December is when a gym wins January

The weeks after Thanksgiving are the quietest of the year on most gym floors. Placer.ai’s foot traffic analysis of the big chains found the fourth quarter brings the lowest share of repeat visits, as holidays and travel push workouts aside. Four weeks from now the same floor will be the busiest it gets.

That gap is the opportunity. What a gym fixes in December moves January more than anything it does in the first week of the year: the profile, the offer, the terms and the follow-up that decides who is still coming in March.

What the last January looked like

Fitness visits in January 2025 ran 21.2% above December 2024, a little below the 23.4% jump in January 2024, according to Placer.ai. The same analysis found that the first quarter of 2024 brought the largest share of repeat visitors, people training at least twice a month, at all four chains it studied.

The market behind that spike keeps growing. In its October 31 consumer report, the Health & Fitness Association counted 77 million Americans who engaged with fitness facilities in 2024.

So the January surge is about as reliable as anything in local marketing. What varies is which clubs catch it, and that is mostly settled before New Year’s Day.

Fix the profile before the first search

Many January shoppers start with “gym near me” on a phone. Whitespark’s newest Local Search Ranking Factors survey, published in November, puts the primary Business Profile category first among map pack factors, distance from the searcher second, and being open at the moment of the search fifth. A club cannot move closer to anyone, but it can get the other two right.

• Category. The primary category should match what you sell, such as gym, fitness center or boxing gym, with the others added as secondary categories.
• Holiday hours. Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, entered in the profile before the week arrives. A profile showing closed on New Year’s morning hands that search to whoever is listed as open.
• Access hours. If members can get in with a key fob outside staffed hours, say so on the site and in the profile description.
• Photos. The floor at a busy hour, a class in progress, the locker room.
• Reviews. The members still training through December are your most committed, so ask all of them now, not only the ones you know are happy. The FTC’s rule on fake reviews, final since August 2024, bans rewards conditioned on a review saying something positive.

Write the January offer for the rules that apply now

The FTC’s amended Negative Option Rule, the rule known as “click to cancel”, was vacated by the Eighth Circuit on July 8 on procedural grounds. It did not end federal interest in gyms. In August the FTC sued the operators of LA Fitness, which it says run more than 600 locations with over 3.7 million members, alleging they made canceling exceedingly difficult in violation of the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act. And this week the FTC published a petition from the Consumer Federation of America and the American Economic Liberties Project asking it to write a new rule, with comments open until January 2.

Most of the specific cancellation rules now come from the states:

• California. AB 2863 applies to contracts entered into, amended or extended on or after July 1 of this year. It requires the consumer’s express affirmative consent, an annual reminder and a way to cancel in the same medium the member used to sign up, and it reaches free-to-pay conversions, the form most January trials take.
• New York. The Attorney General’s guidance on the Health Club Services Act says a club must let members cancel through methods that include its website, email, phone, mail or in person, and caps contracts at $3,600 a year and 36 months.

Your January landing page should show, before anyone signs:

• The monthly price, any annual fee and the date dues are charged.
• How long the trial lasts and exactly what happens when it ends.
• How to cancel. If people can join online, they should be able to leave online.
• Staffed hours and access hours.

The FTC’s business blog drew the lesson from the LA Fitness case in August: making people jump through hoops to cancel is bad business, and unlawful too. We would go a step further and put the cancellation policy in the ad. A shopper comparing three clubs in January is already wondering how hard it will be to leave, and the club that answers first looks like the safe choice.

Spend for March, not for the first week

Placer.ai’s data shows regular visits holding up across the whole first quarter. A budget that runs out by January 15 pays for the rush and misses the people who decide in February. We spread it across the quarter, weighted toward the first three weeks.

WordStream by LocaliQ’s 2025 benchmarks give the Health & Fitness medians. On Google search, campaigns from April 2024 to March 2025 had a median click of $5.00, a conversion rate of 6.80% and a cost per lead of $62.80. For Facebook ads run for leads, the edition published in September (April 2024 to June 2025) put the Health & Fitness lead at $52.98. Facebook and Instagram carry the offer to people who are not searching yet; Google catches the ones who already are.

The Health & Fitness Association’s benchmarking report, published in October, found a member retention rate of 66.4% for 2024, and Placer.ai describes the traditional pattern as fitness chains losing about 30% of their members each year. A January join who stops coming in February and cancels in March was not a cheap lead. Before the first new member walks in, have these ready, ideally automated in a CRM such as GoHighLevel:

• a first workout or class booked before they leave the signup page;
• a message from a coach in the second week;
• an alert to staff when a new member has not checked in for ten days;
• a review request around day 30.

What to do this month

• Enter holiday hours for December 24, 25 and 31 and January 1 in your Google profile, and check that the primary category matches what you sell.
• Ask every member who trains in December for a review, with the direct link, and reply to each one.
• Rewrite the January offer page so the price, billing date, trial terms and cancellation steps sit above the signup button; in California, check it against AB 2863’s consent and same-medium rules.
• Build the Google search campaigns and the Facebook and Instagram ads now, so they are approved and running before New Year’s Day.
• Split the January budget across January, February and March.
• Write the first-month messages for new members before the first one joins.

December feels like the off-season, but most of January is decided in it. How we plan the January push on Facebook and Instagram is on our Meta ads page, and the rest of the gym year, from presales to retention, is on our page for gyms and fitness studios.