Working out how much revenue your gym generated this month is relatively straightforward if your invoices and membership fees are properly recorded. The challenge comes when you look ahead: how much revenue can you expect next month? And in three months’ time?
For many gyms, forecasting is still largely based on intuition. If January went well, it seems reasonable to expect February to follow suit. If membership numbers are growing, we assume revenue will keep pace. And as summer approaches, experience tells us that things will probably change.
But decisions such as hiring another coach, buying equipment or expanding your premises should involve more than a feeling that “things are going well”. That is where a gym revenue forecast helps: it turns the data your gym already generates into a reasonable estimate of what could happen over the coming months.
You do not need a complex financial model. If you know how many paying members you have, how much monthly revenue they generate on average, and how many members join and leave, you have a solid starting point.
Forecasting revenue does not mean predicting an exact figure
A forecast is not intended to tell you that your gym will generate exactly €18,327 in three months’ time.
What it can do is show where the business is heading if certain conditions hold. For example, what would happen if you continued to attract around 15 new members a month, your monthly member churn rate remained at 5%, or new memberships fell during summer as they did last year?
That is the value of forecasting: having a reference point to support decisions and understand what your results depend on.
Suppose you are thinking about hiring another coach. Knowing that you generated €18,000 in revenue this month provides context, but it does not answer the more important question: can you sustain that additional cost over the coming months?
Your revenue forecast is part of the answer. You also need to consider your existing costs, the full cost of employing that person and the cash available to meet your payments.
Start by understanding where your revenue comes from
For many gyms, membership fees are the most stable source of revenue. That also makes them the simplest place to start a forecast.
Imagine you have 200 active paying members, each generating an average of €75 a month across your different membership plans. Your starting monthly recurring revenue would be approximately:
200 members × €75 = €15,000 a month
To make comparisons useful, express membership fees on a consistent monthly basis and treat tax consistently throughout your calculations. If someone pays for an annual membership, spread that amount across the months it covers when calculating average monthly revenue.
The calculation becomes more useful when you account for members joining and leaving.
In a month’s time, you probably will not have exactly the same 200 members. Some will leave and others will join. To understand what could happen to your revenue, you need to consider both.
If you have averaged 15 new members a month recently and lost around 5% of your members each month, you can build an initial estimate.
With 200 members, a 5% churn rate would mean approximately ten members leaving. If 15 new members join during the same period, you would finish the month with around 205 members.
Assuming average revenue per member remains unchanged:
205 members × €75 = €15,375 in monthly recurring revenue at month-end
That €15,375 represents the monthly revenue level your membership base would generate at the end of the month. It is not necessarily the amount invoiced or collected during that month: that depends on when people join, when cancellations take effect and how membership fees are billed.
You can then project the following month and subsequent months, adjusting your assumptions as new information becomes available.
Not all members generate the same revenue
Average revenue per member is useful for an initial estimate, but it may be too broad if your membership prices vary considerably.
Having 200 members paying roughly the same amount is different from combining €50, €80 and €120 memberships, class packs, additional services and temporary promotions.
If you offer several membership types, it is worth forecasting them separately.
For example, you might have 100 members paying €65, another 70 paying €80 and 30 paying €100. If most new members choose the €65 plan, total membership could grow while average revenue per member falls.
That changes the forecast.
This is one reason why membership numbers alone can give you an incomplete picture of the business. Two gyms with 200 members can generate very different levels of revenue. Equally, a gym can grow its membership without revenue increasing at the same rate.
New members matter, but so do cancellations
When we think about growth, we often focus first on how many new members we attract. However, understanding how many leave is just as important when forecasting revenue.
If 20 people join your gym in a month but 18 leave, your net membership growth is two. If 12 join and only three leave, you finish the month with nine additional members.
That is why you need to analyse both figures together.
You can calculate your monthly member churn rate using a simple formula:
Member churn rate = members who leave during the month ÷ members at the start of the month × 100
If you start the month with 200 members and ten leave:
10 ÷ 200 × 100 = 5%
Use consistent definitions of an active member and a cancellation so that you can compare months reliably. If you use this rate to forecast future membership, apply it to the number of members at the start of each month: 5% will not always mean ten cancellations if your membership base changes.
Once you have several months of historical data, you can identify your gym’s typical churn rate and recognise when it moves beyond that level. For a closer look at this, read our guide to reducing gym member churn and spotting disengagement early.
A forecast does more than project revenue. It also gives you a reference against which to compare what actually happens.
Use historical data, but do not assume every month is the same
If you have averaged 15 new members a month over the past six months, you could use that figure to forecast the months ahead. It is a starting point, but it has an obvious limitation: a gym does not behave in the same way throughout the year.
January may bring more new members than other months. Summer may bring a drop in activity. September may see membership acquisition pick up again. Your gym will also have its own patterns, depending on its location, audience and business model.
When you have enough historical data, do not limit yourself to comparing May with April. Compare it with May of the previous year as well.
If you see a similar drop in new memberships every July, that should inform your forecast for the coming July. Likewise, if January usually brings a surge in new members, it would not make sense to use it as the basis for your entire year.
Include changes you already know about, too: confirmed cancellations, price changes, promotions coming to an end or planned new activities.
The better you understand your history and upcoming changes, the more closely your forecast can reflect how your gym actually operates.
Add revenue beyond membership fees
So far, we have focused on memberships because they tend to provide the most predictable revenue. However, your gym probably has other sources of income.
Personal training, class packs, product sales, merchandise, events and additional services all contribute to revenue. The difference is that they do not all recur with the same regularity.
If you generated €3,000 in merchandise sales after launching a special collection, you should not automatically assume you will generate another €3,000 the following month. By contrast, if personal training has generated between €1,000 and €1,300 a month for the past year, you have a historical basis for estimating future revenue.
Separating recurring revenue from one-off sales makes your forecast more useful. It also helps you avoid a common mistake: treating an exceptionally good month as your new normal.
Keep revenue and cash receipts separate, too. A membership fee may have been invoiced but remain unpaid, while an annual membership paid today covers several months of service. If you need to anticipate how much cash will be available, complement your revenue forecast with a schedule of expected cash receipts and payments.
Work with several scenarios rather than a single figure
Once you have a baseline forecast, you can make it more useful by introducing different scenarios.
Suppose you normally attract 15 new members a month and lose around ten. That could be your expected scenario. But you could also calculate what would happen if new memberships fell to ten and cancellations rose to 12, or if a campaign performed particularly well and attracted 20 new members while only eight left.
You do not need ten different possibilities. Three are enough to get started: a conservative scenario, an expected scenario and a favourable scenario.
The example below starts with 200 members and average monthly revenue of €75 per member. To keep the calculations simple, the number of members joining and leaving stays the same each month:
| Scenario | New members per month | Members leaving per month | Members at the end of month 3 | Monthly recurring revenue at the end of month 3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conservative | 10 | 12 | 194 | €14,550 |
| Expected | 15 | 10 | 215 | €16,125 |
| Favourable | 20 | 8 | 236 | €17,700 |
These are illustrative assumptions, not industry benchmarks. Replace them with figures that are reasonable for your gym. The final column shows the monthly recurring revenue level at the end of the third month, not total revenue across all three months.
If you are considering taking on an additional fixed cost of €1,000 a month, check what your revenue, expenses and available cash would look like under the conservative scenario.
If the decision remains sustainable under those conditions, you will have a stronger basis for making it. To complete that assessment, read our guide to calculating your gym’s profitability.
Compare your forecast with what actually happened
Imagine you forecast 205 members at month-end but finish with 198. You expected 15 new members, but 11 joined. You estimated around ten cancellations, but 13 members left.
The aim is not simply to conclude that “the forecast was wrong”. The question is why.
Perhaps you received fewer sales enquiries. Perhaps fewer trial sessions converted into memberships. Perhaps churn increased. Or perhaps membership numbers were close to your forecast, but more people chose lower-priced plans.
Each difference tells you something about the business.
Record forecast and actual figures each month for new memberships, cancellations, members at month-end and average revenue per member. Then compare revenue using the same basis you used to build the forecast.
You can include this review in your regular gym KPI monitoring. Repeating the exercise month after month helps you refine your assumptions as you develop a clearer understanding of how your gym performs.
A forecast helps you make decisions earlier
Historical data tells you what has happened. A forecast uses that information to anticipate possible outcomes and prepare decisions.
If you expect a seasonal drop in membership, you can work on retention before it arrives. If you want to reach a particular level of recurring revenue, you can estimate how many new members you would need. If you are considering an investment, you can assess how it would fit into different business scenarios.
You do not need to predict exactly what will happen for the exercise to be useful.
The value of forecasting your gym’s revenue lies in understanding what would need to happen to reach a figure and how to respond if conditions change.
To do that, you need reliable information. Keeping membership, fee and payment data in one place helps you avoid building forecasts from scattered or outdated figures.
Resawod helps you manage that information in one system and use it as the starting point for your forecasts.
Book a Resawod demo to discover how you can organise your gym’s management.
