How Much Does an ORANGETHEORY Franchise Owner Make?

Officially, Item 19 measures Gross Sales and Monthly Member Count—not operating profit, EBITDA, net income, cash flow, owner compensation, or take-home pay. The measurement period is the 12 months ended February 28, 2026, and the principal population is 1,189 franchised Studios that were open and operating during that period.

Gross Sales includes revenue generated by a Studio and reported to OTF Franchisor, LLC, excluding specified taxes, refunds and credits, and certain rent or fees from an unrelated business. Item 19 divides the franchised Studio population into Gross Sales quartiles and reports averages, medians, highs, and lows.

Source: 2026 Orangetheory Franchise Disclosure Document, Item 19, pp. 58–60. The FDD states that written substantiation for the financial performance representation is available upon reasonable request.

A defensible analytical range is approximately $15,600 to $104,300 per Studio, with a base estimate of about $46,300. These are independent manager-run scenario estimates, not official Orangetheory results, and they apply a broad official margin benchmark to three disclosed Item 19 revenue observations.

• Revenue: Conservative uses the fourth-quartile median Gross Sales of $493,135; Base uses the overall median of $750,643; Upside uses the top-quartile median of $1,136,849. These are historical cohort medians, not probabilities.
• Margin: IRS tax year 2023 data report $933.271 million of net income less deficit on $15.122 billion of receipts for 177,602 sole proprietorship returns in “Amusement, gambling, and recreation industries,” an aggregate margin of 6.171%.
• Sensitivity: With no same-brand operating margin, the Conservative margin is 3 percentage points below the benchmark, Base equals the benchmark, and Upside is 3 percentage points above it: 3.171%, 6.171%, and 9.171%.
• Definition: The result is a pre-tax business-income proxy after normal unit-level expenses and recurring fees, before personal income taxes and loan principal. The IRS measure includes reported interest and depreciation deductions; neither is separately reconstructed here. Capital expenditures are not modeled as annual operating costs.
• Manager assumption: For role comparison, the model assumes normal operating expenses include a paid full-time manager, consistent with Item 15. The IRS table does not isolate manager pay, which is a material uncertainty.

Owner involvement can shift compensation from a hired manager to the owner, but it does not turn that compensation into passive business profit. Item 15 recommends—but does not require—the owner or Principal Owner to personally supervise the Studio; it does require a full-time, on-premises, trained manager. The official U.S. franchise recruitment page also communicates daily owner/operator engagement and no absentee ownership.

At the $750,643 Item 19 median Gross Sales level, the disclosed royalty, annualized minimum advertising spend, Technology Fee, and OTbeat fee total about $125,147, or 16.7% of sales, before rent, payroll, utilities, insurance, supplies, maintenance, and other operating costs. This is a same-FDD derived burden, not an estimate of total operating expense.

After only these minimum identified obligations, approximately $625,496 remains from median Gross Sales. Actual Brand Fund contributions or local advertising could be higher under the FDD terms. This remainder is not profit: it must still cover the full Studio cost structure. Item 6 also lists product and promotional purchases typically ranging from $5,000 to $11,000 annually, plus other conditional or variable fees that are not included in the fixed calculation above.

The scenario model does not subtract this $125,147 a second time from the IRS margin because the IRS net-income benchmark is used as an all-in deduction proxy. Double-charging the disclosed fees would understate the modeled result. The tradeoff is lower confidence because the broad benchmark does not show how much franchise royalty, advertising, rent, or manager payroll it contains.

Source: 2026 Orangetheory Franchise Disclosure Document, Item 6, pp. 12–17. The local advertising amount is a required spend, not necessarily a payment to the franchisor.

Studio-level payroll and occupancy are the largest unresolved cost variables, while the exclusion of closed Studios is the most important population limitation. Item 19 excluded 95 franchised Studios that permanently closed during the relevant period, even though all had been open at least 12 months before closing.

Item 20 adds context that should not be ignored: franchised Studios declined from 1,283 at the start of 2025 to 1,209 at year-end, a net decrease of 74. The same table set reports 214 transfers of Studios from franchisees to new owners during 2025. Neither closures nor transfers prove a particular earnings outcome, but they make location-level due diligence essential.

• Request Item 19 substantiation: confirm how Gross Sales were reported, how temporary closures were treated, and whether a target Studio resembles the relevant quartile.
• Interview current and former franchisees: ask for actual payroll, manager compensation, coach labor, rent, common-area charges, insurance, maintenance, member acquisition cost, and owner hours.
• Separate owner labor from business profit: determine whether the owner will replace the full-time manager, supervise a manager, or oversee multiple Studios.
• Rebuild the P&L by location: use local lease terms, wage rates, membership pricing, churn, class utilization, and presale ramp rather than systemwide averages alone.
• Model financing separately: deduct interest only under the actual loan structure and keep principal payments outside operating earnings. Do not treat the Item 7 startup investment as a one-year expense.
• Verify capital needs: ask about equipment replacement, remodel obligations, deferred maintenance, and working capital because accounting net income is not the same as distributable cash.

The strongest defensible estimate is about $16,000–$104,000 in annual manager-run pre-tax owner earnings per Studio, with a base scenario near $46,000. It is scenario-based, not an official Orangetheory profit disclosure. If the owner personally replaces the required full-time manager, estimated owner-operator benefit rises to about $79,000–$167,000, but the added amount compensates the owner for work performed.

The most important earnings driver is the interaction of membership-supported Gross Sales with payroll and occupancy discipline. The largest unresolved uncertainty is the lack of same-brand operating-expense or profit data, compounded by Item 19's exclusion of permanently closed Studios. Before relying on the range, a buyer should verify the Item 19 substantiation, obtain location-level profit-and-loss evidence, and test the manager-run and owner-operated structures in interviews with current and former franchisees.