Cold Plunge Market Hits $380M and May Be Creating New Sauna Buyers
By Arlene Scott
Senior Wellness Correspondent & Hospitality Consultant
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The cold plunge tub market reached roughly $380 million globally in 2025. A common argument in the sauna trade is that the category is a gateway to broader thermal wellness spending, not a competitor.
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The global cold plunge tub market is estimated at roughly $380 million (per SkyQuest’s 2025 valuation), and SkyQuest forecasts growth of 4.3% a year through 2033. But the more interesting story may be what cold plunge culture is doing for the sauna industry.
The gateway effect
A common argument in the sauna trade is that a significant share of new customers come to sauna through cold plunge. The contrast therapy protocol, alternating between extreme heat and extreme cold, is the use case cited as the bridge between the two categories. In that account, people buy a cold plunge tub, get serious about the practice, and discover they want the heat side too.
On that view, cold plunge didn’t steal customers from sauna. It created a new group of thermal wellness enthusiasts who may eventually want both.
Brand strategy
Several sauna manufacturers have responded by developing their own cold plunge products. Dundalk Leisurecraft now offers the Arctic Plunge and Glacier Plunge alongside its barrel saunas. The logic is straightforward: if your sauna customer is going to buy a cold plunge anyway, better for that sale to happen under your roof.
Plunge, the bootstrapped direct-to-consumer brand founded in 2020, crossed $100 million in revenue in 2024 according to Entrepreneur. The gateway argument holds that growth like that pulls adjacent categories, sauna included, along with it.
Retail and distribution impact
Dealers and showrooms that carry both sauna and cold plunge products can sell them as a pair, which raises the potential value of each transaction.
What Harvia is doing about it
The largest publicly traded sauna company is looking at cold wellness. Asked on the Harvia Q4 2025 earnings call what was on its M&A wish list, CEO Matias Järnefelt called a US infrared sauna business one of the prime candidates, then listed other markets and categories.
Harvia is “looking at categories such as cold wellness” and “digital wellness capabilities,” Järnefelt said on the Q4 2025 call on February 12, 2026.
That positions Harvia as a potential strategic acquirer for cold plunge players, which is a different competitive dynamic than Dundalk building its own Arctic and Glacier Plunge products in-house. A Harvia-backed cold plunge brand with Harvia’s European distribution reach and MyHarvia digital platform would immediately become a scaled contrast-therapy player.
SkyQuest expects the cold plunge tub market to keep growing through 2033, and if the gateway argument holds, that growth is a tailwind for sauna. Sauna and cold plunge are also turning up together in new venues, including public land: Idaho’s state park system put a sauna and cold plunge concession out to bid at Ponderosa State Park in April 2026, one of the clearest US signals yet that parks departments now see contrast therapy as a recreation amenity worth procuring.
