LA Fitness will not tell you what a membership costs until you hand over your details. On 15 September 2026 we read its membership options page looking for a single dollar figure and found none. What it gives you instead is a free pass button, a club finder and a form. The price arrives later, from a person, in a building.
Other chains do publish a monthly rate and then leave the annual fee out of it, so a membership advertised at $15 bills $229 across its first year. That is a 27% gap between the number on the window and the number in your account, and we walk through one chain’s version of it in what a Planet Fitness membership costs for a year.
That gap is why this site exists, and it’s the thing our whole research process is built around. Below is exactly how we get our numbers, what we do when a gym refuses to publish one, and where we still get things wrong.
The price we publish is what leaves your account in a year
Almost no gym charges only its headline rate. There’s usually a joining or enrollment fee on day one, often an annual “maintenance” charge some months later, and sometimes both. Where a gym publishes the month that annual fee hits, we say so. Plenty of them don’t publish it at all, and we say that too.
Every gym page on this site shows the headline rate and the twelve-month total side by side. If you only read one number, read the second one.
Where the numbers come from
We work down this list and stop at the first source that gives us a real figure.
- The gym’s own pricing page. Best case. We link to it, quote it, and date it.
- The membership agreement, terms of service, or fee schedule the gym publishes as a PDF. This is where the cancellation notice periods and buyout fees usually hide, and it’s the document most price articles never open.
- A written quote from a named club, with the club location and the date we asked. We say which club it was, because a quote from Brooklyn tells you very little about Boise.
- Nothing. If none of the above exist, we publish a range and say plainly that the gym does not disclose a price.
We do not take numbers from other price-comparison sites. A lot of them copy each other, and one wrong figure from 2022 can survive for years that way.
The seven things we check for every gym
- Monthly rate for each membership tier
- Joining, enrollment, or startup fee
- Annual or maintenance fee, and the month it’s charged
- Minimum commitment length
- Buyout fee if you leave before that commitment ends
- Notice period required to cancel, and whether cancelling is possible online
- What a guest pass or free trial actually includes, and what it doesn’t
Six and seven are where most readers get burned. A gym can be cheap per month and still cost you an extra billing cycle because you missed a ten-day notice window buried in a document you signed on an iPad.
When a gym won’t publish a price at all
This happens more than you’d expect. On 14 September 2026 we opened LA Fitness’s memberships page and found no monthly price anywhere on it. There were no tiers and no fee figures listed, and it didn’t ask for a ZIP code either. The page exists to get you to claim a free pass or start a signup flow.
That’s a deliberate choice, and it’s the reason so many “LA Fitness costs $X” articles disagree with each other. They’re each quoting one club, or one reader’s memory, and they call it a national rate.
When we hit a wall like that, we tell you it’s a wall. We’ll give you the range we’ve seen, name the clubs and dates behind it, and then show you how to get a real quote for your own location in under five minutes. An honest “we don’t know, here’s how to find out” beats a confident number that’s wrong.
What “last checked” means on our pages
It means a person opened the source that day and confirmed the figure still matched. It is not the date we last touched the file, and it is not automatic.
Our schedule is every 90 days for the big national chains, and immediately whenever a reader tells us something has moved. We’d rather a page say “last checked June” and be honest than carry a fresh date that means nothing. If you see a date older than six months on a page you care about, email us and we’ll move it to the front of the queue.
Things we don’t do
We don’t take money from gyms to be listed or ranked. No gym has ever paid us anything, and if that changes we’ll label it on the page itself rather than in a policy nobody reads.
We don’t publish “best gym” rankings. Cheapest for a 22-year-old who lifts four times a week is a different gym than cheapest for someone who wants a pool twice a month, and a single ranked list hides that.
We don’t invent averages. If we say the average US gym membership is a certain figure, there’s a source under it and you can click through.
How this site is written, including the AI part
Google asks publishers to be open about whether automation is involved in making content. Most sites skip that. Here’s ours.
We use AI tools to help gather sources, structure drafts, and catch errors. What AI does not do here is decide what a gym costs. Every figure on this site is checked by a person against a primary source before it goes live, and every source is linked so you can check it yourself. If a number can’t be traced back to a gym’s own page or document, it doesn’t get published.
That’s the line we hold. If we ever break it, the corrections on this site will show it, because we log them.
Tell us when we’re wrong
We will get prices wrong. Gyms change rates quietly, franchise clubs set their own numbers, and a figure that was right in March can be stale by May. What that means for you is set out in the disclaimer.
If you’ve seen a different price at your club, email hello@gymscost.com or use the contact page, with the club location and what you were quoted. A photo of the signup screen or your first statement helps most. We read every one of these, we reply, and when you’re right we fix the page and note the date it changed.