Your Gym Moved You to a Dearer Club and Raised the Price? What NCAT Just Found

A Sydney gym member’s rate went from $19.95 a week to $25.95 after his membership was moved from the club he joined to one closer to where he had moved. On 18 September the trade press reported that the New South Wales Civil and Administrative Tribunal (NCAT) found the marketing behind that arrangement misleading and deceptive. If your gym has quietly changed your home club and your direct debit has gone up, this decision is worth understanding, because the fix starts with your own agreement rather than with a tribunal.

For the forms, fees and each step, see our guide to making an NCAT application.

What the tribunal was asked to decide

Reginald Yakob joined an Anytime Fitness club at Campbelltown about ten years earlier, then moved to Parramatta and began training at a club closer to his new home. Under the franchise’s transfer arrangements, a membership can be transferred when a member uses another club for more than half their visits during a month for two consecutive months, or visits another club at least once a month for three consecutive months. His membership was transferred to the Parramatta South franchise, and his rate rose from $19.95 a week to $25.95, an increase of roughly 30 per cent. Cancelling instead would have cost him about $400.

Individual franchises set their own membership prices, so a transfer is not a neutral administrative step. It can change what you pay for the same service. According to the report of the decision, NCAT member Michael Terceiro found the transfer clause was not inherently an unfair contract term, but that “the way it was applied in this particular case was unfair”.

The tribunal also found the club had given 31 days’ notice of the fee increase when the agreement required 35, and ordered a refund of $129.75 in overcharged membership fees. The franchise did not attend the final hearing or provide further evidence, according to reports of the decision.

Reciprocal access and a transfer are not the same thing

This is the distinction most members miss, and it is the one the operator itself drew. Responding to the decision, an Anytime Fitness spokesperson said that when a member joins, that location becomes their “home club” and is responsible for managing their membership. The spokesperson added that “reciprocal access gives members the flexibility to train at other Anytime Fitness clubs across Australia when travelling or away from home, without needing a separate membership. Reciprocal access is different from a membership transfer. A transfer may occur when another club becomes the member’s primary place of training.”

Read that alongside the advertising and you can see the gap the tribunal landed on. Being told you can use any club in the country sounds like a benefit with no strings attached. The strings are in the transfer clause. The tribunal found the ability to visit different clubs was a “major selling point” but that the marketing did not adequately disclose the potential financial consequences of a membership being transferred, and that this amounted to misleading and deceptive conduct.

Why the clause survived but the outcome did not

Be precise about this, because it changes what you can usefully argue. Terceiro accepted the provision had a legitimate purpose: stopping people from deliberately joining a lower-cost club and then predominantly using a more expensive location. What made its application unfair was that Yakob had joined his original club because he lived in that area, and then moved. There was no suggestion he was attempting to “take unfair advantage of the Anytime Fitness system”.

So the argument that carries weight is not “this clause is illegal”. It is “this clause was written for a problem I am not causing, and applying it to me is not reasonably necessary to protect anyone’s legitimate interests”.

That phrasing is deliberate. Under the unfair contract terms rules the ACCC administers, a term in a standard form consumer contract is unfair if it causes a significant imbalance in the parties’ rights and obligations, is not reasonably necessary to protect the legitimate interests of the party it advantages, and would cause financial or other harm if enforced. A court also considers the contract as a whole and whether the term is transparent. If a court decides a term is unfair, it is void and no longer applies. Those rules, including the penalties, apply to standard form contracts made or renewed on or after 9 November 2023, and to terms varied or added on or after that date.

What this decision does and does not do for you

It does not hand anyone an automatic refund. One tribunal member decided one dispute between one member and one franchise on the evidence in front of him, and the other side did not attend the final hearing. Decisions at this level do not bind other tribunals, and a different set of facts, particularly a member who changed clubs to save money rather than because they moved house, could land differently.

What it does give you is a clearly reasoned version of an argument you can put in your own letter: that a transfer clause aimed at gaming the price structure should not be turned on someone who simply moved house, and that selling nationwide access without flagging what a transfer can cost is a problem in its own right.

Consumer Action Law Centre representative Galit Aflalo said the centre was “particularly concerned by Anytime Fitness promoting in its marketing material that individuals could sign up to a membership and use any gym in Australia”, and called for regulators “to take swift action against the use of unfair contract terms”. Whether a regulator acts is not something you can plan around.

Five things to check in your own agreement first

1. The transfer or home club clause. Find the trigger. How many visits, over what period, and does anything require the operator to tell you before the transfer happens?
2. The notice period for a fee change. In this matter the agreement required 35 days and the club gave 31. Your agreement will have its own number. If they missed it, that is a plain breach of contract, separate from any argument about fairness.
3. Whether the increase was disclosed at all, or whether you found it on your bank statement.
4. The cancellation terms and any exit fee, so you know what the alternative actually costs before you choose between them.
5. What you were told when you joined. The New South Wales government’s gym and fitness contracts guidance lists terms that increase fees after you sign without letting you cancel among its examples of unfair terms. Consumer Affairs Victoria has identified terms in health and fitness contracts that automatically renew memberships without an opportunity to cancel at the end of a minimum term, allow a centre to vary its services without notice, or penalise members for terminating.

If the agreement runs to pages of defined terms and you are not confident which clause they are actually relying on, a contract and agreement review will tell you what the clause does and whether it does what they say it does.

What to put in writing

Keep it short and factual. Send it to the club taking the debit, and copy any head office contact named in your agreement. Cover:

• Your membership number, the club you originally joined, and the date the transfer took effect.
• The old rate and the new rate, with the dates each applied.
• The notice you actually received, and the notice your agreement requires.
• Why the transfer clause should not be applied to you. If you moved house, give the date you moved and say plainly that you did not change clubs to obtain a cheaper rate.
• What you want. Reinstatement at the original rate, a refund of the difference already taken, or release from the agreement without an exit fee. Choose one primary outcome and name a fallback.
• A date by which you want a written reply.

Send it by email so the date and the content are on record. The New South Wales guidance makes the same point about cancellations: always put it in writing so you can prove the date you asked. Do not simply cancel the direct debit and go quiet, because an unexplained missed payment hands them a default to point at.

If the letter does not work

There are two routes and they are not mutually exclusive. You can complain to the consumer regulator in your state, which will not order a refund for you but does build the record that regulators act on. Or you can bring a consumer claim in your state tribunal: NCAT in New South Wales, VCAT in Victoria, QCAT in Queensland, and the equivalent body in each other state and territory. NCAT’s own pages explain consumer and commercial cases and set out its current fees. Fees and time limits change, so read them on the tribunal’s site rather than trusting a figure in an article.

Do the arithmetic before you file. The amount in dispute, less the filing fee, against the hours it will take you. A few dollars a week looks trivial until you multiply it by the months left on the agreement, and a refund of overcharged fees is calculated the same way the tribunal calculated the $129.75 in the Anytime Fitness matter: rate difference times the period it was wrongly charged.

Where Claim Done fits

Claim Done is not a law firm and does not give legal advice. It takes the facts and documents you describe and turns them into a properly structured letter that quotes your own clause back at the operator, sets out the notice failure and the rate history side by side, and states exactly what you want and by when. You review and approve the draft, and then it is sent by email.

Each document has its own fixed price, with the full list on the pricing page. For a transfer and fee increase like this one, the document that fits is a consumer guarantee and refund demand. If your problem is the narrower one of a gym that will not let you leave at all, the guide on what to do when a gym will not cancel your membership covers that path instead.

Start your document on Claim Done.

Frequently asked questions

Can my gym move my membership to a different club without asking me?

It depends entirely on what your agreement says. Transfer clauses of this kind are common and NCAT did not find the clause itself was inherently unfair. What the tribunal took issue with was applying it to a member who had moved house, and marketing that promoted access to any club without adequately disclosing that a transfer could raise the price. Read your own transfer clause and find the exact trigger before you argue anything.

The gym gave me short notice of the increase. Is that enough on its own?

It can be a useful and simple point, because it does not require anyone to decide what is fair. In the Anytime Fitness matter the agreement required 35 days' notice and the club gave 31, and the tribunal ordered a refund of the amount overcharged. Your agreement will specify its own notice period, so check that number rather than assuming 35 days applies to you.

Does this decision mean I am owed a refund?

No. It was a single tribunal member deciding one dispute on the evidence before him, and the franchise did not attend the final hearing. Decisions at that level do not bind other tribunals. The value of the decision to you is the reasoning, which you can use in your own letter, not an automatic entitlement.

Should I just cancel the direct debit?

Not as your first move. Stopping payment without explaining why can be treated as a default under the agreement and may trigger fees or a referral to a debt collector. Put your position in writing first, state what you want and by when, and keep paying or make your position on payment explicit in the letter.

Is it worth taking a few dollars a week to a tribunal?

Work out the total rather than the weekly figure: the difference between the old and new rate multiplied by the period it has been charged, plus what is left to run on the agreement. Compare that to the tribunal's current filing fee, which is published on the tribunal's own website, and to the time it will take you. For smaller amounts a well-documented letter and a complaint to your state consumer regulator is usually the proportionate step.