68% of Planet Fitness Members Now Pay Up for the Spa Tier

About 68% of Planet Fitness members paid for Black Card at the end of June, up from 66.5% at the end of 2025. Black Card is the upgrade with the HydroMassage beds, massage chairs and what the chain calls its Black Card Spa. In August the chain widened a test of five new Black Card Spa machines to 100 clubs, and it let franchisees order two of them early: a red light sauna and an LED red light booth. The test is meant to show “how these offerings influence total joins,” CEO Colleen Keating said on the August 6 earnings call.

Smaller operators print the price. The YMCA of Greenville in South Carolina charges $15 a month for a basic recovery program and $25 for a tier that adds a sauna and a cold dry plunge. Gold’s Gym Tampa Gas Worx sells a $59 monthly add-on for unlimited use of its recovery lounge, a $169 version with eight private 30-minute contrast sessions on a cold plunge and an infrared sauna, and single contrast sessions at $19.

Most of the gear behind those prices is self-serve and needs no plumbing. Members lie fully clothed on water-massage beds, sit in red light and infrared pods, zip into compression boots, and take “dry” cold plunges without getting wet. On October 19, Crunch’s website listed 583 clubs, and none listed a water cold plunge. Where Crunch sells cold, it’s a dry plunge, a dry cold room, a cryo chair or a single machine that cycles heat and cold.

Recovery now costs a gym member $15 to $169 a month

• Planet Fitness: the company’s annual report puts Black Card at $24.99 a month for new members, against $15 for Classic. Some clubs already charge $29.99. The company paused a national increase in May pending a broader pricing review.
• Crunch Fitness: the top Peak Results tier is most often $29.99 or $34.99 and includes HydroMassage at more than 500 clubs, plus red light, infrared saunas and dry cold where a club has them. At 343 clubs, a sauna comes with the base membership.
• EōS Fitness: an in-ground cold plunge at 50°F, a 104°F hot tub and an infrared sauna come with its top Will Power membership, priced from $29.99.
• VASA Fitness: cold plunge, sauna and steam, hot tub and red light come with the $24.99 Fitness tier, while Basic, at $14.99, has none of them.
• YMCA of Greenville: $15 basic, $25 with the sauna and cold dry plunge, rolled out across five branches from January to June. Without the upgrade, “the RedZone is not going to turn on,” said Brian Vest, the Y’s vice president of operations. About 1,000 people enrolled within months, and the program broke even in nine to 10 months on leased equipment, Athletech News reported.
• YMCA of Greater Houston: free on annual contracts, $20 per family per month for monthly members. More than 1,200 add-ons since an April launch at three locations.
• Fitness Premier: a premium package that usually runs $20 a month more. About 30% of new members buy it at signup, vice president Rick King told Athletech in August 2025.

Most gyms are choosing between a higher tier, an add-on and a session fee. Kevin Conaway of WellnessSpace Brands floated one more option in a piece sponsored by Daxko: include it for everyone, “sometimes with a small $2–$3 dues increase.” Life Time, at the top of the market, lists recovery as complimentary for members, and its average monthly dues were $245 in the second quarter, CFO Erik Weaver said on the July 30 earnings call.

Demand is moving the same way. ClassPass says sauna bookings on its platform rose 40% in 2025, counting January 1 through October 10, SGB Media reported.

One Florida maker supplies much of the menu

WellnessSpace Brands, based in Clearwater, Florida, makes HydroMassage beds, the PolarWave dry plunge, the RedZone infrared and red light sauna, and the CryoLounge+ recovery chair. The Houston Y launched with those four. Gold’s lists RedZone, CryoLounge+ and HydroMassage among the six unlimited items in its $59 add-on, next to a dry plunge. Crunch names PolarWave as the dry plunge at eight of its clubs.

The PolarWave shows what gyms are buying. Members stay fully clothed for a self-guided session of three to seven minutes, and the December 2025 launch release promises “no plumbing, no maintenance or clean-up.” The same release says installation, maintenance and sanitation have been major obstacles for most commercial operators that wanted cold plunge.

Staffing is the other half of the pitch. Wellsystem, a rival maker, builds payment into its hydro-massage and red light units so members can pay per use. A September 15 Athletech piece it sponsored says operators “can provide the services without additional staffing.”

For sauna and plunge makers, that’s the competition for gym floor space: a self-contained unit with no water to treat and nobody on duty. Planet Fitness’s first Houston club with the expanded Black Card Spa opened in May with a red light sauna, a “Polar Dry Plunge,” compression boots, HydroMassage and massage chairs, Community Impact reported.

A wet plunge brings a rulebook

A dry plunge has no bathing water to treat, which is most of the reason to buy one. A wet plunge in a gym is shared water. The Council for the Model Aquatic Health Code’s July 2026 cold-water guidance calls for free chlorine at or above 3.0 ppm, turnover of “typically 30 minutes or less,” filters certified to NSF/ANSI/CAN 50, at least 4 gallons of replacement water per bather per day, and an attendant trained in CPR, first aid and extrication. Our breakdown of the cold plunge guidance has the full list.

The guidance isn’t law, and states write their own rules. Washington’s health department treats a cold plunge as a spa pool and says self-contained tubs, “even those labeled ‘commercial,’” aren’t built to its design and construction requirements. Its rules also require filtration to run 24 hours a day. That’s the code fight cold plunges have brought to the sauna trade.

The clubs that take on the water charge more for it or carry it in high dues. EōS puts its in-ground plunge in the top tier. Life Time said in January 2025 it would add cold plunges at more than 70 clubs, on top of more than 20 it already had. Equinox lists one at 22 of its 124 clubs with amenity pages, per our count of its club pages.

In a commercial sauna, downtime is the expensive part

A gym that adds a traditional sauna room needs a commercial heater, and Harvia is the current leader in commercial rooms. Its 20 kW Virta Pro and its Club heaters are the workhorses of the industry.

Downtime is the cost that matters: a cold sauna on a Saturday morning is a room full of members who paid for the upgrade. First-time operators are often surprised to learn that heating elements don’t last forever. Harvia’s Virta manuals cover the heater for one year in family use and three months in communal use. At 18 hours a day, three months is about 1,600 hours. A family that heats its sauna three times a week for two hours runs about 300 hours a year, so one quarter in a gym is roughly five years in a home.

Operators who’ve been through it keep spare elements on the shelf and buy heaters that are quick to re-element, which is a big part of why the Virta and the Club are everywhere in commercial rooms. On a typical stone-filled heater, reaching a failed element means lifting every stone out and loading them back in. Tall stone-basket heaters look great on opening day, and plenty get swapped out once the staff has done that job a few times.

HUUM is going after the same rooms with a fix for exactly that job. Its CORE Pro, a 12 to 21 kW heater shown at Interbad this month, puts its elements in a service drawer that slides out with the stones still in place, which HUUM says means shorter downtime. It goes on sale in Europe in the second quarter of 2027, with no North American date yet, as we reported from the show.

Power is a monthly line. US commercial customers paid an average of 14.53 cents per kWh in July, the Energy Information Administration reports. At that rate, an 18 kW heater drawing full power costs about $2.62 an hour, or about $940 a month at 12 hours a day. The thermostat cycles the elements once the room is hot, so the real bill comes in lower. Even at that ceiling, 38 upgrades at $25 a month cover it.

Check the voltage before ordering. Many commercial buildings run at 208 volts, and a heater built for 240 volts loses about a quarter of its heat there, because output falls with the square of the voltage. Harvia sells the 20 kW Virta Pro as a 208-volt, three-phase model.

The churn case is still mostly vendor talk

Recovery vendors pitch retention. The Daxko-sponsored piece says recovery users “often post higher monthly check-ins, lower churn and greater lifetime value,” and gives no number. The YMCA of Greater Houston says its members are staying “approximately two months” longer since launch. It didn’t say how it measured that.

Planet Fitness, which keeps its recovery perks in the upgrade tier, doesn’t see a churn gap. “We haven’t seen a significant difference between classic and Black Card member churn,” Keating told analysts in August. The upgrade revenue is real. A retention lift is unproven.

Bathhouses keep the part the cheap tiers skip

Day passes come first in the Global Wellness Institute’s bathhouse survey, according to its October 6 key findings: 23 of 47 operators and developers call day passes and single visits their most important access model. Staffing and training top the list of what prospective owners underestimate, picked by 25. Earlier results from the same survey covered revenue and cash flow.

A gym member already paying $25 or $59 a month for unlimited pods and plunges weighs a bathhouse day pass against that bill. What a gym tier doesn’t promise is what a bathhouse sells: a hot room built for löyly (the steam from water thrown on the stones), a guided session, and staff whose whole job is the bathing. Put that on the menu and in the price. “Sauna and cold plunge” on its own now reads like a gym perk.

Four answers to get before a gym sauna or plunge goes in

• Keep a full set of spare elements on the shelf, and know who changes them and how long it takes.
• Confirm the building’s voltage before you order the heater, and buy the 208-volt model if that’s what the panel supplies.
• Get the health department’s position on a wet plunge in writing before you order one, with the CMAHC guidance as the starting point.
• Price the tier to pay for itself on upgrade revenue alone. Greenville broke even in nine to 10 months on leased equipment. Nobody has published a retention lift you can take to the bank.