A fitness-company survey in the U.K. contains a housing statistic that is easy to dismiss and harder to ignore.
The Gym Group’s 2026 Gen Z Fitness Pulse surveyed 2,000 people ages 16 to 29. Seventy-two percent said access to a gym is important when choosing where to live. Sixty-two percent said they have already chosen a home because it is close to a gym, or would consider doing so. Thirty-two percent said they would pay more for that proximity, by an average of £40 a month.
Asked to rank local lifestyle amenities, 31% put gyms and fitness facilities first. Recreational shopping came next, at 25%, then parks and green space at 21%, restaurants, bars, and cafés at 14%, entertainment at 6%, and cultural venues at 3%.
The survey was commissioned by a gym operator and fielded online by OnePoll between July 9 and 14, 2026. It measures stated preferences, not leases or purchases. Five percent of respondents were 16 or 17, and another third were 18 to 21, so a large share of the sample is nowhere near buying a house. In London the gym figure rises to 82%, which is a reminder that the national number is an average across very different housing markets.
That is also why the result is useful. It records a preference before most of the generation has meaningful control over residential real estate. The open question is what happens when a cohort that already arranges location around training begins to control the floor plan.
The U.S. signal is participation, not yet a floor plan
American data does not show the same housing behavior. It does show that training is ordinary for young adults.
The Health & Fitness Association reported that 81 million Americans held a gym, studio, or other fitness-facility membership in 2025, an all-time high and a 5.2% increase from 2024. Among adults, Gen Z ages 18 to 24 had the highest membership penetration of any age group, at 35.5%. The underlying survey, run through 2025 by Sports Marketing Surveys, covers facility use. It says nothing about where those members live, or what they would pay to live there.
Housing preferences show up in a separate Redfin survey. Ipsos fielded it in May 2026 to 4,000 U.S. residents. The published cuts focus on the roughly 1,000 who planned to move within 12 months, and that combined group carries a credibility interval of ±3.9 percentage points. Generational slices are smaller, so the gaps below are directional.
Respondents picked their top three priorities from 22 home features. Fourteen percent of Gen Z movers selected an at-home fitness or wellness space. Ten percent selected a home theater or media room. Security systems led the generation, at 42%, and a clean home with high-end air and water filtration was next, at 40%.
Fourteen percent is not a generation demanding a home gym. Gen X movers selected the fitness space at a higher rate, 16%. The comparison that holds is narrower: among young people planning a move, a room for training already outranks one of the classic status rooms of the luxury house, and it does not outrank security or cleaner indoor air.
Renters are seeing the first version
The earliest architectural response is easier to find in apartment buildings than in single-family plans.
Greystar’s 2025 Design Survey, released in January 2026, drew on more than 137,000 residents of Greystar-managed rental housing. Fitness centers entered its five most desired amenities nationwide for the first time. Eighty-three percent called them important or essential, and 68% said they use them regularly. They still rank behind expansive closets (88%), large windows and natural light (87%), fresh-air ventilation (85%), and covered parking (84%).
The details inside the fitness number are the useful part. Residents asked for free weights, 24-hour access, and water stations. The fitness room is being judged as a training environment, not as a token amenity with a few treadmills facing a television. Multifamily housing is learning to treat fitness as infrastructure because residents use it often enough to notice when it is bad.
The sample is Greystar’s own residents, not U.S. renters at large. Within that limit, it is a preview of the sequence. A renter can choose a building with a better gym, or a neighborhood close to one, years before they can commission a house around how they train.
Most of this generation still does not own the plan
Gen Z is in the housing market. It does not dominate it, and the two headline numbers describe different age windows.
Redfin’s analysis of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey puts the 2025 homeownership rate for adult Gen Z at 27.1%, up from 26.1% a year earlier. That figure is the share of households headed by Gen Zers ages 19 to 28 that were owner-occupied. People living with parents or other family are left out, so it is not the share of every Gen Z adult who holds a deed. The oldest edge is further along: just over 38% of 28-year-olds owned, against 31.6% of 27-year-olds and 27.2% of 25-year-olds.
The National Association of Realtors reached a compatible conclusion from transaction data, on a younger definition. In its 2026 generational report, buyers born from 1999 to 2011 — ages 18 to 26 in 2025 — accounted for 4% of people who had bought a primary residence between July 2024 and June 2025, up from 3% the year before. Baby boomers were 42%.
The lag is the interesting part. Preferences often become visible before architecture catches up. A generation spends years arranging life around an activity through memberships, rented rooms, neighborhood choices, and whatever spare space is available. Later, once income and ownership rise, some of those behaviors become permanent parts of the house.
Remote work is the recent example, and it is an analogy, not a proof. The home office existed long before 2020. What changed was its rank. Once enough people worked from home often enough, a desk in the corner stopped being sufficient. Buyers asked where the office was. Builders put one in the plan. Fitness may be earlier in a similar sequence. Nothing in the current data says it will follow the same path.
When the routine claims square footage
There is already evidence that houses are moving in that direction, before Gen Z is a major buyer cohort.
Houzz’s 2026 U.S. search data, comparing January through March 2026 with the same months in 2025, found that searches for “home gym” rose 46%. “Wellness room” rose 164%. Spa rose 68%, sensory room 43%, and yoga room 20%. Those are searches on one platform, not permits, contracts, or finished rooms.
Homes.com’s 2026 new-construction survey points at the older edge of the same generation, where buyers can choose layouts. The company surveyed more than 3,000 U.S. adults age 25 and older who had recently bought, or planned to buy, a new single-family home priced or budgeted at $250,000 or more. Seventy-one percent of the Gen Z respondents were first-time buyers. In its account of the same survey, Good Housekeeping reported that 49% of respondents said an infrared sauna or wellness room was important. The age and budget floors mean this is not Gen Z as a whole, and the wellness figure bundles a sauna with a room.
The shift worth watching is not “everyone gets a home gym.”
It is that training and recovery start affecting decisions earlier in design. A room used five mornings a week is planned differently from a spare bedroom that happens to contain a bike. Serious training changes floor area, ceiling height, storage, flooring, acoustics, ventilation, cooling, and how you move through the house. Recovery can add water, drainage, electrical capacity, and a reason to sit beside a shower or an outdoor space. Those are building decisions, and the strength guide treats them as such.
The form can be a garage planned around a rack, a flexible room with real clearances and ventilation, a small recovery room beside the primary bath, a covered place to train outside, or a shared gym in a multifamily building that residents use. The signal is not any one piece of equipment. It is the routine claiming area that used to go somewhere else.
The commercial gym is not the thing being replaced
There is a trap in reading all of this as a home-gym forecast.
The Gym Group’s own research says the gym is not valuable only because it contains equipment. Sixty-two percent agreed that the gym is a place to socialize and feel part of a community, and 57% said it is somewhere to make meaningful connections. A private room cannot reproduce that.
A clean substitution, in which the home gym kills the commercial gym, is the unlikely outcome. The more plausible one is a split. People train at home when convenience matters, and they go elsewhere when the session needs equipment, coaching, competition, or other people. They may choose a house partly because it can support training and partly because it sits ten minutes from the facility they use.
That distinction is the practical one for builders and developers. Fitness-oriented housing does not have to mean more equipment in every residence. Sometimes it means a shared training room with free weights, hours, and water, of the kind Greystar’s residents are already asking for. Sometimes it means a real connection from the house to trails or outdoor space. Sometimes it means one room inside the home that is structurally capable of becoming more later, instead of a spare bedroom that will fight the use.
A floor plan is a list of what won
Every house is a limited amount of money and area divided among competing uses. Formal dining rooms once held dedicated square footage because that was how people expected to entertain. Home theaters became shorthand for luxury when entertainment moved inside. The pandemic moved the office up the list because work needed a permanent address in the house.
Fitness and recovery are now competing for the same territory. The Redfin result is small, and Gen Z is not even the generation most likely to name the room. Houzz is measuring searches. Apartment residents are using and criticizing a shared gym. New-construction buyers in a higher-budget slice are asking for wellness rooms. None of these findings rewrites the American floor plan.
Together they describe where pressure is building, and they should be read as a hypothesis. Gen Z is the most fitness-engaged adult cohort in U.S. facility-membership data, and it remains a small share of home buyers. Much of the generation is still expressing the preference through rent, proximity, memberships, and the amenities it chooses, rather than through architecture it owns.
That mix will change as more of this generation buys, renovates, and eventually builds. Some of the current behavior will turn out to have been a membership and a convenient address. Some of it will turn out to deserve permanent square footage. A young renter may already pay more to live near a gym. The decision that matters later is what they are willing to remove from the house to make room for the routine.