Gym Music Licence UK 2026: PPL PRS Costs Explained
Fitness classes are not priced by floor area. PPL charges £2.30 per class and PRS £2.38 per class on top of an area-based core charge — here is what that does to a UK gym's 2026 bill.
Fitness classes are priced per class, not per square metre. PPL's Exercise To Music tariff has no floor-area band and no attendance band at all — it is £2.30 a class, flat.
PRS is the hybrid: an annual Core Music charge banded by audible area, PLUS a bolt-on of £2.38 per fitness class.
A studio running ten classes a week pays roughly £2,340 a year ex-VAT on the class tariffs alone, before the gym floor is licensed at all.
PPL's tariff says yoga and Pilates are fitness classes, and that it applies whether the class is instructor-led or video-led.
A gym that runs classes and plays background music pays under both regimes. The two tariffs also uplift on different dates — PRS on 1 February, PPL on 1 May.
Sonosfera was started by a salon operator who got caught out by PPL/PRS licensing letters and built the music platform they wished existed. The team behind this blog has spent years inside hair and beauty businesses, clinics, and hospitality venues — booking the bills, dealing with the licensing letters, and learning the hard way that most Spotify playlists don't work for a professional environment.
The reality of the gym music licence UK: PRS PPL requirements for fitness studios 2026
By Sonosfera Team
Music does a lot of work in a gym. It sets the tempo on the floor, lifts a flagging spin class, and covers the clank of plates so the room doesn't feel clinical. The part that catches owners out isn't the playlist — it's that almost everything written about the cost is describing the wrong tariff.
Nearly every guide to gym music licensing tells you the fee depends on the size of your premises. For your gym floor, that is true. For your classes, it is not true at all. The fitness class tariffs do not band on floor area. They do not band on how many people turn up either. They charge a flat fee for every single class you run, and that is a completely different shape of bill — one that grows with your timetable, not your square footage.
This guide is for owners and managers of UK gyms, fitness studios, PT spaces and class-based venues. It does not cover live PT events with a hired DJ, ticketed fitness events, or music broadcast beyond your own premises.
Two societies, and for fitness, two different pricing models
Playing recorded music where members or staff can hear it is a public performance, and in the UK that right is licensed by two collecting societies whose bills are collected together as TheMusicLicence:
PPL licenses the sound recording — the specific recorded version you play.
PRS for Music licenses the composition — the song as written.
For a pub or a shop, both societies do roughly the same thing: band on floor area, charge annually. Fitness is where they diverge, and where the published advice falls apart.
PPL's class tariff: £2.30 a class
PPL's Exercise To Music tariff (PPLPP222) runs 1 May 2026 to 30 April 2027, and it prices classes at a flat £2.30 per class, ex-VAT.
The important part is what the tariff does not contain. No floor-area band. No attendance band. No duration band. One rate, per class, whatever the room and whoever shows up. That is why a page about your studio's square metreage cannot answer your class bill.
You can check the rate without taking our word for it, and without us reprinting PPL's document: PPL PRS publish a worked example of an instructor running three classes a week for fifty weeks in a hired hall, and price it at £345.00. That is 150 classes. £345.00 ÷ 150 = £2.30 exactly. The tariff itself is a one-page PDF if you want the source.
Note the heading says PPL's class tariff, not your PPL bill. Classes are one of at least two PPL lines a gym pays — the gym floor is a separate tariff, covered below.
Four details from the tariff that change how much you owe:
Yoga and Pilates count. PPL's definition of a fitness class explicitly names aerobics, keep fit, step, dance-exercise, group cycling and spin, strength and resistance, hybrid, boxing and combat, flexibility, stretching and abdominal work "including yoga and Pilates", specialty, aqua, and age or lifestyle classes.
A video-led class still counts. The tariff says it applies "whether or not such class is presented by a fitness instructor, video instruction or otherwise". An empty studio running a screen is a licensable class.
Who pays depends on whose room it is. A fitness centre licenses every class held on its premises or under its control. But an instructor running a class in a hired hall or office licenses that class themselves.
The gym floor is explicitly excluded. In PPL's own words, background music in "gymnasium workout areas, public areas and changing rooms, restaurants and cafes should be charged separately using the appropriate tariffs."
There is also a 50% surcharge if you were running classes before you were licensed, and PPL's general minimum fee — £79.45 a year ex-VAT to 30 September 2026, then £81.83 — sits underneath.
PRS: an area charge plus a per-class charge
PRS for Music's Fitness & Dance tariff runs 1 February 2026 to 31 January 2027 and works as two components that stack.
Component one, Core Music — background music covering the total audible area of the premises, which the tariff says also includes staff-only areas and staff training films. It runs across five audible-area bands, from £299.02 ex-VAT at the smallest (under 100 m²) to £1,357.08 at the largest (950 m² and up). Two worked points from that ladder are used below: a 90 m² studio sits in the bottom band at £299.02, and a 100–249 m² gym floor sits one step up at £559.69. The full band table is in the tariff PDF — find your own audible area there rather than guessing from ours.
Component two, Bolt-on Music — charged on top of Core Music: £2.38 per fitness class, or £1.52 per dance lesson.
There is a minimum annual royalty of £73.71, but read the condition carefully: it applies only "where the premises only has Bolt-on Music usage" — that is, classes and no background music anywhere. That describes a hired village hall, not a gym. If you play music in the changing rooms, you are on Core Music and the minimum is irrelevant to you.
The tariff also excludes not-for-profit amateur sports clubs (they sit under tariff AMS), and excludes any café, bar, shop or crèche on your premises that is operated by a third party — those are that operator's own licensing problem, not yours.
What this actually costs a real studio
Take a boutique studio: one 90 m² room, background music between classes, and a timetable of ten classes a week running fifty weeks a year. That is 500 classes.
Line
Basis
Annual ex-VAT
PRS Core Music, 0–99 m²
audible area
£299.02
PRS Bolt-on, 500 fitness classes at £2.38
per class
£1,190.00
PPL Exercise To Music, 500 classes at £2.30
per class
£1,150.00
Total on published, verifiable rows
£2,639.02
The class tariffs are £2,340 of that £2,639 — 89% of the bill, from a component that most published guidance does not mention exists. Double the timetable to twenty classes a week and the total goes to roughly £4,979 ex-VAT while the room stays exactly the same size. Halve the timetable and it drops to about £1,469. Your music bill tracks your schedule, not your floor plan.
Run the same arithmetic before you add a class to the timetable and each new weekly class is about £234 a year across both societies — a real number to put next to the class's revenue.
Adding the gym floor: two PPL tariffs, not one
A gym with a weights floor as well as a studio pays under both regimes, and this is the part the class arithmetic above deliberately left out.
The PRS side is already covered: Core Music is charged on your total audible area, so the gym floor is inside the same band you looked up earlier. There is no second PRS charge for it.
The PPL side is where most write-ups go wrong, including an earlier draft of this page. PPLPP222 says gym-floor background music is charged "separately using the appropriate tariffs" — and PPL publishes two separate flat-fee tariffs that a fitness business can land on:
PPLPP049, Gymnasium Workout — background music accompanying gym workouts, excluding any area where classes are held. £187.60 a year ex-VAT, flat, effective 1 September 2025 to 31 August 2026.
PPLPP054, Leisure Centres and Health/Fitness Clubs — background music in the club generally, at the same £187.60 flat fee for the same period. It explicitly routes gymnasium workout areas to PPLPP049.
Neither is banded. Neither depends on your floor area. Both link straight from PPL PRS: PPLPP049 and PPLPP054. A bar, restaurant or shop inside the club is charged separately again under its own tariff.
So a gym floor of 100–249 m², background music only and no classes, is £187.60 (PPL) + £559.69 (PRS Core Music) = £747.29 a year ex-VAT. That figure is not our estimate — it is the sum of two published flat/band rows, and it is exactly the blended gym figure Sonosfera's own cost calculator publishes, which is how we checked it.
A correction we are recording rather than quietly fixing. An earlier draft of this page said the PPL gym-floor rate could not be retrieved from a published document and withheld it. That was wrong: both tariffs above are public, and adversarial review caught it before publication. The withholding rule stands — a figure we cannot verify does not get printed — but it must never be used to dress up a search we did not finish.
One thing the calculator's blended figure does not include, and its own caveat says so: classes. On the numbers earlier in this page, classes are usually the larger half of a class-based studio's bill.
Two renewal dates, not one
The two tariffs uplift on different schedules, so a fitness business's music cost moves twice a year:
PRS Fitness & Dance uplifts on 1 February, by the mean of RPI and the Average Weekly Earnings index from the previous September, to the nearest whole percentage point.
PPL Exercise To Music uplifts on 1 May.
Both editions above are current as at 1 August 2026. Any figure you read anywhere — including this page — needs an "as at" date attached, because a page written in March is quoting a superseded PPL rate by June.
How the main background-music services compare
The services below all target UK businesses, but they handle the licence very differently. Treat the prices as a starting point and confirm at checkout. A provider's marketing claim is not the same as a tariff ruling, so verify anything that affects your legal position — and note that none of these positions change the class tariffs if you are playing mainstream music in classes.
Its UK guidance says public-performance rights are not included and you should get TheMusicLicence
Budget for TheMusicLicence on top of the subscription
Where pricing is published, the service alone lands between roughly GBP 10 and GBP 32 a month — around GBP 120 to GBP 384 a year. Set that against £2,639 of tariff for the studio modelled above and the subscription is the small number. The licence question is the expensive one.
Where Sonosfera fits
You don't need a PPL PRS licence to play Sonosfera — in a class or on the gym floor. Our catalogue is fully rights-controlled and sits outside PPL and PRS repertoire, so none of the per-class arithmetic on this page applies to it. Every track you play through Sonosfera is included. If you also play other sources — radio, TV, chart tracks, a guest instructor's phone, a hired DJ, live acts — those need their own licence, class by class. Rights documentation is available on request.
The boundary matters more in fitness than anywhere else, because the second music source usually walks in the door: a guest instructor plugging in their own phone is a different music source, and each class it plays in is its own line on both class tariffs.
The trade-off is honest: a curated own catalogue, not the latest chart hits. If a class's identity depends on specific mainstream songs, you need a mainstream service and the class tariffs above. If what you need is reliable, on-brand sound — calm for a yoga room, driving for the weights floor — review country-aware pricing against the alternatives.
Frequently asked questions
Is the fitness licence really not based on my studio's size?
The PPL half is not — PPLPP222 has no area band at all, just £2.30 per class. The PRS half is both: an area-banded Core Music charge for background music, plus £2.38 for every fitness class on top. So "it depends on the size of your premises" is half an answer, and the half it leaves out is usually the bigger number.
Does a quiet yoga class count?
Yes. PPL's tariff names yoga and Pilates in its list of fitness classes. Volume and intensity are not what the tariff prices — the class taking place is.
What if I hire a hall rather than owning a studio?
Then the instructor is responsible for licensing their own classes, not the venue. PPL's tariff draws that line explicitly for classes held outside a fitness centre.
Does streaming a class on a screen with no instructor avoid it?
No. The tariff covers a class "whether or not such class is presented by a fitness instructor, video instruction or otherwise".
Can I use my personal Spotify or Apple Music account for classes?
No. Consumer streaming accounts are licensed for personal listening only, not for playing to members. That is separate from — and additional to — the TheMusicLicence question.
What happens if I have been running classes unlicensed?
Both tariffs carry a stated 50% surcharge for performing before licensing. Beyond that it is a civil copyright matter rather than a fine; music licence fines UK covers what the published judgments actually say, and PPL PRS contacted my business covers what to do if a letter has already arrived.
Sources
Rates change on the dates given above — verify the current edition before acting on any figure.
How much checking is behind each figure. The two gym-floor rates are the best-evidenced numbers on this page: £187.60 appears in two separate PPL tariff documents, PPLPP049 and PPLPP054, for the same period. The per-class rates and the PRS Core Music bands rest on their tariff document alone — a flat per-class fee has no rate-times-unit to recompute, and the Fitness & Dance tariff states no arithmetic relationship between its Core Music bands, so there is nothing independent to check them against. PPL PRS's own £345.00 worked example divides to exactly £2.30 a class, which is reassuring, but a worked example is validation rather than a second source and we do not count it as one.
PPLPP222 — Exercise To Music, effective 01-MAY-26 to 30-APR-27 — Phonographic Performance Limited. Verified 2026-08-01.
Count your classes per year and multiply by £4.68 — that is the combined PPL and PRS per-class rate, ex-VAT, and for most class-based businesses it is the number that decides the budget. Then add the Core Music band for your audible area, plus £187.60 for the gym floor if you have one, and confirm the total with PPL PRS before you budget on it. If a curated own-catalogue route suits your studio, review country-aware pricing and compare on the UK comparison page.
