No traditional sauna, and no steam room. That has been the answer for years and it is still the answer at the great majority of clubs.
But the answer started changing during 2026, and most pages on this question have not caught up. Planet Fitness has begun installing something it calls a Red Light Sauna, alongside a Polar Dry Plunge, at selected clubs as part of a Black Card Spa. If you are searching this because you want to sit in hot air, that is a distinction worth understanding before you drive anywhere.
What is actually in a Planet Fitness
| Amenity | Available? | What it actually is |
| Traditional sauna | No | Hot air and stones. Not offered at PF |
| Steam room | No | Not offered |
| Red Light Sauna | Rolling out, some clubs | A single-person red light cabin. Not a heat room |
| Polar Dry Plunge | Rolling out, some clubs | A cold-padding device, not water immersion |
| Total Body Enhancement | Widely available | Red light booth with vibration plate |
| HydroMassage, CryoLounge | Black Card | Recovery loungers, not heat therapy |
A Red Light Sauna is not a sauna
The unit being rolled out is a single-person cabin lined with red light emitters. You sit in it, you choose which areas the light hits and you set a temperature at the start of the session. It is a red light therapy device with some warmth, and the word sauna is doing marketing work.
A traditional sauna heats a room of air to somewhere between 175 and 195 degrees Fahrenheit over a bed of stones, and you can ladle water onto those stones to produce a burst of steam. The heat surrounds you, including the air you breathe. That whole-body heat load is what the research on sauna bathing was actually measuring, and it is what people mean when they say a sauna made them feel wrung out in a good way.
A light cabin does not do that and is not trying to. The difference is the same one that separates infrared from traditional heat, which our side by side look at the two works through properly. For where each format sits on a thermometer, the temperatures by sauna type put some numbers on it.
The Polar Dry Plunge deserves the same note. It is a device that wraps you in cold padding rather than a tank of cold water. It gets genuinely cold and people report liking it. It is not immersion, and immersion is what the cold water research describes.
Why Planet Fitness skipped saunas in the first place
It is not an oversight, it is the business model. A membership at ten to twenty five dollars a month does not carry the cost of a wet amenity.
Saunas and steam rooms are expensive to run continuously, they need daily cleaning, they need the floor and drainage maintained, and they carry a liability profile that a treadmill does not. Strip those out and you can charge fifteen dollars. The chain grew to more than 2,500 locations on exactly that trade.
It is worth adding that this is an industry-wide direction rather than a Planet Fitness quirk. Gym saunas have been quietly disappearing for a decade, and the ones that remain are often run cooler than a proper sauna to reduce risk and cost.
If you want heat, what to do instead
The chains that reliably have traditional saunas are the mid and premium tiers: Crunch, LA Fitness, 24 Hour Fitness at some locations, Life Time, Equinox, and a great many YMCA branches. Expect to pay considerably more per month, and expect the sauna to be shared, on a timer and cooler than you would like. The honest comparison between a gym membership and other routes to heat runs the numbers.
One thing worth checking before you switch gyms for this: how often would you realistically use it. Sauna frequency is the number people overestimate most, and paying an extra forty dollars a month for a room you visit twice is a bad trade. If you are training as well, the timing matters more than the access does, and heat before or after a workout is not a neutral choice.
If your club does get the new kit
Use it. Red light therapy is pleasant, the recovery loungers are genuinely nice, and none of this is a scam. Just calibrate the expectation: you are getting a warm light cabin, not a Finnish sauna, and the session will feel mild by comparison. Whatever the format, who should be careful with heat and cold exposure still applies.
And if you want to know what the real thing feels like before deciding it matters to you, sitting in a wood-fired room once settles it faster than any amount of reading. A single session costs less than a month of the membership upgrade, and what actually happens during one covers the practical side.
