CrossFit Open Participation Is Down: What Affiliate Owners Do Now

CrossFit Open registrations fell from 343,496 in 2024 to 233,815 in 2025, a 32% drop and the lowest total since 2014. In 2026 they came back only part of the way, to an estimated 254,690. Over the same stretch the affiliate map lost roughly 1,500 gyms. None of that tells you whether your gym is healthy. It does tell you the Open is no longer a marketing engine you get for free, and every affiliate owner should decide on purpose whether it stays on the calendar.

Key takeaways

Key takeaways

1. CrossFit Open registrations fell 32% from 343,496 in 2024 to 233,815 in 2025, then rose about 8% to an estimated 254,690 in 2026.
2. The affiliate map dropped from 11,366 gyms in March 2024 to 9,899 in March 2025, after the annual fee rose from US$3,000 to US$4,500.
3. CrossFit was put up for sale in March 2025 but was not sold; in April 2026 it named Bruce Edwards CEO and said it was no longer seeking a buyer.
4. Open sign-ups are not members. They measure appetite for a branded competition, not your gym's health.
5. Decide whether to keep the Open using your own registration rate, event attendance, guest leads and post-Open cancellations.
6. Keep a member event in the late-winter slot even if you replace the Open with a throwdown, HYROX simulation or masters league.

I co-own CrossFit BC in Vancouver, an affiliate that is also an official HYROX Training Club, so I have a stake in both sides of this. Here is what the numbers say, what they leave out, and a simple way to make the call for your own gym.

How many people do the CrossFit Open each year?

The Open grew from about 26,000 registrants in 2011 to about 416,000 in 2018, according to Morning Chalk Up's January 2026 history of the event. Since then the line has wobbled, then broken.

The 2019 to 2025 figures come from data analyst Mike Halpin, published by Morning Chalk Up and BarBend in March 2025. The 2025 count was taken the day after the first workout closed and was labelled unofficial. The 2026 figure comes from The Barbell Spin's March 2026 prize purse breakdown, which also calls it an estimate. CrossFit itself has not published a clean year-by-year table that I could find, so treat every number here as a close independent count, not an audited one.

Two details matter more than the headline. First, the 2020 drop is partly an artefact: the "2020" Open was held in the fall of 2019, only months after the 2019 Open, which likely split the field. Second, the 2025 drop was not a slow leak. Halpin found 199,706 people who registered in 2024 did not come back in 2025. Only about 42% returned.

The 2026 rebound is real but small. When the Open started on 25 February 2026, registration was still about 59,000 short of 2025's final total, and late sign-ups closed that gap. Morning Chalk Up reported that 30% of 2026 participants were new to the Open, up from 27.9% in 2025. New people are still arriving. The lapsed ones mostly have not come back.

Is CrossFit dying, or just the Open?

The honest answer is that the Open and the affiliate network are both shrinking, and neither number measures how many people train at CrossFit gyms.

Affiliate count trend

BarBend tracked the official CrossFit affiliate map. On 25 March 2024 it showed 11,366 affiliates. A year later it showed 9,899, a 13% drop, and 9,836 by mid-April 2025. Front Office Sports reported that the network peaked at as many as 14,000 gyms in 2018, though it did not name a source for that figure.

Some of those gyms closed. Others kept training people and simply stopped paying CrossFit. BarBend's own survey of 365 gym owners found 10% had de-affiliated or planned to. One Norwegian operator dropped the CrossFit name at 10 of its 16 gyms, citing the fee and the exchange rate. A gym that removes the name from its sign does not lose its members, so a smaller affiliate map is a weaker signal of gym closures than it looks.

The fee change

In November 2023 CrossFit announced its first affiliate fee increase in more than a decade: from US$3,000 a year to US$4,500, phased in from each gym's 2024 renewal date. Grandfathered gyms got a graduated increase, some international regions paid less, and owners were told to enrol in a Level 2 course within 12 months. CrossFit also added a US$500 course credit and dropped the 20% surcharge on monthly payments. If your fee is billed in US dollars, the exchange rate adds to it. For a box with 120 members, that is real money.

The ownership saga

In March 2025 CrossFit announced it was looking for a new owner and had hired Moelis & Company to run the process. Berkshire Partners has owned it since 2020. Through late 2025 one buyer group claimed exclusive talks, and as of January 2026 no deal had closed. On 28 April 2026 CrossFit named Bruce Edwards, its former COO, as CEO from 4 May and said the company was no longer seeking new ownership. In July 2026 Athletech News reported that Edwards had told Two-Brain Business the sale was off.

So the 2024 to 2026 period brought a higher fee, a public sale that did not happen and a leadership change, all while the Open shrank. That is the context. It is not proof that your members are leaving.

What Open sign-ups do and do not tell you about gym health

Open registration counts people who paid to put a score on the leaderboard. Your business runs on people who pay you every month. Those overlap, but they are not the same group.

Here is what the Open number does not capture:

• Members who do the workouts in class or at Friday Night Lights without registering. Morning Chalk Up's 2025 analysis made exactly this point: they never show up in the totals.
• Gyms that de-affiliated but still program Open-style workouts.
• Members who train three times a week and have no interest in a leaderboard, often the most profitable members you have.
• Anyone who moved to HYROX, run clubs or hybrid classes without leaving their gym.

And here is what it does capture: how much appetite there is for a five-week, CrossFit-branded, scored competition. That appetite dropped by about a third in 2025 and is still roughly a quarter below 2024. If your gym's culture, intake funnel or member calendar leans on the Open, that drop is your problem regardless of the global headline.

The numbers that tell you whether your gym is healthy are your own: active members, monthly cancellations, new members per month, attendance per member and revenue per member. If you want to check those properly, the gym numbers teardown walks through the five I would look at first, and this piece on retention in Vancouver goes deeper on why members leave.

Why it matters for your marketing and community calendar

For about a decade the Open did three jobs for affiliates at once. It was a member retention event in the dead of late winter. It was a referral moment, because members brought friends to Friday Night Lights. And it was free marketing, because CrossFit's own push sent new people looking for a gym to register with.

With roughly 90,000 fewer registrations than in 2024, all three jobs weaken. The national hype is quieter, so fewer outsiders walk in. Fewer of your members sign up, so the in-gym energy is thinner. And the five weeks you blocked out for it may now carry less weight than a well-run in-house event would.

The timing still works in your favour. Late February to mid-March in Canada is when New Year sign-ups start to drift and the weather has not turned. You need something on the calendar then. The question is whether it should be the Open.

What affiliate owners are doing instead

The smart move is to keep the community event and drop the dependence on CrossFit's version of it. Here are four options I would weigh.

In-house throwdowns

Run your own five-week or one-day event with workouts you write, scaled for your actual members, with teams drawn across class times. You control the date, the difficulty and the entry fee. You can invite members' friends as guest athletes, which turns it into a lead source. The downside: you lose the global leaderboard, and that matters to a small slice of competitive members.

HYROX

HYROX reported 5,000 Training Clubs worldwide by December 2024, after adding more than 2,300 in that year alone, a reported 260% annual growth rate. It gives members a race to train toward, a public Training Club finder that sends new people looking for a gym, and a format that suits people who will never do a muscle-up. CrossFit BC became a Training Club because members wanted to race, because new people find gyms through that finder, for the programming and coach course, and because HYROX Vancouver is local (17 to 20 December 2026). It is too early to claim results. If you are weighing it, the HYROX affiliation cost breakdown for small Canadian gyms covers fees, equipment and payback.

Hybrid programming

Morning Chalk Up reported in December 2024 that many affiliates had started adding HYROX programming. You can also program running, rowing and sled work alongside barbell and gymnastics, or run a separate hybrid class. It widens who your gym is for without dropping the CrossFit core.

Masters focus

The Open's new registrants in 2025 had an average age of 34.7, per Halpin. If a big share of your members are older than that, a masters league, an over-40 strength cycle or a "first competition" event with sensible standards may serve them better than a leaderboard built around 18 to 34-year-olds.

How to decide whether to keep running the Open

For what it is worth, CrossFit BC will run the 2027 Open as usual, alongside our HYROX Training Club classes. Here is how I would make the call for your gym.

I would make this decision with numbers from last year's Open, not with feelings about CrossFit HQ. Pull four figures:

1. How many members registered, as a share of active members.
2. How many members attended Friday Night Lights at least twice, registered or not.
3. How many non-members came through during the five weeks, and how many became leads.
4. Cancellations in the eight weeks after the Open compared with the same weeks the year before.

Then ask whether the Open beat what you could get from an in-house event or a HYROX simulation in the same slot. If it did not, change it. If you have no data from last year, set up the tracking now so you can decide for 2027 on facts.

A simple decision table

Whichever row you land in, keep a member event in late winter. The calendar slot still matters even if the brand behind it changes.

What to measure this week

• Your active member count and cancellations for each of the last 12 months. Look at February to April specifically.
• Last year's Open: registrations, Friday Night Lights attendance, guest visitors and leads.
• What your members are actually asking for. A two-question survey works: "What event would you sign up for?" and "Would you bring a friend?"
• The date of your next affiliate renewal, and what US$4,500 converts to in Canadian dollars on that date.

If you would like a second set of eyes on whether the Open, HYROX or something else should fill your late-winter calendar, and what your own retention numbers say, book a gym numbers teardown and we will go through them together.