Gen Z Gym Members: Why They Churn and How Gyms Keep Them

Gen Z is now the biggest source of new gym members and the group most likely to cancel. ABC Fitness, a gym software company, reported that 47% of new gym joins in 2025 came from Gen Z, and a separate ABC statistics page puts Gen Z churn at 54.42% against 26.48% for members aged 65 and over.

Key takeaways

Key takeaways

1. Gen Z made up 47% of new gym joins in 2025 (ABC Fitness), and an ABC statistics page reports their churn at 54.42% against 26.48% for members 65 and over. That figure is vendor data with an undefined churn period.
2. Younger members name community, variety, strength-led group training and mental health as reasons to train, more than price.
3. Deep youth discounts tend to attract the most price-sensitive members and lower your revenue per member without fixing churn.
4. Flexible structures (month-to-month, starter blocks, pauses, event programs) suit younger members better than long contracts.
5. Introduce every new member to other members by name in week one, and book the 30-day coach conversation at sign-up.
6. Measure cohort retention by age band at 30, 90, 180 and 365 days, and start with the 90-day number for under-25s.

For most owners the hard part is keeping younger members long enough for the habit, and the margin, to show up. This piece covers what the numbers really say (and what they do not), what younger members want, the mistake that makes it worse, and the pricing, onboarding and measurement I would put in place.

How big is the Gen Z churn gap?

Start with the headline figures and their limits.

ABC Fitness's "Fitness Industry Statistics 2026" page (published July 2026) states that Gen Z posts the highest churn rate of any generation at 54.42%, and the 65+ cohort the lowest at 26.48%. Treat that as vendor data. ABC sells club management software, the page cites both the HFA 2026 Consumer Report and ABC's own Wellness Watch 2025 for that section without saying which one produced the number, and it does not define the churn period (annual, or something else). The HFA's public summary of its 2026 report gives no churn rate at all. Use the direction, not the exact gap.

The joining side is better documented:

• ABC's 2025 year-end Wellness Watch (December 2025) says 47% of new gym joins in 2025 were Gen Z, drawn from member activity across roughly 30,000 gyms, studios and clubs with more than 40 million members. Countries and method are not stated.
• ABC's Fall 2025 Wellness Watch (October 2025, ClubIntel research plus ABC data for July to September 2025) found 60% of new big-box gym joins and 31% of new studio joins came from people aged 18 to 35.
• The Health & Fitness Association's 2026 US Health & Fitness Consumer Report (about 18,000 Americans aged six and over, surveyed with Sports Marketing Surveys USA) found Gen Z aged 18 to 24 had the highest membership penetration of any age group at 35.5% in 2025. Members aged 65+ were the fastest-growing cohort, up 8.6% year over year.
• The HFA's 2025 report, as summarised by Athletech News, put under-25s at 30.8% of US facility members in 2024, up from 22.9% in 2015.

All of that is US or global data. I found no Canadian source that breaks gym churn down by age.

What the gap does and does not mean

A higher churn rate among 20-somethings is partly life stage. They move for school and work, change jobs, change cities and have less settled income. Some of that churn you cannot touch, and some of it is real attrition you can. Your job is to separate the two, which is why the measurement section at the end matters more than any industry average.

What do younger gym members actually want?

The largest study I found is Les Mills' "Gen Z Fitness: Cracking the code" report: more than 4,000 people aged 16 to 26 across North America, Europe and Asia, with summaries on its site in 2023 and 2024. It is also vendor research (Les Mills sells group fitness programming), so weigh it accordingly. The useful findings:

• 81% of Gen Z gym-goers take part in group workouts, and strength training ranked as their top group workout, up from 10th in 2021.
• 64% of regular exercisers strongly agreed they like to choose different workouts and discover new ones.
• 72% of regular exercisers train both in and outside the gym. Les Mills found these hybrid exercisers were 40% more likely than gym-only exercisers to have been members for three years or more (an association, not proof that one causes the other).
• 50% want to work out regularly but said they need help getting started.

Community shows up in every survey. ABC's Fall 2025 research found 57% of active consumers named social interaction and connection as the main reason they join a fitness community, and nearly half of Gen Z said community is what keeps them going. The Gym Group's Gen Z Fitness Pulse Report 2025 (UK implied, sample not stated) found 51% had made new friends through working out and 44% exercise specifically to socialise.

Mental health is a bigger driver than many owners assume. The same Gym Group report found 55% ranked mental health among their top three reasons to exercise, up from 46% in 2024.

Content matters too. Les Mills found 76% look to fitness influencers for guidance at home, and its January 2025 roundup of Unidays research (Q1 2025, sample not stated) reported 91% of Gen Z are influenced by review videos from peers or creators.

Younger members want strength-led group training with variety, other people to show up for, and a gym that looks credible online.

The Canadian picture for young adults

I could not find Canadian gym membership data by age, so the closest public evidence is how active young adults already are. Statistics Canada, using the Canadian Health Measures Survey with accelerometers worn for a week, reported in January 2025 that across the decade before the pandemic 65% of men and 53% of women aged 18 to 34 met the guideline of 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity a week, against 45% of all adults.

Newer CHMS results (2022 to 2024, released October 2025) show only 21% of Canadian youth aged 12 to 17 met their activity recommendation, down from 36% in 2018 to 2019, with girls at 8%. Those teenagers are your members in a few years. Many of them will arrive with less movement history than the cohort before them, which raises the stakes on onboarding.

What not to do: discounting into churn

The reflex when a demographic churns fast is to cut the price to get more of them in. I would not.

A deep student or under-25 discount does two things. It fills the gym with people who chose you on price, and those are the members most likely to leave for the next cheaper offer. And it lowers your average revenue per member while the churn problem stays exactly where it was. You end up running harder to stand still. If you want the maths on that, read my piece on average revenue per member.

The research points the other way. Younger members cite community, variety and mental health far more than price. None of those get fixed by a coupon. Les Mills found half of Gen Z want help getting started. That is a coaching problem, and coaching fixes it.

If you already run a youth rate, keep it honest: a modest, published rate with a clear end point, attached to the same onboarding everyone else gets. Never a rate that only appears when someone tries to cancel. That trains members to threaten to leave.

Pricing and membership structures that suit younger members

Flexibility is the common thread. A 23-year-old who might move for a job in eight months will not sign a 12-month contract, and if you force one, you will get a chargeback or a bad review when they leave. I would offer structures that make it easy to start and easy to stay.

Notice what is missing: a bigger discount. Every row trades commitment length for structure, not price. Price itself is its own decision, and I cover it in gym membership pricing decisions.

Onboarding that fits Gen Z

If half of Gen Z say they need help getting started, and Les Mills found 68% of non-exercisers want to start at home first, the first 30 days have to do a lot of work. Here is the onboarding I would set up for any member under 30.

Week one: names before numbers

The first-week priority I care most about is introducing every new member to other members by name. In class, introduce them to two or three people who train at the same time. A welcome post on social does not count. Community is the reason younger members give for staying, so build it on day one rather than hoping it appears.

Make the plan visible

Younger members are used to apps that show progress. Give them a simple written plan for the first month, one or two baseline numbers to retest, and a date for that retest. It can be a shared note. What matters is that they see movement.

Give them a way to train outside the gym

Les Mills found most young regular exercisers train in and out of the gym. Fighting that is pointless. Hand them a short off-day session they can do at home or in a park, and check in on it. That turns their outside training into a reason to stay connected to you.

Book the 30-day conversation on day one

The first real retention moment is around week four. Put a short coach conversation in the calendar at sign-up, ask what is working, and set the next goal. I go deeper on this in gym retention in Vancouver.

How HYROX-style and hybrid classes attract younger members

Strength-led group training, variety and a goal to chase: that describes HYROX almost exactly. A HYROX race is eight 1 km runs, each followed by a functional station, and the format is the same in every city, so members can train for a real date and compare their times anywhere.

CrossFit BC, which I co-own, is an official HYROX Training Club. We affiliated because members wanted to race, because new people find the gym through the HYROX Training Club Finder, because HYROX Vancouver is local (17 to 20 December 2026), and for the programming and coach course. We run HYROX classes and a HYROX bootcamp. We have not published any retention results from it, and I am not claiming any.

HYROX's affiliation program has grown fast: Morning Chalk Up reported in December 2024 that it had passed 5,000 Training Clubs worldwide, with more than 2,300 added that year. I could not find published data on the age profile of HYROX racers, so I will not tell you HYROX is a Gen Z product. What I can say is that its ingredients line up with what the Gen Z research keeps finding: strength in a group, variety, a social event, and something worth posting.

If you are weighing it, I break down cost, space and payback in HYROX affiliation for a small gym in Canada. You can also run hybrid conditioning classes without affiliating. The key retention move either way is the same: set the next goal before the race, so race day becomes a milestone on the way to something else.

Gym marketing to Gen Z without wasting money

Les Mills' research, citing ABC Fitness 2023 data, found 55% agreed that promoting trainers and instructors as local fitness influencers is a high-impact way to build community. That is the cheapest marketing lever a small gym has. Your coaches are already credible. Let them post real sessions, real coaching cues and real members (with permission) rather than polished ads.

Show the class, the people and the coach. A short clip of a coach scaling a movement for a beginner tells a younger prospect they will fit in and get help.

Track where younger members actually come from. If social is driving trials but those members leave by month three, your content is working and your onboarding is not.

What to measure: cohort retention by age band

Industry churn figures tell you where to look. Your own data tells you what to do. Here is the report I would build, monthly, from whatever system you use for billing and attendance.

1. Group every member by the month they joined (their cohort) and by age band: under 25, 25 to 34, 35 to 44, 45 to 54, 55 and over.
2. For each cohort and band, record the share still active at 30, 90, 180 and 365 days.
3. Split leavers into reasons you can act on (attendance dropped, payment failed, price) and life events you cannot (moved away, injury, new job in another city).
4. Track average visits per week in the first 30 days by age band. Low early attendance is usually the earliest warning sign.
5. Track ARM (average revenue per member) by age band, so you can see whether any youth rates are dragging the average down.

Small numbers will make the bands noisy for a small gym. Look at rolling six- or twelve-month totals rather than single months, and watch the 90-day line first. If under-25s hold at 90 days at roughly the same rate as everyone else, the industry gap is not your problem. If they fall off a cliff at week six, you know exactly which part of the journey to fix.

This week, pull your member list, add date of birth and join date if they are not already there, and run the 90-day number for under-25s against everyone else. That single comparison will tell you more than any vendor report.

If you would rather have a second set of eyes on those numbers, that is exactly what a gym numbers teardown is for: a free 20-minute call where we look at your retention by cohort and find the biggest leak.