A gym membership card needs eight things on it: your gym name, the member's name, their photo, a member ID, the plan, the valid-till date, a scannable code, and your phone number on the back. Everything else people put on these cards is decoration.
Below are three layouts you can copy — a plastic card, a printable paper one, and the digital version — plus what 200 cards actually cost to print in India, the numbering scheme that matters more than the design, and an honest answer to the question nobody asks first: does your gym need cards at all?
What actually goes on a gym ID card
Front and back, in the order a person at your desk reads them. If a field isn't on this list, ask what job it does before you put it on.
| Field | Side | Why it's there | What gyms get wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gym name and logo | Front | It's the only branding most members carry | A logo so large the member's name gets 8pt type |
| Member photo | Front | Stops one card being shared by three people | A dark selfie taken at the desk. Shoot against a plain wall, face lit |
| Member name | Front | The desk reads this first | Full legal name in tiny type. Use the name you'd call out |
| Member ID | Front | What you actually search by | No ID at all, so staff search by name and find three Rahuls |
| Plan and valid till | Front | Tells the desk in one glance if the card is live | Printing a date that goes stale in three months — see below |
| QR or barcode | Front or back | Turns the card into a check-in token instead of a souvenir | A QR that encodes a website instead of the member ID |
| Gym phone, address, timings | Back | The card is a business card that lives in a wallet | A full address in 5pt. Area and phone number are enough |
| Emergency contact | Back | The one field that might genuinely matter one day | Skipping it. It costs nothing and takes one line |
Two things deliberately not on this list: blood group (people get it wrong, and no hospital treats on a gym card's say-so) and any part of an Aadhaar number.
That last point deserves a sentence of its own, because it comes up every time. Don't print Aadhaar numbers on member cards, and don't keep photocopies of Aadhaar in a file behind the desk either. We went through what UIDAI actually says about this, and what to collect instead, in the gym membership form guide.
Layout A: the standard plastic card
Size is not a choice — use CR80, which is 85.6 × 54 mm, the same card as the one in your wallet. At 300 dpi that's roughly 1011 × 638 pixels. If your printer asks for bleed, add 2mm on every side and keep anything important 4mm inside the edge.
Front, top to bottom: a coloured band across the top with your logo on the left and the word MEMBER on the right. Below it, the photo on the left at about 25 × 32 mm, and to its right three stacked lines — name in the largest type on the card, member ID under it, plan name under that. Along the bottom, a thin strip with VALID TILL and the date on the left, and a QR code about 18 × 18 mm on the right.
Back: your gym name once, then address line, phone, and timings — three short lines. Below that, EMERGENCY CONTACT with a blank ruled line, because you'll fill this in with a pen at the desk more often than you'll get it printed. At the bottom, one line of small print: "This card remains the property of [gym name]. Non-transferable. Please report loss on [phone]."
Colour: two colours plus black. Whatever your signboard uses. Cards printed in six colours look homemade in a way that's hard to explain but easy to see.
Layout B: the paper card that costs almost nothing
Same layout, printed 10-up on an A4 sheet of 300 gsm card, cut with a paper trimmer, then pouch-laminated. It looks less premium than PVC and it works fine. Most members can't tell the difference after a week in a wallet.
The one change worth making: leave the valid-till line blank and write it by hand, or print a small box the desk ticks each renewal. A paper card is cheap enough to reprint, so it can carry a real date instead of a vague one.
This is the right answer for a gym under about 80 members, or for a gym that wants to try cards before committing to a print order of 500.
Layout C: the card that lives in the member's phone
Same eight fields, rendered on a screen the member already carries: photo, name, member ID, plan, valid-till, and a QR code that's the check-in token. The difference is that the expiry date is read from the membership record, so the day someone renews, their card is correct — no reprint, no sticker, no crossing out a date with a pen.
That's how the card works in our member app, and it's why we don't sell card printing. The QR encodes the member ID, the tablet at your entrance scans it, and the visit is logged. If you want the mechanics of that, how QR gym attendance actually works has the setup end to end.
What do gym ID cards cost in India?
This is where the decision actually gets made, so here are the real numbers rather than a vendor's "starting from" price.
| Option | Cost | Worth it when |
|---|---|---|
| Printed PVC, bulk order (250+) | ₹5–25 per card | You have a stable roster and print once or twice a year |
| Printed PVC, small order (under 50) | ₹35–59 per card | Rarely. Small orders are where card budgets quietly die |
| Paper card + lamination pouch, in-house | ₹5–10 per card | Under ~80 members, or you want to test the idea |
| Your own card printer | ₹55,000–85,000 for the machine, plus ribbon and blank cards | You print 1,000+ cards a year, or you sell card printing to other businesses |
| QR card in the member's app | ₹0 per card, no reprints | Your members have smartphones — which, for a gym, is most of them |
Bulk and small-order PVC prices from Indian print vendors and IndiaMART listings; printer prices are street prices for the Datacard SD360, Magicard Enduro 3e, Evolis Primacy and Fargo DTC1250e, checked in August 2026. Printer prices exclude ribbons and blank cards, which is where the running cost hides.
Run the arithmetic for a 200-member gym. A bulk PVC order at ₹20 a card is ₹4,000 — genuinely cheap, and if the story ended there I'd tell you to print them. It doesn't end there. Members lose cards, new members join every month, and any card carrying a printed expiry date is scrap the moment they renew.
Say you reprint for 15% of the roster each year and add 60 new members. That's 90 more cards, and they don't come from a 250-card bulk run — they come from small top-up orders at ₹35–59 each, which is ₹3,000–5,000 a year on top. The printer starts to look tempting at that point, and then you've spent ₹60,000 on a machine to solve a problem you could have deleted.
The member ID scheme matters more than the design
Nobody thinks about this until year three, when they have two members with the same number and no way to tell which payment belongs to whom.
Keep it boring. A short prefix, the joining year, and a running serial — IY-26-0147 for the 147th member who joined in 2026. Say it out loud on a phone call and see if it survives; that's the only test that matters.
- Never reuse a number, even when someone leaves. The old records still point at it
- Don't encode anything personal — no phone digits, no birth date, nothing that changes
- Don't restart the serial each year unless the year is part of the ID, or you'll have two 0001s
- Use the same ID on the card, the receipt and the admission form, so all three can be tied together later. The same logic applies to your bill numbers — the invoice numbering rules are worth reading before you set either
- Write it on the physical form too, not just in the software. Paper and screen should agree
Should you print cards at all?
A gym card does three jobs: it identifies the member at the desk, it makes joining feel like something happened, and it acts as a check-in token. Only the third is load-bearing, and it's the one a phone does better.
Here's what I see in practice. The gym prints good-looking cards, hands one over on joining day, and never sees it again — because nobody carries a wallet to the gym in shorts. Six months in, the card is in a drawer at home and the desk is looking people up by name anyway, which is exactly where they started.
The joining-day feeling is real, though, and I don't want to dismiss it. A card handed across the desk with someone's name and photo on it says "you're a member here" better than a welcome message does. If that matters to how your gym sells, print the cards — just print the cheap ones, and don't make them do a job they can't do.
The two situations where a printed card genuinely earns its place: members without smartphones, which is usually 5–10% of an Indian gym's roster rather than all of it, and gyms where an access gate or a third-party scanner reads a printed barcode. For everyone else, the plastic is a souvenir.
The expiry date problem
This is the flaw in every printed card and it has no good fix. Print "Valid till 31 March 2026" and the card is wrong from 1 April, whether the member renewed or not. So you either reprint every renewal, which is the cost above multiplied by how often people renew, or you leave the date off — and then the card proves nothing, which is what the date was for.
The workarounds all have a smell to them: a sticker over the old date, a punch hole per renewed quarter, a pen strike-through and a new date written beside it. I've seen all three. They tell a member exactly how much their membership is worth to you.
A card whose validity is read from the membership record doesn't have this problem, which is the actual argument for a digital one — not that it's modern, just that it can't be out of date.
If you're printing anyway, do these five things
- Shoot every photo the same way — plain wall, face lit, phone held at eye level. Consistent photos are most of what makes a card set look professional
- Order in one batch and keep 30 blanks aside for new joiners, so you're never paying small-order prices in a hurry
- Print the QR before you decide what scans it. Encode the member ID and nothing else — a QR pointing at a URL is useless the day you change systems
- Put the phone number on the back. Lost cards get returned surprisingly often when there's a number on them
- Decide the renewal rule before the first print run: reprint, sticker, or no date. Deciding it after 200 cards are printed means you'll pick whichever is cheapest that day
Common questions
What size is a gym membership card?
Use CR80 — 85.6 × 54 mm, the same size as a debit card, which means it fits every wallet and every card printer. Design at 300 dpi, which is about 1011 × 638 pixels, and keep important text at least 4mm in from the edge so nothing gets trimmed off.
How much does it cost to print gym ID cards in India?
Bulk PVC printing runs roughly ₹5–25 a card depending on quantity and finish, but small top-up orders cost ₹35–59 each, which is where most of the money actually goes. Doing it in-house needs a card printer at ₹55,000–85,000 plus ribbons and blank cards, which only makes sense above about a thousand cards a year.
What information should be on a gym membership card?
Gym name and logo, member photo, member name, member ID, plan, valid-till date, and a QR or barcode on the front; gym phone, area, timings, and an emergency contact on the back. Leave off blood group and anything to do with Aadhaar.
Do gym members actually need a physical card?
Most don't. The card's only load-bearing job is check-in, and a QR code in the member's phone does that without being left at home or going out of date at renewal. Printed cards still make sense for members without smartphones and for gyms whose entry gate reads a printed barcode.
Can I design and print gym cards myself?
Designing them yourself is easy — Canva, Word or any layout tool will do a CR80 card. Printing them yourself is the expensive half: a PVC card printer starts around ₹55,000, so for most gyms it is cheaper to send a bulk order to a local printer, or to skip plastic and issue the card in the app.
If you want cards, print the paper ones this week and see whether members still have them in March. That answer costs about ₹800 to find out, and it's worth more than any argument I can make here.