UK gyms dataset: fitness companies and mapped fitness sites by local authority

How many gyms are there in the UK?

There is no official count. The two industry reports published in 2026 disagree by 1,621 clubs, and neither could be read at its source without signing up. So this page counts two things that anyone can check, and says plainly that neither is a count of gyms.

• On 1 November 2026, 16,288 active UK companies listed fitness facilities (SIC code 93130) as a business activity at Companies House.
• On 11 November 2026, OpenStreetMap held 4,980 places in the UK tagged as a fitness centre.
• That is 3.3 companies for every mapped site. The company count runs high and the map count runs low, for the reasons set out below, and the two published counts both sit between them.

How many fitness companies and mapped sites are there in each nation and region?

A company is counted where its registered office is. A mapped site is counted where it stands. London holds 19% of the companies and 21% of the mapped sites.

The four nations add up to 13 fewer companies than the UK row, because that many registered offices had a postcode we could not place. The nine regions are England only.

How many are there in each local authority?

All 361 local authority districts of the UK, in alphabetical order. By company count the largest are Camden and Westminster. Central London boroughs rank high because many companies keep a registered office there, wherever they trade. By mapped sites the largest are City of Edinburgh, Birmingham and Tower Hamlets. 4 districts have no mapped fitness site at all, which says more about the map than about the district.

The eleven Northern Ireland districts show no company count. The open postcode lookup may not be used commercially for Northern Ireland postcodes, so we did not read those rows. The 515 companies with a Northern Ireland postcode are counted for the nation, and the mapped sites are placed in a district by their position on the map.

How many fitness companies are formed and dissolved each year?

Companies House recorded 2,011 companies with the fitness facilities code dissolved in 2025. In the same year 3,639 were formed, of which 3,131 were still on the register on 1 November 2026.

• "Formed" counts only companies that carry the code today or carried it when they were dissolved. A company that changed its code, or was dissolved before 2012, is missing from its year.
• The search for dissolved companies returned none with this code before 2012 and few in the first years after it, so the early rows are a floor, not a count.
• Recent years look strongest because young companies have had little time to close. Of the 2,412 formed in 2019, 1,434 have since been dissolved.
• 2026 is a part year: formations to 1 November 2026 and dissolutions to 11 November 2026. In all, Companies House's search listed 16,657 dissolved companies with that code, the earliest dissolved in 2012.

What counts as a fitness company here, and what was left out?

Every company tells Companies House what it does with up to four codes from the UK Standard Industrial Classification. We count a company if any of its codes is 93130, fitness facilities. Of the 5,711,779 live companies in the snapshot, 17,946 carry it.

Five neighbouring codes hold businesses that a reader might call a gym. We count them here so the size of what is left out is known, and we do not add them to the headline, because each also holds far more that is not a gym.

• 93110, operation of sports facilities. Stadiums, swimming pools, golf courses and arenas. A leisure centre with a gym may sit here, but so does every football ground, and the notes send fitness facilities to 93130.
• 93120, activities of sport clubs. Member clubs for one sport, from football to chess. A boxing club may sit here, but the code cannot separate it from a bowls club.
• 93199, other sports activities. Event promoters, athletes, referees, leagues and racing stables. Too wide to count as fitness.
• 85510, sports and recreation education. Instruction: coaches, personal trainers, yoga and martial arts teaching. Many trade without premises of their own.
• 96040, physical well-being activities. Saunas, steam baths, solariums, slimming and massage salons. The notes send fitness clubs to 93130.

A company that lists both 93130 and a neighbouring code is already in the headline. The descriptions follow the official explanatory notes to the classification (checked 11 November 2026).

What counts as a mapped fitness site, and what was left out?

OpenStreetMap is a map of the world made by volunteers. Its usual tag for a gym, health club or fitness studio is leisure=fitness_centre, and we count every point, outline and grouped feature in the UK that carries it.

• Sports centres are counted apart. The map holds 8,275 places tagged leisure=sports_centre. Many leisure centres have a gym inside, but the tag also covers places with none, and only 345 of them name fitness, weightlifting or a gym as a sport. They have their own column and are not in the site count.
• Outdoor exercise equipment is left out. The 2,998 places tagged leisure=fitness_station are free equipment in parks, not businesses.
• The older tag found nothing extra. We also asked for amenity=gym, a tag the map has retired. 0 places carried it without the current tag.
• One place may be mapped twice, once as a point and once as a building outline. We did not try to merge them.

Why is the company count too high and too low at once?

It counts legal entities, and a gym is not a legal entity. The errors run in both directions, and they do not cancel out.

What pushes it too high

• New and untested companies. 5,765 of the active companies, 35%, were formed in 2025 or 2026, and 5,391 have never filed accounts. Many will not have opened anything yet, and some never will.
• Dormant companies. 862 last filed dormant accounts, which means they reported no trading.
• Businesses with no premises. The code is chosen by the company. Personal trainers, online coaches and franchise holding companies use it too, and nothing in the register says whether a company has a gym floor.
• Several companies behind one gym. Groups split property, staff and trading across companies. 64 active companies file group or subsidiary accounts, and 3,761 list another activity beside fitness.
• Registered offices are not gyms. The 16,288 companies sit at 12,412 different postcodes. 40 postcodes hold ten or more of them each, 1,034 companies in all, and one postcode holds 148. Those are accountants, formation agents and head offices. The area tables show where companies are registered, not where people train.

What pushes it too low

• Sole traders and partnerships. A gym owned by a person, not a company, is not at Companies House at all. Nobody publishes an open list of them, and we would not publish people's names and addresses if one existed.
• One company, many sites. A chain is one company, or a few, and hundreds of gyms. On the map, 19 names appear on ten or more sites each and cover 1,278 sites between them. The ten most common names alone cover 22% of all mapped sites.
• Operators under another code. Councils, leisure trusts, universities, schools and hotels run gyms without using this code. The neighbouring codes above hold some of them, mixed with everything else those codes cover.
• Companies that picked a different code, or never updated the one they chose when they were formed.

Why is the map count too low?

• The map is only as complete as its volunteers have made it. 4 of the 361 districts show no fitness site, which cannot be right.
• A gym inside a leisure centre, a hotel or a university is often mapped only as the larger place.
• A closed gym can stay on the map until somebody removes it, so the count is not purely an undercount.
• 268 of the mapped sites have no name, and only 2,476 carry a postcode. Detail is thin, which is why matching is hard.

How far can the two sources be matched?

Not far, and we would sooner say so than publish a merged count. The register has company names and registered offices. The map has trading names and locations. They share no identifier, so a match can rest only on a name or a postcode.

• Names were compared after removing case, punctuation and the legal ending, such as Limited. On that test 14.5% of mapped sites match an active fitness company, and 21.4% match on the name or the postcode.
• From the other side, 453 of 16,278 distinct company names, 2.8%, appear on a mapped site.
• The middle row is a ceiling, not a finding: a short trading name can equal the name of an unrelated company by chance. It does show that many gyms on the map belong to companies that do not use the fitness code.
• What cannot be matched: a gym that trades under a different name from its company, a company registered at its accountant's office, a site with no name, and any gym owned by a sole trader. That is most of them, so we do not publish a merged list or an estimate of the true number.

Why do the published counts differ from these, and from each other?

They count clubs, and they come from each publisher's own research. Ours count companies and map entries, from open data. The three methods should not agree.

• Leisure Opportunities reported (checked 11 November 2026) that the State of the UK Fitness Industry Report 2026 found 7,463 health clubs. The report itself asks a reader to register before it shows a page, so we did not read it.
• Leisure Opportunities reported (checked 11 November 2026) that the UK Health and Fitness Market Report 2026 put the total at 5,842 clubs. The publisher's own page refused an automated read, so we did not read it.
• The same trade report says the two use different methods, one working from live spending data and the other from published membership charges. Because we could read neither report, we do not say how either defines a club.
• Our company count is 8,825 above the higher published figure, which is the overcount described above. Our map count is 862 below the lower one, which is the gap in the map.

If you need one number for the gyms in the UK, use a published count and name its publisher. If you need a number you can check, rebuild and break down by local authority, use this dataset and quote which of its two counts you mean.

How was the dataset made?

1. We downloaded the Companies House Free Company Data Product for 1 November 2026, the monthly file of every live company, and kept each company whose activity codes include 93130 or one of the five neighbouring codes.
2. That file holds live companies only. For dissolved companies we used the Companies House advanced company search, which exports its results: 17 searches, one for each year from 2010, for code 93130 and the status dissolved. The row count of every export equalled the count the search page showed.
3. Each active company was placed by the postcode of its registered office, using the ONS Postcode Directory, which gives the local authority, region and nation of every postcode in Great Britain, including postcodes no longer in use.
4. We asked OpenStreetMap once, through its public Overpass service, for every feature inside the UK boundary carrying one of the four tags named above, with its tags and a central point. It returned 16,253 features.
5. Each feature was placed in the local authority district whose boundary contains its point. 6 points on piers and harbour edges fell just outside the generalised coastline and were placed in the district within 300 metres.
6. We counted. Nothing was estimated, weighted or rounded, and no row was edited by hand.

The whole pipeline is two scripts, one that fetches the files and one that counts. The raw files hold company names and addresses, so they stay out of the published data and out of our code repository. Only the counts on this page leave the pipeline.

What are the sources and their licences?

The mapped site and sports centre counts on this page contain information from OpenStreetMap, which is made available under the Open Database License. Anyone who builds a database from OpenStreetMap must share it on the same terms, so this dataset is shared on them too.

How can you download or quote the data?

• Counts by area as CSV: the UK, the four nations, the nine English regions and every district.
• Companies formed and dissolved by year as CSV.
• The licence and credits as a text file, to keep with the data.

The two files are made available under the Open Database License, version 1.0. You may copy, share and adapt them. If you publish a database built from them, credit OpenStreetMap contributors, Companies House and the Office for National Statistics as the text file sets out, and share your database under the same licence. To quote a figure in an article, a link to this page is enough.

The files hold counts only. They contain no company name or number, no person, no address and no postcode, and no figure describes a single business.

What has changed, and when?

The dataset is rebuilt at least every three months from fresh downloads. Each edition is listed here, newest first, with what changed.

• 12 November 2026: First edition. Companies as at 1 November 2026, companies dissolved to 11 November 2026 and mapped sites as at 11 November 2026.

How do you report an error?

If a count looks wrong, or you know the source of a published figure we could not read, tell us by the route on the contact page. We will check it against the raw files and list any correction above. To fix a gym that is missing from the map, add it to OpenStreetMap, and the next edition will count it.