Coach rate: Fitness Industry Award 2020 (MA000094), from 1 July 2026. Fill and space figures are the planning benchmarks used in this guide.

This guide walks gym founders and facility managers through the four levers that decide whether a timetable works: peak load, coach hours and cost, class caps, and the capacity reality check. It assumes you are planning a real room with real square metres and a real wage bill, not a spreadsheet fantasy.

Start with demand, not with a blank grid

The single most common timetable mistake is spreading classes evenly across the day. Demand is not even. Across the industry, gym traffic clusters into predictable waves: most gyms see high traffic in the early morning, with a secondary rush around lunchtime and a peak from 4 PM to 7 PM. Weekday attendance concentrates before work and after work, while midday from around 10am to 2pm sees lower traffic, with retirees, stay-at-home parents and remote workers taking advantage of the quieter hours.

Weekends flip the pattern. Saturday mornings tend to be the busiest time at the gym, with many people using their weekend mornings to get their workout in, and weekend peak hours run roughly 9am to 11am on Saturdays, with attendance dropping significantly in the afternoon. Mondays are typically the busiest weekday and Fridays the quietest, so your Friday evening and Sunday afternoon slots will always be your hardest to fill.

Group training is a big share of gym activity to build around. Depending on the study, around half of gym-goers participate in group fitness classes, with spin, HIIT and yoga leading the way, though only a smaller core attend consistently every week. That matters: your timetable is competing for a member's two to three weekly visits, not filling an unlimited pool.

Peak load: put your best sessions where the people are

Peak load is the demand your room must absorb in a handful of hours. For most suburban gyms the practical peaks are:

• Weekday early morning: approximately 5:30am to 8:00am. Best for efficient, high-energy formats (HIIT, strength circuits, spin) that people fit in before work.
• Weekday evening: approximately 5:00pm to 7:30pm, your single densest window. This is where you run back-to-back flagship classes.
• Saturday morning: approximately 8:00am to 11:00am. Community-friendly, higher social value, good for beginners and partner workouts.
• Midday and mid-afternoon: lower demand. Best for smaller specialist formats, seniors, mums and bubs, or recovery and mobility.

A common error is stacking too many concurrent classes at peak and cannibalising your own attendance. If you only have one studio, resist the urge to also run a floor class at 6pm that competes with the room. Concentrate demand into fewer, fuller sessions, then let the shoulders of the peak (for example 8:15pm or 1:00pm) carry your experimental formats.

Coach hours and the real cost of a class

Every slot on your grid is a wage commitment whether one person shows up or twenty. In Australia, most gym and group fitness staff are covered by the Fitness Industry Award 2020 (MA000094). This award sets the minimum pay rates and working conditions for employees in the fitness industry, including gyms, fitness centres and studios across Australia. Employees are classified across Levels 1 to 7 (including 3A and 4A), and minimums are reviewed each July. From the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026, the Level 1 base rate is $25.74 per hour and the casual rate including 25% loading is $32.18 per hour, with higher classification levels receiving progressively higher rates.

Because early mornings and late evenings are standard in this industry, penalty rates matter, and those penalties land squarely on your peak classes. Permanent staff attract loadings such as 1.25x on Saturday, 1.5x on Sunday and 2.5x on public holidays, so a full Saturday and Sunday timetable costs meaningfully more per class than a Tuesday. One more trap worth naming: many gyms classify trainers as independent contractors to avoid award rates, super and leave, but if the gym controls their hours, uniform and client base they are likely an employee regardless of the contract. Get classification and pay structure confirmed with your accountant or an employment lawyer before you lock in a roster, because the rules and rates change.

The practical takeaway: a class that runs half empty at a penalty rate is a direct loss every week. Model the wage cost of each slot against a realistic headcount before you publish the grid.

Class caps: what your room and gear can actually deliver

Your class cap is not a marketing number, it is a physics number. It is set by the smallest of three limits: floor space, equipment count, and coach line of sight. A cap that exceeds any of these creates a bad session, injuries risk, and churn.

As a planning rule of thumb, functional and strength group training needs roughly 3 to 4 square metres of usable training space per participant once you account for rigs, benches and movement lanes. Bike and reformer studios are capped hard by the number of stations you install. The table below is a starting point for setting caps, then confirm against your actual layout.

Equipment quantity is the quiet killer of class caps. If you cap a strength class at 16 but own eight kettlebells, you have really capped it at eight, or you have designed a class full of waiting. Deciding caps and buying the right number of stations is exactly where an early layout conversation pays off. VERVE's free 2D and 3D gym design service maps your studio zone, station counts and circulation so your caps are set by design rather than discovered on opening week. You can start that at our commercial gym fit-outs page, and the broader room planning is covered in our gym fit-out and equipment guide.

The capacity reality check

Here is the maths that decides whether group training makes money. Weekly class capacity is simply: number of classes multiplied by your average cap. But capacity is not revenue, fill rate is. A healthy target is 65 to 80 per cent average fill at peak and lower off-peak. Below roughly 50 per cent at peak, the slot is usually not paying its wage and space cost.

Work it in three steps:

• Break-even headcount per class: divide the fully loaded cost of the slot (coach wages plus penalties, plus a share of rent and overhead) by your per-visit class value. If a class costs about $120 to run and each attending member is worth about $8 in class value, you need roughly 15 heads just to break even.
• Set the cap above break-even, not below: if your room only caps at 12 but break-even is 15, that slot cannot win at that price. Either change the format, the pricing, or the room.
• Prune ruthlessly: retire any slot that sits under 50 per cent fill for a month and move that coach hour to a proven peak. Fewer full classes beat a busy-looking but empty grid.

Retention is the reason to persist. Members who attend group classes are around 20 per cent more likely to stay than those who exercise solo, and given that the average annual retention rate is about 66.4 per cent, meaning roughly one in three members leaves each year, a well-filled timetable is one of your cheapest retention tools. Community is increasingly the driver: nearly half of Gen Z say community is the primary reason they stick with fitness, wanting to feel like they belong rather than just swipe in and out.

Plan for seasonality too. January sees a surge, with around 12 per cent of new sign-ups occurring that month driven by New Year resolutions, while enrolments typically drop by about 15 per cent from May to August as people move to outdoor activities and holidays. Build a fuller summer grid and a leaner winter one rather than running the same timetable year round.

How timetable and build costs fit together

Your timetable is only as good as the room it runs in, and the room is a capital decision. Based on VERVE's published fit-out data (real delivered projects over the twelve months to July 2026), median equipment spend is about $27,500 ex GST and the average is just over $40,000, while full builds typically run $50,000 to $200,000 for a 150 to 400 sqm space, around $300 to $600 per square metre. Founder projects move from first design to deposit in roughly 3 to 10 weeks, and from signed lease to open doors in about 8 to 16 weeks. The full breakdown sits in our Australian gym fit-out cost data study.

Two design decisions have an outsized effect on your timetable's ceiling. First, a dedicated, acoustically sensible studio lets you run classes and open floor at the same time, doubling your usable peak. Second, buying the right equipment quantity for your intended caps prevents the waiting-room problem. Both are cheaper to solve on paper than after opening. If you are still pre-lease, our gym lease guide and complete guide to opening a gym in Australia cover the sequencing, and the free founder planning tools include a financial planner to model class revenue against break-even.

A simple week-one framework

• Publish a lean grid first: two to three strong peak classes each weekday plus Saturday morning. Add slots only when existing ones fill.
• Set caps from your real layout and equipment count, not aspiration.
• Roster to the award correctly and confirm classification with a professional.
• Track fill rate weekly and prune anything under 50 per cent at peak.
• Use off-peak for community and specialist formats that build loyalty rather than volume.

Frequently asked questions