Can Climbing Outrun Its Own Elitism with Inclusive Gym Pricing?

When I’m standing in the Meadow in Yosemite, adjusting the telescopes that point to El Capitan, tourists of all ages often ask me how I got started in climbing and how they could try it out. I tell them the truth: I started in a climbing gym.

When they ask how much it costs, I’m still honest: Depending on where they live, it could be as low as $60 per month, or as high as $150, but for me, it’s usually been around $90 per month.

That’s when their faces fall.

It’s another daily reminder that climbing, as a sport, is knee deep in an economic identity crisis. In campgrounds and wilderness areas, my friends and I sleep in our cars and forego the common luxuries of showers and kitchens in order to climb as much as possible. On my feed, videos of shredded boulderers in action suggest an ascetic freedom–empty hands, lone chalk bag. But for most climbers, the opportunity to climb outside only unlocks after they hone their skills in the gym–and even dirtbags only rarely escape that fact. It was in the gym that I learned to belay, lead climb, and practice cleaning anchors until I could bet my life that I had it right. While outdoor climbing still looks and feels like an anti-materialistic pursuit, its common prerequisite, indoor climbing, has quietly followed skiing into the category of high-income, elitist sports.

Fortunately, the American Alpine Club (AAC) has noticed. On July 12, the AAC announced via email that high gym membership prices are officially an access issue.

“Many climbers are introduced to the sport through a gym, and therefore a holistic approach to climbing access requires us to consider challenges across the climbing spectrum, including indoor climbing,” they wrote.

To solve this problem, the AAC says, climbing gyms can start offering discounted pricing for lower-income climbers, also known as a Pay What You Can (PWYC) pricing model.

“Addressing equity issues in climbing is not mutually exclusive from best business practices,” wrote the AAC, noting that “sustainable PWYC models” often come with “the added benefit of increasing these gyms’s memberships.”

The AAC followed up that suggestion by publishing a free, 26-page Pay What You Can Digital Toolkit for gym owners. The toolkit analyzes nine different components of PWYC programs, asking questions like “Honor System or Proof of Need?” and “Self Funded or Community Funded?” It then concludes with specific recommendations for each component based on real PWYC gyms.

The AAC (a nonprofit) has added a carrot to these recommendations by announcing that, in partnership with The North Face, they will offer $1,000-4,000 grants for gyms who need the extra boost to start PWYC programs of their own. Applications are due August 31.

But wait, is climbing really “too expensive”?

By the numbers, yes. Climbing gyms, today, regularly charge more than $100 per month and $1,000 per year (with a discount for paying annually) for membership—far more than most Americans are able or willing to pay.

For example, in Denver, one can get a monthly pass to Movement ($102), the Spot ($115), Übergrippen ($98), or G1 Climbing ($91). In Atlanta, where the cost of living is 11% cheaper than Denver, the average price dips slightly—Central Rock Gym ($80), Wall Crawler Climbing ($79), and Overlook ($1o7)—but in New York City, where the cost of living is 47% higher than Denver, gyms such as MetroRock ($125), Brooklyn Boulders ($129), Central Rock Gym ($135), Movement ($135), Bouldering Project ($120), and VITAL Brooklyn ($145) have much steeper fees.

According to the Aspen Institute, American families making $100,000 or more (the top 33% of households) spend an average of $1,099 per child on sports–enough, if barely, to afford most annual climbing gym memberships–but the average family making $50,000 or less only pays $476 per year–which means they’re firmly priced out of today’s climbing gyms. (This is one reason, by the way, that so many climbers work in gyms for minimum wage: even low-paid employees get free memberships.)

For adults, the numbers are even more dire. The average American spends just $33.89 per month to work out, which falls about $67 short of a $100 climbing membership. Indeed, only 15 percent of American adults are currently accustomed to spending more than $100 per month on gym memberships.

For gym owners who hope to grow their membership base, finding creative ways to lower their prices could help drastically open up their audience.

Option 1: Volunteer memberships 

The most famously progressive gym in the country, Memphis Rox, opened in March 2018 with financial inclusion as a founding principle. “We exclude no one, regardless of ability to pay,” says their mission statement.

Memphis Rox, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, lets members exchange five hours of volunteering for a 4-week membership. The gym’s 32,000-square foot campus houses a community closet, food bank, and food garden, and volunteers support those programs. Since 2018, members have performed at least 2,000 hours of community service.

Despite their zero-dollar option, Memphis Rox—located in Memphis, where the cost of living is 16.6% lower than Denver—charges just $55 per month and $630 per year for traditional adult memberships.

Some for-profit gyms have also tried volunteer membership. The Pad Climbing, which operates four gyms across California, Nevada, and New York, charges $85 per month for traditional adult memberships. Yet their PWYC program allows members to set their own price, with special requirements—volunteering, caregiving for a relative, or showing evidence of financial need—for those who choose to pay under $50 per month. Some pay as little as $1.

Did offering such cheap membership options bankrupt the gym? Surprisingly, no. In 2023, the Pad supported reduced-price memberships for 527 people out of 860 applicants. On their website, the Pad announced that fundraiser events, optional premium-price member support, and contributions from the gym itself had allowed them to “pay for” the full $16,781 value of the program—with more than $300 left over to re-invest into this year’s program.

The downside? In its compare-contrast analysis, the AAC noted that volunteerism-based programs, compared to discount-only programs, typically increase the burden on staff to track hours and manage scheduling.

The popular alternative: Sliding scale and tiered membership

Among for-profit gyms looking for a quick-and-easy PWYC system, the most popular setups so far are sliding scale or tiered discount memberships. For example, the Spot, which operates five gyms around Denver and Boulder, charges $115 for one month’s membership but offers three lower price tiers: $62, $42, and $32.

In 2022, the Spot awarded 450 of these lower-tiered memberships. Had the affected members all paid full price, the gym would have earned $22,000 more—but the Spot doesn’t consider this a loss.

“$22,000 in membership dollars saved,” reads their proud announcement in Climbing Business Journal.

Other gyms offer only one discount level, most likely because the accounting is simpler for the gym and its staff. Movement Englewood, for example, offers the TEAL membership for the flat rate of $31 per month, or 70% off the standard $102 rate. Launched in April 2024, the TEAL program currently has 516 members across all 30 Movement gyms.

The AAC notes that sliding scale models offer the most flexibility to a participant’s financial situation, but tiered prices are typically easier to integrate into gym check-in software.

For PWYCs to work, gyms need to rethink cost and profit

A standout section of the AAC’s report was the firm reminder—demonstrated by the owners of The Spot—that PWYC programs shouldn’t necessarily be tracked as gym expenses, and that owners shouldn’t necessarily worry about finding alternate sources of funding to offset what they supposedly would have made if their PWYC participants were also paying full price.

“We found this was oftentimes a perception issue rather than a true financial concern,” writes the AAC in their report.

“For example, ‘We have 30 members who are paying $40/month on an $80 membership; we’re losing $1,200/month through this program!’ could alternatively be viewed as, ‘We added 30 members to our gym who are paying $40/month who can’t afford an $80 membership; we have increased our monthly revenue by $1,200,” the report said.

But whether a gym is truly winning over new members in a lower-income tier depends on how the PWYC program is being marketed. If a gym wants to attract new members with discount prices, the AAC warns against simply advertising “in the gym’s physical and digital spaces.” Instead, the report recommends advertising PWYC programs “through local non-profits, school programs, or other community outreach,” to ensure that each new member is indeed a new source of revenue.

Let’s not be like skiing

As the high-income recreational sports market becomes more saturated, climbing gyms may choose to grow in the direction of supporting underprivileged participants. If they don’t, climbing will be even more restricted to an activity for the rich. For those of you who argue that it already is, remember that it can get even worse. Just look at what’s happened with skiing, where the vast majority of resorts do not prioritize equitable access or offer reduced pricing for lower-income athletes. The result is a sport with rampant inclusion issues: 88% of ski visits are made by white people, and more than half of skiers make two times the national average salary.

Despite attracting participants with plenty of cash to spare, ski resorts have not succeeded in building wealth for their local communities, and staggering income inequality has become a predictable component in each one. In fact, Teton County, home to Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, has the highest income inequality of any county in the U.S. Yet climbing isn’t that much cheaper. While renting ski equipment (at least $30 per day) costs far more than renting a pair of climbing shoes (typically $5-6 per day), and the average day pass at ski resorts like Vail ($259) and Breckenridge ($241) are nothing short of exorbitant, most annual climbing memberships in the Denver area actually cost more than an IKON base pass ($969).

And while climbing gyms do not tend to highly skew the cost of living in otherwise remote rural towns, as ski areas do, climbing gyms are already markers of gentrification in many cities—and their proliferation in places like Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood and Los Angeles’ Echo Park, have coincided with severe housing crises in those areas. Pay What You Can programs give climbing gyms a chance to build in the opposite direction: toward inclusion.

If we care about stopping climbing’s acceleration toward elitism, then we should all take the AAC’s advice to our local gyms and push them to apply for the North Face grant before August 31. And when they miss the grant deadline, let’s push them to create a PWYC program anyway. We need to close the climbing wealth gap while we still can.

I want to live in a world where inclusive pricing is so common that, when Yosemite visitors ask me in the Meadow what joining a climbing gym costs, the answer won’t make them grimace at their shoes. Instead they’ll nod with excitement, squint up at El Capitan—and maybe, for the first time, see themselves up there.

Four main takeaways from the AAC’s toolkit

• Across the 47 gyms with Pay What You Can programs in the study, the “vast majority” had “net positive” but “not substantial” effects on their revenue—which means that, while it’s good business, it’s not something that most gyms will be able to structure their entire business model around.
• Most PWYC programs require 1-4 hours per week of staff time to maintain, so they can be managed as an additional duty by one staff member
• Most PWYC programs operate successfully on an honor system rather than requiring proof of need. The incidents of members lying about their financial situation for lower rates were, on average, “less than one member per gym” with “negligible” economic consequences.
• One case study gym, which introduced a PWYC program with two tiers—30% and 75% off a full membership—saw their membership increase by 8%

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