When taking on a Peloton class the leaderboards can be quite intimidating, with some classes having hundreds of thousands of people on the board. If you are anything like us this can create a level of competition that is sometimes detrimental to a workout. On many occasions we have had to hide the leaderboards on recovery rides or easy workouts to avoid getting into some arbitrary battle that leads to the top 5% or even 50% of class members. All of this makes it easy to wonder how many riders there are out there in the Peloton universe.
For many of our rides it feels like similar efforts will land us in the same % of finishers. Even with the variety of bike calibrations and riders, large numbers tend to average out the total output numbers. At the same time, the total workout count of other riders seems to be all over the place with little correlation to their spot on the leaderboards. This makes sense as a huge portion of Peloton riders are still new. Also, over time Peloton has also moved away from just cycling and their bike. With the release of their tread as well as physical products they have shared that >40% of the workouts logged are non-cycling workouts. So let’s get to some of those other numbers to see how we stack up outside the leaderboards.
How Many Peloton Users Are There?
According to their annual filing, Peloton has an average of 2.2 users per paid subscription. As for actual users the last released number was 5.9M total Peloton members in June of 2021. It is important to recognize that that number is higher than the paid subscription users which was 2.3M total at the same time. Based on on-going comments and analysis of their sales the below chart, from EMarketer.com, shares the expected US growth of Peloton users through 2026.
- Total Members (2021): 5.9M
- Total Paid Subscribers: 2.2M
- Total Workouts: 459M
All of this means that even though it might seem like there are a ton of riders, less than 5% of the US population is considered a Peloton member. So, the next time you find yourself in the top 50% of riders in a class, realize that this is already skewed toward folks who have made fitness a priority (and have the financial access to get on Peloton).
How Many Workouts Does The Average Peloton User Do?
A workout is counted within the Peloton numbers (again 459M annually) if you complete at least 50% of the class length, or at least 10 minutes for any of the freeform “Just Run” style workouts. It is important to understand the climate within which these numbers were generated. The 2020-2021 time frame was over the better part of the global pandemic. While the total numbers grew nearly 20% the other number that shot up was the average sessions per month which moved from 17.9 workouts/month to the average Peloton user working out 22 times/month. This impact is huge considering that individual users did not get more time in their day so this time to complete an average of 4 additional workouts had to come from some other activities.
Presumably that time shift to Peloton was from indoor gyms, organized sporting events, and other activities that were canceled. The best guess is that this number will fall for Peloton over the coming years as their core users have more opportunities to do other workouts, and as they expand their customer base to a less total monthly workouts per month of any kind.