UK Home Gym Price Index

Quotable stats from this run

Pre-written for anyone citing this data — each line is generated directly from the dataset below, not written separately from it.

• As of 2026-08-06, the median UK price across the 10 verified products in the UK Home Gym Price Index is £224.50.
• Accessories is the cheapest category we track: median £19.95 across 3 verified UK listings.
• This is the first published run of the UK Home Gym Price Index (2026-08-06); week-on-week trend statistics will appear from the next weekly check.
• 4 of the 14 products in this basket could not be verified this week — mostly retailers (including Amazon UK) that block automated price checks — and are recorded as null rather than estimated.

Methodology

What follows is the plain mechanics of this page, in the same spirit as our published testing method: what we track, how often, and — because "median" and "verified" get used loosely elsewhere — exactly what we mean by them here.

What's tracked

A fixed basket of 14 named products across five categories: cardio machines, free weights, racks, multi-gyms, and accessories. We chose the basket to span budget and mid-range UK home gym buying, not to chase the cheapest or most expensive item in each category. The basket can grow over time; when it does, we'll note the change here with a date rather than silently reshaping the average.

How often

Weekly, automatically, in the small hours of Monday UK time. Each run appends one dated observation per product — it never overwrites or discards history, so the full price history behind every number here stays inspectable.

What "median" means here

For each category we take the median — the middle value, not the average — of that week's verified prices. We use median deliberately: this is a small basket, and a single expensive multi-gym would drag a mean average around in a way that misrepresents the category. A median is more resistant to that kind of outlier.

Automated vs manual verification — the honest part

Most prices here are checked automatically: our collector script reads a retailer's own product data (a Shopify store's product JSON, or Product structured data embedded in the page) rather than screen-scraping visible text. That is more reliable, but it does not work everywhere — Amazon UK actively blocks automated price-checking, and some smaller retailers (Mirafit, in our current basket) return an error to any non-browser request.

Where automated extraction fails, we record price: null with a "fetch-failed" or "manual-required" status — never the last known price, and never an estimate. This week that applies to 4 of the 14 products in the basket; they're marked "not yet verified" in the table above rather than silently dropped or guessed at. We top these up by hand between automated runs where we can.

"RRP" in the table is the retailer's own displayed compare-at/was price at the time we checked — we do not independently audit retailers' discount history the way we would for a hands-on review; see how we test for how we handle "RRP theatre" in full reviews.

Extraction strategies, for the technically curious

• Shopify JSON — most of our tracked direct-to-consumer retailers run Shopify; we read their public /products/{handle}.json endpoint, which returns price, compare-at price and stock as structured data. No HTML parsing involved.
• JSON-LD — for retailers who embed Product/Offer schema.org markup in the page itself, we read that directly.
• CSS — a fallback, best-effort text match near a known price element. It is intentionally fragile: when a retailer redesigns their page, this strategy is expected to fail closed into "fetch-failed" rather than return a wrong number.
• Manual — retailers (Amazon UK among them) that block automated requests outright. These prices are checked and entered by hand, on a best-effort basis, and are the ones most likely to lag.