How Much Does a UFC Gym Franchise Owner Make?

Item 19 measures 2025 revenue, membership, square footage, and dues for 25 “Managed Gyms”; it does not measure franchisee profit, owner salary, distributions, cash flow, EBITDA, or net income. The applicable facilities are Signature and UFC FIT gyms. The disclosure does not apply to UFC GYM Jiu Jitsu, Class by UFC GYM, or UFC GYM Core formats.

The cohort combines company-owned gyms with franchisee-owned gyms operated under management arrangements. Results cover January 1 through December 31, 2025, while the membership table also shows year-end 2024 and 2025 counts. The financial information was not audited or independently verified. The FDD says written substantiation is available on reasonable request. Source: 2026 UFC GYM FDD, Item 19, pp. 65–66.

Which gyms were left out of the revenue cohort?

The FDD excludes two franchisee-owned managed gyms opened during 2025 because they lacked a full year, three franchisee-owned gyms whose management agreements ended during 2025, one corporate-owned gym that closed during 2025, and one franchisee-owned Signature/UFC FIT gym that was not operated under a management services agreement. These exclusions make the published low, median, average, and high useful historical observations, but not a full-system profit distribution.

The model applies a 13%, 16%, or 19% operating-margin proxy to the FDD's low, median, and high revenue observations, then deducts UFC GYM's 4% royalty, 2% Marketing Fund contribution, and the disclosed 3.4% billing charge on member dues. The three-point margin spread is an editorial sensitivity band around the 16% benchmark; it is not reported by UFC GYM or Life Time.

The central benchmark comes from the Life Time Group Holdings 2025 Form 10-K: $481.3 million of operating income on $2.995 billion of total revenue, or 16.0%. Life Time is a company-operated athletic-country-club business rather than a UFC GYM franchise system, and its centers, geographic mix, pricing, scale, corporate overhead, and amenities differ. That comparability gap is the main reason confidence is Limited. The separate 3.4% billing deduction may partly overlap with payment-processing costs already embedded in Life Time's operating expenses; retaining it makes the scenarios more conservative rather than treating the proxy as a precise same-brand margin.

“Percentage fees” combines the 4% royalty, 2% Marketing Fund contribution, and 3.4% of the Item 19 member-dues figure. Values are calculated at full precision and rounded to the nearest dollar. Conservative, Base, and Upside are analytical scenarios, not probabilities or forecasts.

What is included and excluded from the modeled result?

The Life Time operating-income margin includes center operations, rent, general and administrative expense, marketing, depreciation and amortization, and other operating expense at the consolidated-company level. Using operating income rather than Adjusted EBITDA is deliberately conservative because depreciation remains in the benchmark as a rough allowance for asset consumption.

• Included through the benchmark: normal manager payroll, other labor, occupancy, utilities, repairs, supplies, marketing, administrative expense, depreciation, and comparable operating overhead.
• Subtracted explicitly: UFC GYM royalty, Marketing Fund contribution, and the disclosed billing percentage applied to member dues.
• Not subtracted again: local advertising, software, music, and platform charges, because the all-in benchmark already contains comparable marketing and operating overhead; subtracting them separately could double count cost.
• Excluded: interest, loan principal, personal income taxes, owner distributions, working-capital changes, and actual capital expenditures. Those items determine cash take-home but are not disclosed consistently enough for a same-unit calculation.

An active owner who replaces a paid general manager may create an estimated owner-operator benefit of about $177,000 to $750,000, including $75,860 of labor value. The added amount is compensation for performing a full-time management job; it is not passive business profit and should not be counted twice as both payroll savings and owner salary.

Item 15 says personal participation on premises is not mandatory, but the franchise is not a passive investment. Either the Managing Owner or an approved Designated General Manager must provide day-to-day supervision and devote best full-time efforts to the gym. The FDD also warns that hiring a General Manager increases operating cost and may impair results. Source: 2026 UFC GYM FDD, Item 15, pp. 60–61.

The labor-value adjustment uses the BLS May 2023 wage table for Physical Fitness Facilities, which reports a $75,860 annual mean wage for General and Operations Managers. It is a national employer wage, not a guarantee of the cost in a particular city. Payroll taxes, benefits, incentives, and recruiting costs can make the employer's full cost higher.

What if the gym uses the franchisor's management services?

A franchisor-managed structure is economically different from the manager-run scenario above. Item 6 discloses a management and back-office fee of up to $13,000 per month, equal to as much as $156,000 annually, plus an incentive fee. The attached Management Services Agreement states a 15% incentive fee on Operating Profit once Operating Profit reaches at least $250,000, calculated quarterly. Those charges are not included in the principal range because the arrangement is not mandatory for every owner and the exact Operating Profit sequence requires the individual agreement and budget.

The largest clearly disclosed percentage charges for Signature/UFC FIT are the 4% royalty, 2% Marketing Fund contribution, and 3.4% billing charge on recurring revenue. Local advertising and optional management arrangements can create additional six-figure annual obligations, while required software and music charges are smaller but recurring.

Royalty Fee — 4% of Gross Revenues

Subtracted explicitly in all three scenarios. Source: 2026 UFC GYM FDD, Item 6, Signature/FIT table.

Marketing Fund — 2% of Gross Revenues

Subtracted explicitly. The model treats it conservatively as incremental even though the comparator's operating margin already includes marketing expense.

Local Advertising — at least $7,500 per month

Equivalent to at least $90,000 annually. It is not separately deducted because the all-in operating-margin benchmark includes marketing; a location-specific budget must confirm whether the proxy is sufficient.

Billing and lead management

The FDD lists $150 per month forDataTrak, $200 per month for GymSales/Ignite, 3.4% on recurring revenue, and a 2.5% transaction fee on credit/debit retail merchant transactions. Only the 3.4% member-dues component is calculable from Item 19 and included in the scenarios.

ClubConnect, Enhance Fitness Platform, and music

Disclosed fixed charges total approximately $13,500 to $15,400 annually using the stated monthly ranges. They are not separately deducted from the all-in benchmark to avoid double counting comparable software and operating overhead.

Management and back-office services

Up to $13,000 per month plus the applicable Operating Profit incentive. Model separately when a management services agreement will apply.

Initial investment is not an annual operating expense. Item 7 estimates $2,170,577 to $6,211,970 for a Signature/UFC FIT opening, but subtracting that startup amount from one year of revenue would not calculate annual profit. Financing cost, capital replacement, and debt principal require a separate cash-flow analysis.

The range is wide because Item 19 gives extreme low and high revenue observations but no franchisee expense distribution. The low gym reported $2.14 million of revenue and the high gym reported $6.22 million—nearly a threefold spread—before any adjustment for market rent, wage rates, owner role, facility age, or local competition.

• Cohort composition: “Managed Gyms” blends company-owned and franchisee-owned facilities under management arrangements; it is not a clean owner-operated franchise cohort.
• No profit line: Item 19 omits payroll, rent, advertising, utilities, insurance, supplies, maintenance, equipment replacement, taxes, and owner compensation.
• Format limits: Signature and UFC FIT results cannot be transferred to Core, Jiu Jitsu, or Class formats without separate evidence.
• Benchmark mismatch: Life Time is a larger company-operated premium fitness system with different amenities, pricing, geography, and corporate scale.
• Excluded outlets: partial-year, closed, and management-transition gyms were omitted, so the published observations do not show every operating outcome.
• System movement: Item 20 shows all-format franchised outlets declined from 66 at year-end 2024 to 58 at year-end 2025, while company-owned outlets declined from three to one. The table does not establish why those changes occurred or which format drove them.

A useful external comparison illustrates why format matters. The Planet Fitness 2025 Form 10-K reports a 35.3% four-wall Adjusted EBITDA margin after applying its current royalty, but Planet Fitness describes a typical 20,000-square-foot, low-price club without many full-service amenities. That result is not used in the calculation because its operating model is materially different; it only demonstrates that gym margins cannot be transferred across concepts without reconciling format and expense definitions.

A buyer should replace every proxy with location-specific evidence and franchisee operating statements before treating any scenario as decision-grade. The FTC Franchise Rule defines a financial performance representation broadly and requires the FDD to state its basis and assumptions; the Item 19 substantiation and franchisee interviews are therefore central diligence sources.

• Request the written substantiation for Item 19 and reconcile every reported revenue category to the Gross Revenues definition.
• Ask Signature/UFC FIT franchisees for full-year unit profit-and-loss statements showing payroll, occupancy, advertising, billing fees, repairs, equipment replacement, and owner compensation separately.
• Confirm whether the target gym will be owner-operated, manager-run, or subject to a Management Services Agreement—and obtain the complete compensation formula in writing.
• Compare the proposed site's rent, common-area charges, utilities, and wage schedule with the expenses of the Item 19 gyms most similar in square footage and member count.
• Identify whether the manager salary is already included in the operating statement before adding any owner-operator labor value.
• Model interest and principal from the buyer's actual financing terms separately; neither is included in the principal earnings range.
• Review Item 20 franchisee and former-franchisee contacts and ask why locations transferred, closed, changed management arrangements, or left the system.
• Do not convert pre-tax operating earnings into after-tax take-home pay without entity-specific tax advice.

The official UFC GYM U.S. franchise website currently presents Signature/UFC FIT, Core, and Jiu-Jitsu development models. The official UFC GYM consumer site can help a buyer compare live offerings, memberships, classes, and facility positioning, but neither replaces the economics and obligations stated in the current FDD and signed agreements.

The strongest defensible range is approximately $101,000 to $674,000 in annual pre-tax manager-run operating earnings for a full-year Signature/UFC FIT gym, with a base scenario near $329,000. It is scenario-based, not an official owner-earnings disclosure. An owner who personally performs the General Manager role may receive an estimated total owner-operator benefit of approximately $177,000 to $750,000, but $75,860 of that amount represents labor value rather than passive profit.

The most important earnings driver is revenue scale relative to labor and occupancy cost. The largest unresolved uncertainty is the absence of a same-brand franchised-unit expense or profit distribution in Item 19. Before committing capital, a buyer should verify the Item 19 substantiation, obtain comparable franchisee profit-and-loss statements, and test the manager-run, owner-operated, and managed-service structures against the exact site, financing plan, and required fee schedule.