ID | 18+, valid driver’s licence or photo ID | PF policies page |
| Black Card guest | one guest each visit | PF policies page |
| Guest age | 18+; 13 to 17 accompanied by a parent or guardian | PF policies page |
| Classic guest privilege | none | PF memberships page |
| Joining age | 13+ with a parent or guardian’s permission; 13 and 14 accompanied at all times | PF policies page |
| Summer Pass ages | 14 to 19 | PF newsroom, 20 May 2026 |
| Summer Pass dates | 1 June to 31 August | PF newsroom, 20 May 2026 |
| Summer Pass club rule | “teens must work out at the location they sign up at” | PF newsroom, 20 May 2026 |
| Dress code | athletic footwear, full coverage shorts, no open-toed shoes, no jeans with grommets | PF policies page |
Three things we could not confirm
- What the day fee costs. No Planet Fitness page we read publishes it.
- Whether a day pass or a free pass gets you into the Black Card amenities, or only the gym floor.
- Whether every club honours the app day pass, and whether you can claim one more than once.
We would sooner write “we could not confirm this” than fill a gap with a plausible number. That rule is how we check every figure on this site.
What we would do
Take the free day first. Download the PF App. It costs nothing, and you find out whether the club is packed at the hour you would actually turn up, which is the one thing no price table can tell you.
Use that visit to look at the room instead of the treadmill. Count the machines that matter to you, check whether the amenities on the Black Card list are physically there, and note the hours on the door. Planet Fitness publishes no per-club amenity list anywhere we could find, so your own eyes are the source.
Then, if you want a second look before committing, ask the front desk what the day fee is and keep the receipt. Thirty days is a long window, and the money comes back off the membership.