A UK gym member parks for 60 to 90 minutes. A 22kW twin AC charger delivers roughly 20kWh in that window — about 70–80 miles of range, for free, while the member squats. A 50kW DC unit delivers 75kWh in the same time, which is a full charge on most EVs. Industry-average UK gym churn is 32% annually. The EV-driving demographic — higher household income, higher commitment to monthly memberships — churns at roughly half that rate. Member lifetime value sits between £600 and £1,400. Preventing 1% additional annual churn across a 1,000-member club is worth £6,000–£14,000 in retained revenue per year.
A 22kW twin AC unit costs £3,500–£6,500 installed. A 50kW DC unit runs £25,000–£40,000. Four chargers per site across an 8-site chain is roughly £160,000 of capex.
Now here's the part the villain doesn't want you to see. Your competitor — the other mid-market chain you benchmark against on Companies House — is currently signing a £140,000 PO for a fresh rack of Watt Bikes. They'll be obsolete in three years. The chargers they aren't installing will still be earning revenue in fifteen.
The villain in this post is the gym operator who knows the numbers and is still buying spin bikes.
The 90-minute parking opportunity
Most retail and hospitality venues lose the EV charger maths because their dwell time is wrong. A coffee shop visit is 18 minutes. A supermarket shop is 40. Neither makes economic sense for a 22kW unit, let alone a 50kW DC.
Gyms are the goldilocks dwell time in the UK retail estate. The average session is 64 minutes. The peak window (5:30am–8:30am and 5:30pm–9:30pm) shows tight clustering around 70–90 minutes. That window is exactly the right shape for a 22kW twin to deliver a meaningful charge — meaningful enough to be the reason a member chooses your gym over the one 1.2 miles away. (Golf clubs have the same dwell-time advantage over a longer window — we ran those numbers in EV charging for golf clubs.)
And — this is the underappreciated bit — your members are already paying you. The charger doesn't have to make money from kWh sold. It has to make money from kept memberships. The economics flip from "charger as profit centre" to "charger as retention asset," and the maths gets much, much better.
The retention maths your CFO will actually read
Take a 1,000-member club at £42/month average. Annual revenue: £504,000.
At 32% churn, you're losing 320 members a year. Replacing them costs roughly £45 per acquisition in marketing and admin spend, so churn replacement runs £14,400/year before counting the cost of the discount onboarding rates new members get.
Now assume 12% of your members drive EVs (rising fast — battery-electric cars took roughly a quarter of UK new-car registrations in 2025). That's 120 members for whom the charger isn't just a perk. It's the deciding factor on the morning they're thinking about cancelling.
Drop their personal churn rate from 32% to 22% (very achievable; most retention surveys show a perk like this moves the needle 8–12 percentage points within the affected cohort). That's 12 retained members out of your EV-driving 120. At an LTV of £1,000 each: £12,000 of preserved lifetime value, per year, from one cohort.
Across an 8-site estate at the same numbers: £96,000 of retained LTV annually. On £160,000 of capex, the chargers pay for themselves on retention alone in under two years. Nobody on your finance team has been told this.
The premium-tier add-on play
Here's where it gets more interesting. Several premium UK chains have trialled an "EV Access" membership add-on between £8 and £15/month. The pricing logic is simple: a member charging twice a week at 20kWh per session is consuming roughly £6.40/week of electricity at your commercial rate — about £27.70/month. You charge them £12. You're subsidising the difference — and you're delighted to, because the alternative is them cancelling.
But the maths only works when the perceived value is high enough. The trick is to position it as a "members club" tier, not as a charging tariff. Premium gyms get this right. Budget gyms try to make a margin on the electricity and lose the plot.
Take-up at trial sites has run at 6–10% of total membership. At a 9% take-up rate across 1,000 members at £12/month: £12,960/year of pure premium-tier revenue per site.
The worked example: 8-site mid-market chain
This is a composite based on three live UK clients in the 8–15 site mid-market segment: 8 sites averaging 1,500 members, 12,000 members in total.
Capex (year 0):
- 4 × 22kW twin AC chargers per site × 8 sites = 32 units. At £5,000 installed each: £160,000
- Grants: a word of warning here. The Workplace Charging Scheme (£500 per socket, up to 40 sockets, open until 31 March 2027) only lets a business use its funded chargers for staff and fleet vehicles. Member bays at a commercial gym don't qualify. Charitable leisure trusts and council-run centres are different — they can let customers use WCS-funded chargers, which knocks up to £20,000 off this bill.
- Net capex for a commercial chain: £160,000
Year 1 revenue and value:
- Direct charger revenue (member-paid energy, modest markup): £36,000
- "EV Access" tier at 9% × 12,000 members × £12/month: £155,520 at steady state. Take-up ramps over the first six months, so book around £104,000 in year one.
- Churn reduction at 0.4% across full membership (48 members) × £1,000 LTV: £48,000 preserved value
Year 1 total upside: ~£188,000
Year 1 costs:
- Capex amortised over 8 years: £20,000
- Maintenance contract (£300/charger/year × 32): £9,600
- Electricity supply margin loss: £14,000
- Total year 1 cost: ~£43,600
Net year 1: roughly +£144,000 across the estate.
On cash terms that's roughly a 12-month payback on £160,000 of capex, with a 7+ year revenue tail — and it gets better from year two, when the EV Access tier is running at full take-up. Your CFO has approved worse with much weaker maths.
Picking partners (don't pick the wrong network)
You have two paths: own the chargers and operate them yourself, or partner with a public charging network like Mer, Pod Point, Be.EV, Osprey or Instavolt to host their hardware on your site.
Network-hosted is lower-capex (often £0 upfront) but you don't own the member relationship; the network does. Self-owned costs upfront but the data, the pricing logic, and the membership integration all stay yours. For retention-focused gyms — i.e. the ones who took the time to read this far — self-owned almost always wins on a 5-year view. The integration with your member CRM is the whole game.
If you go network-hosted: insist on a co-branded customer experience and a data-sharing agreement on who's using the chargers. Otherwise you're paying for free charging access for someone else's members. The same owned-vs-hosted trade-off shows up in every destination vertical — see our holiday parks breakdown and the retail park P&L.
What to ask before you sign
- "What's the dwell-time analysis for the proposed unit choice — 22kW AC versus 50kW DC?"
- "Will the chargers integrate with our member CRM so we know who's using them?"
- "Which grants genuinely apply to us — and if you're quoting the Workplace Charging Scheme, show me how member bays qualify."
- "What does the 'EV Access' tier pricing look like at our average household-income mix?"
- "Self-owned versus network-hosted — show me the 5-year cashflow on both."
Five questions. Anyone who can't answer all five doesn't understand your business. Anyone who can answer all five is worth a meeting.
The short version
UK gym members park for 60–90 minutes — the perfect dwell time for 22kW AC. Churn is the silent killer at 32% annually. EV chargers cut churn in the EV-driving cohort by 8–12 percentage points. Premium-tier "EV Access" add-ons at £8–15/month land 6–10% adoption. A typical 8-site, 12,000-member estate sees ~£188k of year-one upside against £160k of capex — less if you're a leisure trust that can use the Workplace Charging Scheme. The chargers your competitor isn't installing this year will be the reason their members are at your gym next year.
Want us to do the maths on your site?
Book a site survey at /site-survey. We'll model the retention uplift against your actual membership data, check which grants genuinely apply to your sites, and give you a 5-year cashflow on owned-vs-hosted. Then you can decide whether to buy the chargers or the spin bikes. We have opinions.
Sources
- find-government-grants.service.gov.uk/grants/workplace-charging-scheme-2 (WCS: £500/socket, 40-socket cap, closes 31 March 2027; business chargers restricted to staff/fleet use)
Read this article in the app at energy-partners.co.uk/insights/ev-charging-gym-leisure-uk. Energy Partners installs and manages commercial EV charging, solar and battery storage for UK venues — talk to us.