On August 20, 2025, the FTC sued Fitness International — the company behind LA Fitness — alleging it made cancellation "exceedingly difficult" for roughly 3.7 million members across more than 600 locations, and pocketed "hundreds of millions of dollars in unwanted recurring fees" from people who tried to leave and couldn't. I read the complaint looking for the part that would surprise me and never found it: a 12-month gym contract with an exit harder than the entrance isn't a design flaw, it's the design.
Quick answer
If your gym contract is about to auto-renew and you want out — and the front desk is the last place that's going to tell you how — here's what actually works:
- Pull your actual contract and find the notice-period clause — most major chains require 30 days' written notice before your next billing date, not a same-day walkout.
- Cancel in writing, never by phone or a front-desk conversation — most agreements only recognize a signed letter or a specific cancellation form.
- Send it certified mail with return receipt so you have a dated, verifiable delivery record if the gym later claims it never arrived.
- Check whether you qualify for a legal exit: moving beyond a set mileage radius, medical incapacity, active-duty military orders, the gym closing or relocating, or a short cooling-off window right after you signed.
- Don't wait on a federal fix — the rule that would have forced cancellation to be as easy as sign-up was struck down in 2025.
The 30-day notice every major chain uses
Planet Fitness requires 30 days' written notice before your next billing date, sent to your specific home club — there's no central corporate address — and processing can take up to seven business days after that. LA Fitness sets the same 30-day floor and is explicit that membership doesn't end the day you submit the form; it ends 30 days after the company receives it. Anytime Fitness, 24 Hour Fitness, and Gold's Gym all use the same 30-day window, though Anytime Fitness's exact process varies by location since each club is independently franchised rather than centrally run. The pattern holds whether you're paying $10 a month or $60: the notice period is contract language, not a courtesy, and reading through how each chain frames it, the billing cycle you first notice the clause in is invariably the one you just got charged for — which reads less like bad luck and more like the intended order of discovery.
Cancel in writing — and prove you mailed it
Every one of those chains treats a phone call as informal — worthless if a charge ever gets disputed, which is convenient for the gym and inconvenient for everyone else. LA Fitness has historically required certified or registered mail to a PO Box in Irvine, California; 24 Hour Fitness routes cancellations to a PO Box in Carlsbad marked "Attn: Cancellation Department"; Gold's Gym's correct address depends on whether your location is corporate- or franchise-owned. Certified mail with return receipt is the method recommended across the industry for one reason: it creates a dated, verifiable proof-of-delivery record if the gym later claims your letter never showed up.
A short letter covers what most contracts actually require:
[Your name], member ID [number] [Home club name and address] [Date]
This letter serves as written notice that I am cancelling my membership, effective 30 days from the date above, per my contract's notice-period requirement. Please confirm receipt of this cancellation in writing and stop all billing to my account after that date.
[Signature]
Mail it certified with return receipt, keep a copy of the letter and the receipt, and mark your calendar for the date the notice period ends — that's also when you should check your statement to confirm the billing actually stopped, since "confirm receipt in writing" is a request gyms honor unevenly at best.
No federal easy button — check state law instead
The FTC finalized a "click-to-cancel" rule in October 2024 that would have required anything sellable online — including a gym membership — to be cancellable online, with no extra steps. It never took effect: the Eighth Circuit vacated it in full on July 8, 2025, days before its compliance deadline, on procedural grounds unrelated to gyms specifically — which is its own small monument to how these rules tend to die, not on the merits but on a technicality nobody exercising on a treadmill will ever hear about. Businesses are still bound by the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act and by state law, just not by a federal cancel-as-easy-as-signup standard. That's exactly why the friction described in the FTC's LA Fitness complaint — in-person cancellation limited to one specific employee, cancellation hours restricted to when members are typically at work — is still legal in most states unless a specific statute says otherwise: the one fix that would have applied everywhere got replaced by fifty separate maybes.
State law is where the real leverage lives, and it's more specific than most people expect. New York's GBL Article 30 lets a member cancel penalty-free if they move their residence more than 25 miles from any club the seller operates, become "significantly physically disabled" for more than three months with a doctor's order, or if the gym permanently closes or substantially changes its operations — a refund is owed within 10 business days of the notice. California's Health Studio Services Contract Law works similarly: relocating more than 25 miles out gets you a pro-rata refund (the gym can withhold up to $100, or $50 once you're past the halfway point of the term), and if the club itself closes or relocates more than 5 miles away, you're owed a full refund of unused prepaid fees. California goes further and voids any contract clause that tries to waive these rights. If you're in the military, the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act was expanded in January 2023 to explicitly cover gym memberships — orders to relocate or deploy for 90 days or more let you terminate with no early-termination charge, and the same protection covers a dependent relocating with you. Most states also give you a short cooling-off period, typically three business days after signing, to cancel a brand-new contract for any reason and get a full refund — that window is for buyer's remorse right after signing, not for exiting a contract you've already paid into for months.
If none of that applies, expect a fee
No relocation, no injury, no orders, no closure — you just want out early. Expect a fee, and expect it to be in the contract you signed. Planet Fitness charges up to $58 to buy out a commitment membership (its no-commitment plans carry none), which tells you the $58 was never about cost recovery — it's a tax on people who picked the cheaper plan and now want out of it too. Anytime Fitness charges 50% of the remaining balance on your minimum term, or 30 days of dues, whichever is higher. Those numbers aren't negotiable in the sense of disappearing, but showing up with your own copy of the mileage rule or medical clause, rather than asking the front desk to explain your contract to you, is usually what gets a fee waived instead of just charged.
Contract lock-in with an early-termination fee isn't unique to gyms — I've written about the exact same trick at Adobe, where Creative Cloud runs the same 12-month-contract-disguised-as-monthly-billing structure, just with software instead of a treadmill. If the real problem is that you've lost track of which of your recurring commitments even have a notice period, Subnesio keeps the actual renewal date next to the terms, so a 12-month contract doesn't quietly relock itself while you're not looking.
The FTC's case against Fitness International was still pending as of this writing — worth checking before you take LA Fitness's word for it that any of this got fixed.
