Rise Above Consulting's 2025 Climbing Gym Industry Insights & 2026 Predictions
- Pete Ward
- Jan 14
- 7 min read
Updated: Jan 20
Over the last three+ years Rise Above has had hundreds of discovery calls with gym owners, managers and leaders across the globe who run climbing gyms of almost every size and maturity level. This includes businesses that are single door operators, to multi-location chains, to well-funded institutional finance-backed international businesses.
Rise Above has contracted with 60+ clients globally doing everything from starting their first gym to building sales strategies, solving complex cultural crises, managing leadership and investors, launching their first pre-sale, developing compensation strategies, scaling their business to new markets and more.
The following insights are aggregated from our unique, first-hand look under the hood in the climbing gym industry
Rise Above's Climbing Gym Industry Insights from 2025 and Predictions for 2026
Welcome to 2026! For the last several years industry operators have attempted to figure out “The State of the Industry”. Yet we hear over and over again that it is hard to find good data on where the climbing gym industry stands today and where it is headed in the foreseeable future.
To offer more solid ground to all of us, we’re sharing our own first-hand experiences across client work, discovery calls, investor meetings, advising financial institutions & landlords, etc… - which gives Rise Above a uniquely credible perspective on the climbing gym industry.
And if you stop reading here, here’s the ONE thing you should take away with you:
While we believe that the industry is healthy and growing, we're already starting to see gyms and operators struggling to maintain performance and in some cases closing their doors. 2026 will be about performance, plain and simple.
2025, The Good News & The Bad news
If you’re an existing gym…
Bad News: We’re not going to pour salt in any wounds by naming names, but gyms with bad leases or poor financial performance can no longer stay afloat based on the popularity of the sport alone. We expect this trend to continue.
Good news: There are older gyms out there that continue to maintain success and relevancy by upscaling their operations and offerings to stay relevant to the marketplace. Some of these gyms that we’d like to give a specific shout out to include:
If you’re trying to finance a gym…
Bad News: Funding for new gyms continues to be a challenge in an uncertain economic environment. The Fed has reduced rates a bit but lenders are still squirrely.
Good news: With the right planning, you can make your vision a reality. We have helped many operators successfully fund their project with highly believable financial models and business planning. There are still some very creative operators opening great new gyms in a huge cross section of new markets. Some of our favorite new gyms (not all RA clients) include:
Blocworks in Oklahoma City, OK (Not new in 2025, but was new to us in 2025) - Not a Rise Above Client
GP81 Youth Training Center in Brooklyn, NY - Not a Rise Above Client
ROQ in Seattle, WA
Mwamba Climbing in Kampala, Uganda
Don't make it up. Lenders are not taking risks. Have a believable, achievable plan for success if you want to get funded.
If you’re looking for a great location…
Bad News: Real Estate continues to be a challenge as well, with landlords being more picky about who they want in their spaces and going harder in negotiations to protect their perceived downside risk.
Good news: Many operators are rising to the challenge, even finding great space in previously impossible locations. Two great examples of this in one of the toughest real estate markets in the world (NYC) are Vital Lower East Side (Not a Rise Above Client)- a magnificent bouldering gym that opened in late 2024 and which might be the single most impressive gym we’ve ever seen, and Brooklyn Uprising, an innovative new space that will open next month in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood. Both are examples of gyms that never would have made sense even as recently as five years ago, but which represent a prescient evolution of the climbing industry in two very distinct individual directions. And notably in one of the toughest most cut-throat real estate markets on earth.
If you’re trying to be a better leader…
Bad News: It’s easier to build a good product than it is to build a good company. Management pressures are still a present topic, with some gyms fighting real battles with their community and/or staff in order to keep their doors open. We’re seeing staff unionizing due to poor relationships with management, boards of directors struggling to provide good governance to their leadership, and we’ve seen leaders finding out the hard way that it’s easier to build a good gym in a good location than it is to build and scale a great company.
Good News: If the first step to solving a problem is recognizing it, we can tell you that climbing gym operators are starting to recognize the problem. More than ever, we’re seeing our clients identify the need to level up. The Rise Above Climbing Gym Bootcamps last March in Chattanooga, TN were filled with new and existing operators who were all raising their game to offer a better product to their customers. More than any other trend, we can speak to this one specifically. There is a deep, industry-wide hunger for greater professionalism, better systems and a clear path to strategic control of revenue (more on that later). We see it every day and with nearly every client.
Top 2025 insight: It's easier to build a good gym in a good location than it is to build and scale a great company.
If you’re trying to leverage technology, data, and analytics…
Bad News: Gym owners, investors, and managers are fed up with the currently accepted tech stack for our industry, and the concurrent lack of data & insights. In a world that is rushing to adopt AI and leveraging data for every conceivable use-case, the climbing gym industry remains steadfastly luddite, checking members in, checking them out, and using very little data along the way to improve the experience of those members or to inform their own strategy and decision-making.
Good News: There are more good options than ever and according to Climbing Business Journal (CBJ) 2025 Climbing Gym Awards there are no less than six major climbing gym management software players competing to be the winning solution for the industry. We at Rise Above have worked with all six of them (and a few that aren’t on the CBJ list) and we can tell you for sure that good solutions are coming in 2026. In the new year, be ready to learn how to use data to supercharge your business (whether you prefer being a luddite or not)!
If you’re looking to grow the topline revenue of your business…
Bad News: More and more clients are coming to us for help with sales strategy and revenue challenges in an increasingly competitive market with increasingly discerning customers and no real plan for taking strategic control of revenue.
Good News: There are easy, proven solutions out there and they work. At Rise Above we work on our own model that has been adapted over decades of operating experience and we routinely see sustained double-digit percentage improvements (sometimes more) in sales metrics with our clients.
Rise Above's 2026 Predictions
Market consolidation is real, but prices are coming down - There continue to be gyms for sale and we have fielded many inquiries from Private Equity firms looking to acquire and consolidate gyms. We believe that this trend will continue and even pick up speed. That said, the era of selling for very high multiples might be over. Increasing competition means that any argument for a high valuation multiple will be heavily scrutinized by potential buyers in a way that has not previously been the case in the climbing gym industry.
Not to be dramatic, but less professional operators and older climbing gyms will evolve or die. This one is a no-brainer, but it’s worth saying out loud while there’s still time to level-up. The older and the weaker gyms are starting to get squeezed out. If your business is weak in data analytics, strategic revenue planning, if you don’t have a strong performance-based HR function, and if you aren’t using your data to understand the market you serve, you are likely to be left behind regardless of how good your product is.
Segmentation will become the driving force for growth. In the past, climbing gyms wanted to be all things to all people: Kids go over there, strong folks go up on that mezzanine with a board, there’s a special room for yoga or whatever and everyone else goes in the main area. But that’s starting to change as the market segments into more niche services like board gyms, kids gyms and training gyms where each individual customer profile gets the full attention of the business. Even large chains that might have historically been safe from change are starting to feel the pressure as well. After all, can you really be all things to all people, or do you have to pick a lane, build a brand, and serve that marketplace?
Segmentation and specialization will start to reveal winners and losers. If we’re going to learn anything from the fitness industry, it might be that we’re going to have to pick a lane and build a brand whether we like it or not and that our ability to level-up our business, identify our future customer and serve them what they need is the whole ballgame. In fitness, even gyms that ostensibly offer the same product do it in totally different ways. You would never say that Planet Fitness and Equinox are the same business, but they sure do sell a similar product! That same dynamic will come to rule the climbing gym industry and gyms that have not chosen a lane and leaned into it, will be worse off in January 2027 than they are today.
Successful new gyms will draw lessons from outside the climbing gym industry. At Rise Above, our new gym clients are no longer only passionate enthusiasts who love the sport but have never previously grown a business. They are (almost universally) starting a second passion-based career after a successful first career in a totally different industry. We’re seeing sophisticated professionals from Tech, Financial Services, Private Equity and similar fields opening gyms because they love climbing and they are, to a person, at a different level of professionalism than we were seeing in this industry just 3-5 years ago. These people may not know everything about how climbing got where it is, but in some ways they’re the best positioned to see where it's going and they are not constrained by any dogma about how climbing “should” be.
Let us know what you think, what we got right, what we got wrong and where you think climbing will go in 2026.
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