The recovery studio landscape, 2026: pricing and modality data from a live directory

That ranking is a proxy for two different things depending on who's reading it. For consumers, it's a rough guide to how likely a given modality is to be down the street versus a special trip: infrared sauna and cryotherapy show up in roughly half of directory cities each, while something like PEMF or localized cryotherapy is genuinely uncommon outside a handful of markets. For operators, it's the inverse signal — the top of the list (sauna, cryo, red light) is closer to table stakes, what customers expect a studio to have; the long tail (PEMF, lymphatic compression, percussion therapy, and a scattering of modalities that appear at exactly one studio in the whole directory) is where differentiation lives, for better or worse. Rare doesn't automatically mean underserved-and-profitable — it can also mean thin demand — but it's the honest starting point for that conversation rather than a guess.

What sessions cost: median listed price by modality

This section carries the biggest caveat on the page. Only 50 of 2,072 US studios list a session price at all, so every number below comes from a small, self-selected slice of listings — studios that chose to publish a price, not a representative sample of the market. We're showing it anyway because directional data, clearly labeled as thin, is more useful than silence — and because the sample size (n) is shown next to every figure so you can weigh it yourself.

• PEMF — median $30 (range $15–$150, n=6)
• Compression therapy — median $40 (range $15–$89, n=18)
• Float therapy — median $44 (range $15–$89, n=4)
• Cryotherapy — median $45 (range $15–$150, n=18)
• Hyperbaric oxygen — median $45 (range $25–$63, n=3)
• Infrared sauna — median $49 (range $15–$150, n=47)
• Red light therapy — median $49 (range $15–$99, n=42)
• Halotherapy — median $49 (range $20–$150, n=23)
• Contrast therapy — median $49.50 (range $15–$99, n=30)
• Cold plunge — median $49.50 (range $15–$99, n=14)
• IV & hydration — median $54 (range $25–$150, n=8)

Modalities with fewer than three studios reporting a price are omitted entirely rather than published on a sample too small to mean anything. Even the larger samples here (infrared sauna at n=47, red light at n=42) represent a low-single-digit share of all studios offering that modality — most studios simply don't publish price online, which is itself useful information if you're comparison-shopping and expect to call or book a consult rather than see a number up front. For where sessions or memberships fit into a studio's overall economics, see our guide on recovery studio membership pricing; this page is the market-numbers source it points back to.

The geography of recovery

• Austin, TX — 34 studios
• New York, NY — 29 studios
• Houston, TX — 28 studios
• Denver, CO — 24 studios
• Nashville, TN — 24 studios
• Chicago, IL — 21 studios
• San Diego, CA — 21 studios
• Brooklyn, NY — 20 studios
• Scottsdale, AZ — 20 studios
• St. Petersburg, FL — 20 studios

The distribution is heavily skewed toward a small number of dense metros and a long tail of thin ones: of the 706 US cities in the directory, 398 — 56.4% — have exactly one listed studio. That's not necessarily 398 open markets; a single-studio city might be genuinely underserved, or it might be a small town that can only support one. But it's the honest starting shape of the industry right now: a handful of cities like Austin and New York carry real density and competitive pressure, while most of the map is one studio deep or has none at all. If you're scouting a location, that gap between "has a studio" and "has real modality choice" is worth checking directly against live studio listings for your specific city rather than assumed from a national ranking.

What pairs with what

Studios rarely offer just one modality, and the co-occurrence pattern in the data lines up with what you'd expect from how these categories get built out physically: infrared sauna is the default second modality almost everywhere. Among studios that offer cold plunge, 77.2% also offer infrared sauna — the classic contrast pairing, and the single most common two-modality combination tied to a specific consumer routine in the dataset. Compression therapy studios pair with infrared sauna at 87.7%, contrast therapy studios at 85.0%, and hyperbaric oxygen studios pair most often with red light therapy at 90.5%.

Even the two largest categories lean on each other: cryotherapy studios pair with red light therapy 45.5% of the time, and infrared sauna studios pair with red light therapy 44.9% of the time — lower percentages than the smaller categories above, but because sauna and cryo are each so large on their own, those are still the two biggest absolute overlaps in the directory. Read this as evidence that most studios are built around a core 2–3 modality bundle rather than a single specialty, and that sauna in particular functions as connective tissue across nearly every other category.

What this means if you're opening or upgrading a studio

None of this data tells you what to do — it tells you what's already true, which is a better starting point than a guess. If you're evaluating a market, cross-reference the city and modality-prevalence numbers above against live listings for that city: a metro with a below-average share of, say, contrast therapy or float therapy relative to its studio count may be a genuine gap, or may reflect real local demand limits — the data narrows the question, it doesn't answer it for you. Our guide on how to open a recovery studio walks through reading local demand and competitor capacity in more depth.

If you're deciding what to add next, the co-occurrence data above is a reasonable proxy for what customers expect to find bundled together — infrared sauna pairs with almost everything, which is part of why it's also the single most common modality in the directory. Before you buy, our recovery studio equipment guide covers the capex and buying-order side of that decision, and once you're pricing what you'll charge for it, recovery studio membership pricing covers the model and unit-economics side — this page only covers what the market currently shows, not what to charge or how to structure it.

Cite this report

This page is meant to be cited. Every figure above is reproducible from Praxium's live directory at the time of computation, and the report itself updates as the underlying listings change — so link to the page rather than screenshotting a number that may drift.

Suggested citation: "Recovery studio modality and pricing data, Praxium directory, computed as of July 2026 — askprax.ai/guides/recovery-studio-landscape-2026." If you're citing a specific figure (a modality's prevalence, a price median, a city's studio count), please note the computation date alongside it, since the directory is live and those numbers will move as studios are added and updated.