How Gym Pricing Tiers Steer Joins, Not What Members Pay
Key Takeaways
- Redesigning gym pricing tiers can influence member choice without affecting average revenue per member.
- The decoy effect shows that adding a less desirable option can steer decisions without changing perceived value.
- Choices connect to external prices, so gym pricing tiers should be built to compare favourably against other gyms.
- Set specific goals for your pricing page: focus on tier appeal for more members or pricing strategy for increased revenue.
- Planet Fitness increased membership fees without altering their tier structure, demonstrating a focus on pricing over arrangement.
A 2026 study on how people choose between similar options points to why redesigning your gym pricing tiers can shift which plan people join on and do nothing at all to your average revenue per member.
Chang-Yuan Lee at the University of Toronto, with Nina Mazar and Carey Morewedge at Boston University, ran 22 experiments in Management Science. Each one asked people the same question two ways: one group picked between the options, and another put a number on each of them, either what they’d pay or what they’d charge to give it up.
TL;DR. A decoy tier changes which plan people pick, though not which plan they’d pay more for, so long as your gym pricing tiers differ on something a prospect can price at another gym. In the restaurant experiment a worse third option moved choices by 30 percentage points while the pricing ranking sat still. Build the tiers to steer the mix, then set the price against the gyms your prospect already has open in another tab.
What an option nobody wants actually does
Four hundred people in the UK were shown restaurants described by star rating and driving distance. Asked to pick one, 33% went for the target restaurant when two were on the list. Add a third restaurant that’s worse than the target on both counts and that climbs to 63%. A separate group put a price on dinner at each place instead of choosing, and among them the decoy shifted the share who valued the target restaurant higher from 2% to 6%, which wasn’t significant.
Two later experiments pin down when that holds. Lee and his colleagues ran an apartment version twice. First time, the apartments differed on square footage, and anyone can price a square foot. The second run swapped that out for commuting time and distance to a supermarket, and nobody carries a rate for those in their head. With square footage on the page, the decoy moved choices from 51% to 79% and left the pricing side sitting at 82% and 80%. Without it the two came back together, with choice going 48% to 64% and pricing going 47% to 61%.
The decoy moves the pick either way. Whether it also moves what people think the thing is worth comes down to whether they can look the features up somewhere else.
Britons in a fifth experiment imagined moving to an American city, and were told the average rent there was either $1.50 or $3.00 a square foot. At the higher figure, the median amount they’d pay for the larger apartment went from $950 to $1,725. Which apartment they picked stayed exactly where it was.
142 people in the biggest study looked at two apartments, couldn’t separate them, and were dropped as indifferent, so the pricing results describe people who already had a preference. Most of the work is hypothetical as well. Participants came mostly from Mechanical Turk and Prolific in the US and the UK, with one experiment run on undergraduates. Five of the 22 were preregistered, and one of those staked real money, with 604 people putting $1.10 on lotteries that paid out.
The decoy effect. Put a $59 plan next to an $89 plan and people weigh the two against each other. Add an $85 plan that gives less than the $89 one, and the $89 starts looking sensible, because there’s now something on the page it plainly beats. The $85 plan is the decoy. It exists to lose. Joel Huber, John Payne and Christopher Puto demonstrated it in 1982, and it’s a close relative of the contrast effect, where a judgement shifts depending on what’s sitting next to it.
Why a prospect can price your gym pricing tiers in thirty seconds
Almost everything separating one gym pricing tier from the next has a price on it somewhere else. Two PT sessions a month, or a twelve-month term instead of month to month. A prospect can put a number against either one on their phone before they’ve finished reading your page, which puts you in the same spot as the apartments with square footage on them. Rearranging the options moved the pick there and nothing else.
Prices get compared to prices. That’s anchoring, and it’s older than your gym. The new part is where the comparison goes. It reaches outside whatever list you’ve built, to whatever similar thing the prospect already has a number for, and only when the features carry a market price in the first place.
The move, and how you’ll know it worked
Split the two jobs your pricing page is doing.
The tiers decide who lands where. Build them so the plan you most want members on is the obvious pick, then stop asking them for anything else. Setting the price is a separate decision, judged against a market you don’t control, so you set it by looking at what your prospects are comparing you with. If your tiers are built out of bundled extras, how you describe those extras is its own problem, covered in why “free” outperforms “$0” in pricing.
Coaching quality has no market rate. Neither does who’s in the room at 6am. If you want the shape of your tiers to change what the place feels worth, those are the sorts of things they’d have to differ on, because that’s where the decoy moved valuation as well as choice. Building tiers on that is harder than it sounds, since almost everything people will pay extra for is countable, and the countable things all have a rate attached.
You’ll know it worked from a mix shift with a flat average. Watch the share of new joins landing on your target plan, and watch revenue per new member stay put. If you rebuilt the gym pricing tiers hoping the average would climb and only the mix went anywhere, nothing has gone wrong. That’s what was measured.
“Your top tier is too expensive” is a page problem, and the arrangement can help with it. Once someone starts quoting what the place down the road charges, the page has stopped mattering.
Every option in this research was put in front of people at once, which is what a pricing page does and isn’t what a consultation does. Nobody tested a membership, a gym, or anything you’d recognise as recurring. Lee and his colleagues do make the jump themselves, guessing the effect should hold in rental markets where people choose from fixed prices, but that’s a guess in their discussion and not a finding.
What Planet Fitness did instead
Planet Fitness runs two tiers, the Classic Card and the Black Card, and the company says over 60% of members join on the Black Card.
When it wanted more revenue per member it left the tiers alone. In May 2024 it announced that the Classic Card would go from $10 to $15 a month for anyone joining from that summer, holding existing members at $10 under its price-for-life policy. In November 2025 chief executive Colleen Keating said the Black Card would move from $24.99 to $29.99 after the 2026 peak join season. Two price changes, no reshuffle.
Where this goes wrong
The decoy effect has a much worse replication record than its popularity suggests. Sybil Yang and Michael Lynn tried to produce one 91 times, across 23 product classes and 73 different decoyed choice sets, and got 11. In that same 2014 issue of the Journal of Marketing Research, the effect largely vanished for Frederick, Lee and Baskin once abstract pairs of numbers were swapped out for pictures and richly described products. Huber, Payne and Puto, who found the thing in the first place, used the issue to concede it’s fragile.
Your pricing page, with its photographs and its logo, is the version where the effect gets thin.
Somebody will buy the tier you built to lose. Seventeen people in the biggest apartment study picked the decoy and were dropped from the analysis, which isn’t a move available to you. A tier built to be beaten still has to be a defensible product on the morning a member joins on it, and someone who chose the option you designed to be worse is someone you’ve set up to be disappointed.
The question
When you last changed your tiers, were you moving the mix or the money?
People also ask
What is the decoy effect in gym pricing?
It’s what happens when adding a third membership option that’s worse than one of the existing two changes which of those two gets chosen. Huber, Payne and Puto demonstrated it in 1982 and it’s been a staple of pricing advice ever since, on evidence thinner than the advice suggests. Yang and Lynn’s 2014 review of 91 attempts across 23 product classes produced 11 reliable effects, and the original authors published a reply the same year conceding the effect is fragile and sensitive to how options are presented. Where it does hold, it changes the pick and very little else.
How should I set up membership tiers on my pricing page?
Decide first which of the two jobs you’re asking the page to do. If you want more members on a particular plan, build the gym pricing tiers so that plan is the obvious pick, and judge the change on the share of new joins landing there a month later. If you want more revenue per member, the arrangement of the tiers is the wrong lever, and the price itself is the right one. Set that against what your prospects are comparing you with. All of this research was hypothetical, run on online panels and not on gym members, so treat a redesign as a test with a number attached.
Why do prospects compare my prices to other gyms instead of my other plans?
Because you asked them a money question, and money questions send people looking for a rate. Lee, Mazar and Morewedge’s account is that putting a price on something prompts people to call up what similar things cost, and that it only happens when the features involved carry a market price. PT sessions and contract lengths carry a rate your prospect can find in a minute, which is why the comparison leaves your page. Choosing keeps someone inside your list, and pricing sends them out to a market you’ve got no say in.
Every pricing page is built to be read left to right. The number that decides whether anyone joins was set in a building you’ve never been in.
That’s the move for your pricing page. If you want the same treatment across your whole membership structure and the conversations that happen around it, book a free 30-minute chat.
References: Lee, Mazar & Morewedge 2026 (Management Science); Yang & Lynn 2014 (Journal of Marketing Research); Frederick, Lee & Baskin 2014 (Journal of Marketing Research); Huber, Payne & Puto 2014 (Journal of Marketing Research); Planet Fitness pricing reported by Athletech News, May 2024 and November 2025.
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