France Digital Fitness 2026: 28.5M App Users, Only 7% Pay

The full report · 3 min read

France does not have an attention problem. It has a payment problem. 28.5 million people used health and wellness coaching apps in 2024, up from 6.5 million in 2018 (Statista Market Insights). That is more than four times the audience in six years, and the forecast keeps climbing to 33.3 million by 2028.

Now look at who actually pays. In Statista’s Consumer Insights survey of French adults aged 18 to 64, only 7% bought online fitness services (websites or apps) in the past year. 82% spent nothing on any fitness or health service at all. Just 6% paid for a gym membership and 3% paid a personal trainer.

Millions use. Few pay. That gap is the whole story.

The hardware has stalled, the software has not

Fitness trackers tell you where the novelty went. Tracker users in France grew from 4.6M in 2018 to 7.9M in 2024, but the forecast to 2028 adds only 0.3M more (+3.8%). The device market is close to saturated.

App revenue is a different curve. Health and fitness app revenue in France is forecast to grow from $101.8M in 2024 to $140.7M in 2027, up 38%. People are slowly getting used to paying for software. They are not yet paying for coaching.

A July 2023 CRÉDOC survey adds context: 35% of French people already use connected technology to track their activity, either while exercising (18%) or all the time (17%). The data habit exists. The willingness to pay a human for it mostly does not, yet.

A smaller, cheaper gym market

France is a thinner market for traditional fitness than its neighbours. In 2022 it had 4.7M gym members, less than half of Germany (10.3M) or the UK (10.4M), and gym penetration of 10%, against 12% in Germany, 16% in the UK and 21% in Sweden (Deloitte / EuropeActive).

Revenue follows: the French fitness industry turned over about €1.6bn in 2022, versus €4.9bn in Germany and €5bn in the UK. And the price anchor is low. Basic-Fit runs 780 clubs in France, its largest market, compared with 12 in Germany.

So the French customer is surrounded by free apps and cheap gyms. Any paid offer has to justify itself against both.

Why they move, and why they stay home

The CRÉDOC data is useful because it shows motive. 52% say they exercise for health, ahead of relaxation (35%), fun (31%) and appearance (28%). Only 10% exercise to meet people.

Where they train matters too. 36% exercise outdoors in nature, 25% at a sports facility and 22% at home. Among home exercisers, the top reason is being able to train whenever they want (31%), followed by weather (20%) and cost (19%).

Put that together and the French customer looks like this: health-driven, independent, already tracking, price-sensitive and used to free tools.

What operators and coaches should take from this

The app is not your competitor. It is your lead list. Someone logging workouts in a free app has already shown intent. What they lack is accountability, adjustment and a person who notices. That is the product you sell.

Price the human layer, not the content. Workouts are free everywhere. Feedback, check-ins and progress reviews are not. A low-cost hybrid tier (remote programming plus a monthly in-person session) meets the “train when I want” need without racing Basic-Fit to the bottom.

Speak to health. With more than half of active people citing health first, outcome language (energy, mobility, blood pressure, sleep) will convert better than aesthetics.

Watch the 7%. That number is the real market size today, and it is growing as app spending grows. The operators who build trust with free users now will be the ones those users pay when they are ready.

A living Sqwod Intelligence report. Every figure was taken from the underlying chart data in Statista’s “Fitness industry in France” study and cites the original source (Statista Market Insights, Statista Consumer Insights, CRÉDOC/INJEP, Deloitte/EuropeActive, Basic-Fit). Survey figures and app-user figures measure different groups, so we do not combine them into a single conversion rate. We refresh the numbers as new data lands; see the update log.