"Home gyms are having a moment" has been said every year since 2020, which makes it worth asking whether it's still actually true, or just a comfortable thing people keep repeating. The data says it's true — and more than that, it says the shift has settled into something durable rather than a pandemic-era spike that was always going to fade.
The Market Is Still Growing, Not Just Holding Steady
The global home fitness equipment market sits at roughly $13.57 billion in 2026, and it's projected to reach $22.99 billion by 2034 — a 6.81% compound annual growth rate, according to Fortune Business Insights. That's not a market coasting on old momentum; that's a market still climbing.
Worth putting in context: the home fitness market grew more than 40% above its pre-2020 baseline during the pandemic years, and rather than sliding back down afterward, it settled at that permanently elevated level. The surge pulled a lot of demand forward, and the years since have been about the market digesting that shift rather than reversing it — which is a meaningfully different story than "temporary spike."
More Americans Now Train at Home Than at a Gym
This is the stat that tends to surprise people: 52% of U.S. adults say they exercise regularly (weekly to monthly) at home, compared to 28% who regularly train at a gym, based on CivicScience polling. That's not a close race — it's nearly double.
About 40% of U.S. adults own or have access to home exercise equipment, per Statista, and the behavioral pattern behind that ownership is worth noting too: people who train at home are roughly 21% more likely to work out at least once a week than people who rely on a gym. Convenience, not cost, tends to be the deciding factor — when people are asked why they train at home, cost usually ranks well below simply not having to travel somewhere else to do it.
Younger Buyers Are Driving the Next Wave
Nearly two-thirds of adults under 30 expect to add home gym equipment in the near future, and their buying intent is running well ahead of older age groups. That's shaping what actually gets built: brands are increasingly launching modular, apartment-friendly product lines specifically for this cohort, rather than assuming every buyer has a garage to fill. If you're working with limited square footage yourself, How to Build a Home Gym in a Small Apartment covers the practical side of that same shift.
This matters beyond just demographics — it's a signal about where the category is heading. A market driven by people with dedicated home gym rooms looks different from one increasingly driven by people fitting equipment into shared apartments, and product design tends to follow the buyers, not the other way around.
Strength Training Is Leading Over Cardio
One of the clearer trend shifts heading into 2026 is strength training's growing dominance over pure cardio as the primary focus of home training — part of a broader move toward integrated fitness that treats strength, mobility, and recovery as connected rather than separate categories. This lines up with why equipment that covers more than one training style in a single footprint — strength, mobility, and Pilates-style work together — fits where the category is actually moving, rather than where it used to be.
Gyms Aren't Disappearing — This Isn't Zero-Sum
It's worth being straight about this: commercial gyms haven't collapsed alongside home training's rise. Roughly 77 million Americans — about 25% of the population aged six and up — still use a gym or fitness facility. Global health club memberships actually rose year over year recently, and industry operators remain broadly optimistic about growth ahead.
The honest read isn't "home is replacing gyms." It's that the total pool of people training in some form has grown, and a large share of that growth has gone toward home setups rather than gym memberships — particularly among people for whom convenience matters more than variety. Both categories are growing; they're just not growing at each other's expense the way a simple "home vs. gym" framing suggests.
Where the Growth Is Actually Concentrated
North America holds roughly 37% of the global home fitness equipment market, per Fortune Business Insights — the largest single regional share, and a sign that this isn't a trend playing out unevenly somewhere else while stalling domestically. The U.S. specifically remains the largest fitness market in the world by gym membership count, at over 72 million members, which reinforces the point above: growth in home training hasn't come at the direct expense of commercial fitness, even in the market where home training has grown the most.
That regional concentration also explains why so much recent product development — modular equipment, apartment-friendly footprints, multi-function systems — has been aimed squarely at the North American home market rather than commercial gym buyers. The category's growth engine and its product innovation are pointed in the same direction.
What This Actually Means If You're Deciding Right Now
If you've been on the fence about a home setup, the data suggests you're not early and you're not late — you're in the middle of a shift that's already mainstream and still has real room to grow. The equipment side has caught up too: what used to be commercial-gym-only technology now ships at consumer prices, and the "you have to choose one training style" assumption doesn't hold the way it used to, either.
Recommended Setup
- MOMO Core — a practical entry point if you're part of the growing share of people testing whether home training actually fits your routine before committing further
- MOMO Pro — for anyone leaning into the strength-plus-mobility integration the data points toward, rather than a single-purpose setup
- Pilates Kit — fits directly into the "more than one training style, one footprint" trend shaping where the category is headed