Guides / most-saturated-gym-markets-us

The Most (and Least) Saturated Gym Markets in America, Measured

By Sergio Salgado, founder of Denzify · Updated July 22, 2026 · 8 min read

“Fittest cities” lists rank residents by how much they exercise. This is not that list: it ranks markets by how much fitness supply is already competing for those residents, which is the number that matters if you are about to sign a lease for one. We measured it ourselves, with the same machinery Denzify uses for paid market reports: for each city, an exhaustive grid of place searches covering the entire administrative boundary (not a viewport, not a radius around downtown), deduplicated, then divided by the city’s ACS population. Data collected 2026-07-22.

The full ranking: gyms per 10,000 residents

#	City	Gyms	Population	Per 10k residents
1	Pittsburgh, PA	177	304,759	5.82
2	Atlanta, GA	290	505,268	5.73
3	Raleigh, NC	249	481,031	5.17
4	Miami, FL	234	459,745	5.09
5	Denver, CO	338	718,877	4.7
6	San Diego, CA	622	1,389,526	4.48
7	Oklahoma City, OK	305	697,125	4.38
8	El Paso, TX	272	680,130	4
9	Minneapolis, MN	169	427,246	3.96
10	Portland, OR	247	641,165	3.85
11	San Francisco, CA	315	830,235	3.79
12	Austin, TX	360	979,539	3.67
13	Indianapolis, IN	314	885,860	3.55
14	Charlotte, NC	315	903,844	3.49
15	Washington, DC	232	681,294	3.4
16	Seattle, WA	256	754,195	3.39
17	Tucson, AZ	185	547,073	3.39
18	Columbus, OH	308	914,802	3.36
19	Louisville, KY	212	631,818	3.35
20	Baltimore, MD	183	573,243	3.19
21	Sacramento, CA	166	528,706	3.15
22	Detroit, MI	197	638,530	3.09
23	Albuquerque, NM	173	562,218	3.08
24	San Antonio, TX	444	1,479,835	3
25	Dallas, TX	387	1,307,930	2.96
26	Salt Lake City, UT	58	208,007	2.77
27	Kansas City, MO	140	510,612	2.75
28	Nashville, TN	188	690,130	2.73
29	Memphis, TN	160	618,980	2.58
30	Jacksonville, FL	248	977,670	2.54
31	San Jose, CA	238	990,138	2.41
32	Boston, MA	154	666,442	2.32
33	Las Vegas, NV	147	660,400	2.22
34	Houston, TX	515	2,328,253	2.21
35	Los Angeles, CA	782	3,857,263	2.03
36	Milwaukee, WI	115	566,973	2.02
37	Chicago, IL	524	2,711,226	1.93
38	New York, NY	1,454	8,483,844	1.71
39	Philadelphia, PA	241	1,579,706	1.52
40	Phoenix, AZ	233	1,642,323	1.42

How to read a 4.1x spread

Pittsburgh, Atlanta and the rest of the top five are compact core cities: their legal boundaries wrap the employment and retail heart of a much larger metro, so the commercial density of the whole region concentrates over a small resident count. The bottom of the table is the mirror image. Phoenix annexed its suburbs decades ago and New York packs 8.5 million residents inside its city line, so the same searches spread over vastly more people. Neither end is a verdict by itself; the table tells you what a customer searching “gym” inside those city limits actually finds per neighbor, and that is the competitive field a new operator walks into.

The second thing the count cannot see is capacity. A big-box budget club serves several thousand members from one address; a boutique studio serves two hundred from the same map pin. Sun Belt markets near the bottom of this table skew big-box, which means fewer, larger competition points, not necessarily easier competition. Gyms also compete segment by segment: budget, boutique and full-service clubs split the same map, and your rival count is the subset in your segment, not the whole column above.

Note that these are keyword-measured counts: everything a “gym” search surfaces inside city limits, which includes CrossFit boxes, martial-arts gyms and studio concepts alongside health clubs. That is deliberate, because it is the customer’s view of the market. It also means the per-10k figures here run higher than establishment-census norms (County Business Patterns puts dedicated fitness centers at about 2.1 per 10,000 nationally); rank cities against each other on this table, not against that baseline.

Why city-level density still isn’t your answer

A city average flattens the only geography that matters for a lease. Gym competition happens inside a 2.5 km trade radius, roughly the distance members will drive three times a week, and every city on this list contains both saturated corridors and zero-competition tracts. In our public Boston sample report, the citywide read (Grade D, 36/100) coexists with 72 census tracts that have no competitor at all. The ranking above tells you the temperature of the pool; it does not tell you where to dive.

Methodology

Supply: for each city we ran a recursive quadtree of Places text searches with an IDs-only field mask over the city’s administrative boundary (Nominatim polygon); any cell hitting the 60-result cap was subdivided and re-searched, results were deduplicated by place ID, and boundary-straddling cells contribute their count weighted by the share of the cell inside the polygon. Cities marked with + still hit caps at maximum depth and are undercounted. Demand denominator: ACS 5-year place-level population. Median income per city comes from the same ACS table. The approach is the counting half of a market saturation analysis; a full Denzify report additionally reads every candidate (name, categories, reviews), maps white space, and grades demand vs supply into a Promise Score.

If your city is on this list and you want the block-level version of this analysis, competitors verified by segment, demand measured, zones mapped, a Denzify report runs it for $149, with a free snapshot first. Journalists and researchers: cite freely with a link to this page; write support@denzify.com for the underlying table.