Europe Had a Record Year in Wellness. Here’s What Health and Fitness Entrepreneurs Should Know.

Europe’s health and fitness operators finished 2025 with 75.5 million members and €39.1 billion in revenue, according to the 2026 European Health & Fitness Market Report, published by EuropeActive and Deloitte. Memberships rose 5.8%, and the sector added nearly 2,000 clubs.

For anyone deciding whether to build a company in the health and fitness space, a less flattering number in the same report matters too. Penetration across Europe stands at 9.3% of the total population, and 11% among those aged 15 and over.

Choose the market before the concept

Market penetration varies widely from one European country to the next. UK Active’s UK Health and Fitness Market Report 2026 recorded 12.2 million members, 18% of over-16s, £6.5 billion (€7.6 billion) in income and 679 million visits. Germany sits near 14.8% penetration and Sweden above 21%. Spain grew faster last year than either of Europe’s two largest markets, reaching 7.1 million members.

Wilder Zapata has tested those differences with his own money. The Colombian founder of Action Black, a 137-site gym chain, opened in Madrid and Lisbon in 2024 and has a London fitness club under construction. He calls it the toughest market yet, less for the competition than because of the cities’ floating population, which made his community-based model hard to build.

The rule he drew now governs where he signs leases, and it inverts the usual advice about localising: screen markets for one where your offer already works rather than reshaping the offer to fit.

“Rather than adapting the model, we started looking for locations where it works as it is,” he told Entrepreneur Europe.

Find out who else will pay

Across Europe, the customer is often not the only payer in the wellness space. Sweden’s tax agency treats employer-funded wellness benefits as tax-exempt, which is why gym membership sits in Swedish employment packages as a standard line rather than just a perk.

Corporate distribution has consolidated around that; Wellhub’s $600 million acquisition of Berlin-based Urban Sports Club created a platform with 39,000 corporate clients and five million employee subscribers across 18 countries. Winning that channel is a different sales motion from filling a health club.

The same employer budgets fuelling that gym growth are also being pulled toward a category the fitness sector doesn’t outright own: occupational health.

Wellhub’s Return on Wellbeing 2026 report, a survey of more than 1,500 HR and benefits leaders across 10 markets, found that 95% of companies that actually measure their wellness ROI report a positive return, with 91% citing lower healthcare costs and 89% fewer sick days, a sign that what began as gym subsidies is being judged by the same cost logic as any other line item.

Germany’s Deep Care is a case study in that shift. Whereas a gym membership sells access, its AI-powered health assistant, Isa, targets the specific behaviors behind employer costs, prolonged sitting, poor posture, and dehydration, and reports it’s now used across more than 280 organizations and close to 50,000 employees in Europe.

“Work is where behavior becomes routine,” Deep Care co-founder and CEO Milad Geravand said, arguing that most age-related disease “does not start with illness, but with years of unnoticed bad habits.”

A Technical University of Munich study of more than 2,000 users found Isa cut musculoskeletal-related sick days by 56% and lifted productivity by 58%, in as little as four to 18 weeks.

Tax measures move the needle, too. In Portugal, gym access without an instructor falls under the 6% reduced VAT rate while instructor-led sessions attract the standard 23%, so the specifics change the margin. Germany applies 19% to all of it.

For founders, the takeaway is that the member is rarely the whole revenue model in Europe. This shows the importance of mapping employer budgets, insurer reimbursements and national tax reliefs that touch your category before you set a consumer price.

Don’t import your unit economics

Action Black’s headline numbers come from Colombia: 17.6-month average payback per club, EBITDA margins near 60% at mature sites, 2.85% monthly cancellations.

Zapata was direct that numbers like that don’t travel. “In Madrid or New York, acquiring a customer costs much more and retention is far more demanding, simply because there is so much more on offer. It’s an ocean of possibilities.”

Retention behaviour compounds this. The leading reason Gen Z memberships lapse is a cancelled direct debit rather than a decision to leave – 44% of losses.

Consolidation is squeezing in. The EuropeActive and Deloitte report counted 27 mergers and acquisitions in 2025, transferring 936 clubs between operators. For a founder this shows how sites and members are increasingly contested by groups with larger capital, and an operator who does reach scale has a visible list of buyers.

In short, unit economics rarely survives a border. Founders should build acquisition cost and churn assumptions separately for every market they enter, and test the payback period against the more expensive of the two rather than the one they already know.

What to do now

The report’s own consumer research points at the levers. Deloitte surveyed 11,250 people across 20 European markets and found location weighing more heavily than before, with convenience and accessibility to the fore.

In other words, price still counts, but respondents judged it against operating hours and equipment quality. Interest in strength training, and in the community around a facility, both rose.

Herman Rutgers, the report’s co-author and a EuropeActive ambassador, sets the headroom against the United States, where penetration runs near 25% against Europe’s 9.3%. “We are confident of reaching EuropeActive’s ambition of getting to 100 million members of health and fitness centres by 2030,” he stresses to Entrepreneur Europe.

The public health case is what the sector is taking to governments. The WHO and OECD have estimated that bringing Europeans up to recommended activity levels would save EU states close to €8 billion a year in healthcare spending, returning €1.70 for every €1 spent on physical activity policy – a gap technology firms are moving on too.

The same logic is being made for prevention on the other side of the Atlantic. Exploding U.S. healthcare costs are driven largely by preventable chronic conditions like diabetes, cardiovascular disease and musculoskeletal disorders, and employers there are already paying to treat conditions that small workplace changes could prevent.

“Consumer demand for gym, pool and leisure centre services is growing year on year,” said UK Active chief executive Huw Edwards on this year’s UK figures, pointing to “the untapped potential to get millions more people active if the sector gets the right support from the Government to remove the barriers to growth.”

Three things follow for founders: choose the market on its penetration gap rather than its size, which tells you whether you’re converting first-timers or taking members off a rival; find out who else pays before you set a consumer price; and rebuild the unit economics at every border, since acquisition cost and churn change first.