What's a good LTV for a fitness studio member?

For a studio charging $149/month with average 14-month retention and 70% gross margin, LTV is roughly $1,460. Healthy studios target an LTV-to-CAC ratio of at least 3:1 — meaning your LTV should be at least three times what you spend acquiring each member. A LTV under $800 at typical pricing usually signals a retention problem worth solving before scaling acquisition.

How do I calculate my actual average retention?

Export your membership start and end dates over the past 12–18 months, excluding anyone still active. Calculate the average months between start and end date. If your software doesn't export this, count members who churned each month and divide by your total active members — that's your monthly churn rate. Retention months ≈ 1 / monthly churn rate.

Should I include add-on revenue in LTV?

Yes, but conservatively. Add-on revenue (retail, class packs bought by members, personal training upsells) is real and often 10–20% on top of membership fees for engaged members. Include it only if it's consistent — don't inflate LTV with best-case upsell scenarios that only apply to your top 10% of members.

Member LTV Calculator

LTV is the number every growth decision depends on

Customer acquisition costs money — ads, referral bonuses, intro offers, staff time. The only way to know how much you can afford to spend is to know what a new member is worth over their lifetime with you. That's LTV.

Without it, marketing budgets are guesswork. With it, you can say confidently: "A member is worth $1,460 in lifetime gross profit. We can afford to spend up to $480 acquiring one and maintain a healthy 3:1 LTV-to-CAC ratio." That's the difference between a growth plan and a gamble.

How to read your LTV result

Lifetime gross profit is the headline. This is the total gross profit your studio earns from an average member over their full relationship with you, after variable costs. It's the number to compare against your customer acquisition cost.

Annualized LTV normalizes across different retention lengths — useful for comparing cohorts or benchmarking against other studios. A member who stays 24 months has twice the lifetime revenue of a 12-month member, but their annualized LTV may be similar if later months have lower engagement (and thus fewer add-on purchases).

Monthly LTV is the steady-state contribution of a retained member. If your monthly LTV is $85 and you spend $40/month on retention programs (automated emails, birthday campaigns, milestone rewards), that's money well spent.

Three levers to extend LTV

1. Nail the first 90 days. The steepest churn curve is in the first three months. Members who make it to month four stay an average of 11 months longer than those who don't. An automated onboarding sequence — welcome message, check-in at day 7, class recommendation at day 14, milestone celebration at day 30 — dramatically flattens that early churn curve without requiring staff time.

2. Surface at-risk members before they cancel. Attendance drop is the leading indicator of churn, typically by 4–6 weeks. Studios that act on early warning signals — a personalized "we missed you" message or a check-in call — recover 25–40% of members who would otherwise have churned silently. The key is catching them at the inflection point, not after they've already decided to leave.

3. Add structured upsell moments. The add-on revenue input in the calculator is often undersized because studios don't create systematic upsell moments. A member who buys a retail item, a private session, or a workshop in their first 60 days has a 2.4× higher retention rate than one who doesn't. The purchase isn't why they stay longer — the deeper engagement is. Create the moment; the engagement follows.

For more on predicting and preventing churn before it happens, see predictive churn for studios and the client lifetime value guide.

Member LTV Calculator