The Open begins in two days. Register here.

On February 27, the Open kicks off at CrossFit Mayhem with the announcement of 25.1.

Here are the registration numbers for the last four years:

Competitive region analysis

While the 2025 Games season structure doesn't feature competitive regions as heavily as in the past, several in-person qualifying events are using them to determine athletes' eligibility for their competitions.

To date, the competitive region record looks like this:

All our tracking has shown that registration numbers are down across the board, but digging a little deeper shows there isn't much year-over-year variation by region.

• In other words , coaches and community members, there was an indication that due to the death of Lazar Ðukić, the European region might fall behind compared to other regions.

So far, this has not made it into the data:

Who is in and who is out?

Much has been said about top elite athletes posting about their status for the 2025 CrossFit Open and the subsequent Games season.

That's not what this report is about.

• Athletes can reach millions through social media, but it would be impossible to identify the impact directly attributed to posts like Annie Thorisdottir or Patrick Vellner saying they're "Out" and Rich Froning and Scott Panchik saying they're "In for the Open."

Elite athletes at the Games represent less than 0.03% of the total athlete population.

I want to focus on something bigger, something that's the heart of the community and brings CrossFit to the masses every day: affiliates.

At the 2024 Open, there were a total of 343,528 registrants, and the top gym on the 2024 affiliate leaderboard was SuperForce CrossFit, with 613 registered athletes.

In 2025, CrossFit headquarters has pushed to involve members more.

• In addition to the marketing boost, HQ is also offering $2,500 Rogue Fitness gift cards to top affiliates based on team participation and performance.

It's also worth noting that the new "In-Affiliate" semifinal can only be completed within the four walls of a CrossFit affiliate.

By the numbers

In 2024, 307,115 affiliated members, representing 10,904 members, participated in the Open. The remaining 36,413 were not affiliated. This represents 89.40% of the total number of affiliates and 10.60% of non-affiliates.

Those 10,904 members averaged 28 athlete members who participated in the 2024 Open.

Currently, for 2025, there are 8,590 affiliates with at least one athlete registered for the 2025 Open.

But how many members do these affiliates have?

To establish a baseline, I looked at two places that understand this well. The first is Two Brain Business 's State of the Fitness Industry 2024 , which puts the average at 122.5 members across "Big Group" gyms.

• "Big Group" is how Two Brain Business classifies CrossFit gyms and other large group class gyms, of which CrossFit gyms make up 50 percent of its total respondents.

The other place that shows an average number of members is the publicly available CrossFit Affiliate Playbook . In the Playbook's financial planning section, CrossFit lists an average of 118 members as the "minimum number of members needed to meet operating expenses and allocate toward its annual take-home goals." 

• Therefore, for the purposes of this exercise, we are estimating 120 members each, on average. 

Here it is: If 10,904 affiliates with an average of 120 members participated in the Open last year and an average of 28 members per affiliate registered, that means an average of 23% of members signed up at those gyms.

• Worth noting: Based on the fact that 343,000 represents 23% of total enrollments by 2024, we can roughly estimate that there are around 1.5 million total members across all CrossFit gyms.

For more information and graphics, continue reading here.