Your members are comparing you to the new gym down the road. Time to invest.

A gym is read the way any leisure business is read: how much revenue arrives, how reliably it arrives, and how long it has been arriving. On our panel 23 lenders fund gym equipment as an asset and 31 will lend against leisure premises, checked September 2026, and panel composition changes over time.

The wrinkle nobody mentions is how members pay. Card-linked advances size themselves on card takings, and a gym collecting most of its membership by direct debit shows a card figure that badly understates the business. We place fewer gyms on card-linked funding than we did three years ago for exactly that reason. Where the money lands as direct debits, a term facility or asset finance reads the bank statements instead, and reads them properly.

Time trading is the gate that catches new sites. 21 of our 55 unsecured lenders will look at a business under a year old, and 5 will look at a genuine start-up with nothing behind it (checked September 2026). A second site backed by a first site's statements is a much easier conversation than a first site backed by a spreadsheet.

At £25,000 unsecured, 36 lenders on the panel have a product covering the amount, over terms from 1 to 72 months. At £50,000 it is 47 lenders and terms out to 120 months. Published floors across those products start at 4.1%, with a typical floor nearer 17% (checked September 2026). A floor is where pricing starts, not where a gym lands.

Cardio kit and rigs are financeable assets, which matters more than it sounds. An asset finance lender is pricing against a rack of spin bikes it could take back and sell, so the security sits in the room rather than on your balance sheet. Product limits across our asset finance panel of 38 lenders run £1,000 to £50 million, which is what the products allow rather than what any gym would be offered.

Buying outright avoids finance cost and empties the account in one afternoon. Spreading the same purchase keeps the cash for the things no lender will fund, such as the marketing that fills the classes the kit is for. The arithmetic that decides it is not the rate; it is whether the retained cash earns more than the finance costs over the same months. We can put both totals in front of you, and the lender still makes its own decision.

The SME Finance Monitor records a 96% success rate for asset finance applications and 60% for bank loans across all SMEs, a 36-point gap that is the reason a new gym's treadmills go on hire purchase before anyone asks a bank for a term loan.

ukactive's UK Health and Fitness Market Report 2026, published on 9 April 2026 with Sport England and 4GLOBAL and analysed by Grant Thornton UK, counts 12.2 million members aged 16 and over, 18% of that population, up from 14.6% in 2022, 16.0% in 2023 and 16.9% in 2024. It puts clubs at 5,842, 4.2% more than in 2024, total income at £6.5bn against £5.7bn a year earlier, and 2025 visits at 679 million, a 10% rise; studio-only and pool-only sites are excluded. The ONS bulletin on UK businesses (24 September 2025, IDBR at 14 March 2025) has no separate line for fitness facilities, so we cannot put a number on gym businesses as opposed to gym sites, and we would rather say so than borrow one.

Gyms, sports grounds and sports clubs are named on the gov.uk list of leisure premises that qualify for the retail, hospitality and leisure multipliers from 1 April 2026: 38.2p in the pound for a rateable value under £51,000 and 43p from £51,000 to £499,999, each 5p under the national equivalent, replacing the 40% relief of 2025/26 (guidance updated 30 March 2026, Budget 2025 factsheet updated 30 January 2026, both read 9 September 2026). Whether a unit qualifies is the billing authority's decision.