Our new 2025-26 Pricing Strategy took effect on 27th September 2024. As it's our first major change to the way we structure membership and insurance fees for a number of years, we really wanted to provide some context and background to our members, to help you understand our reasoning and decision.

Since 2012 we've always focused on offering exceptional value for money, and we feel that's an important thread for us to carry forward into the future. Our Group Cover Insurance provision has been operational since 2016 and has always provided great value for money insurances for clubs of all sizes and styles.

BMABA's pricing has broadly remained unchanged since 2019. Since then we've seen off a Global Pandemic, the cost of living crisis, energy price rises, inflation, a recession and more.

We've done absolutely everything we can to hold back costs, and suppress increases in membership fees to clubs big and small, at all costs. That has often involved BMABA 'taking a hit' and running some provisions at a loss to make that happen.

As we approach 2025 - 5 years after COVID effectively shut down martial arts - we're forced with a difficult decision around our pricing strategy. Over the past five years, our pricing has remained broadly the same. It's even decreased in some places! However our continued costs of the supply chain, staffing, infrastructure, insurance and innovation continues to rapidly increase.

We're no longer able to absorb the huge increases wholly, however we're not about to throw our members under the bus and issue huge price increases. Instead, we're going to be closely targeting costs to keep everything as 'buttoned down' as we can for members during the 2025-26 period.

Here's a summary of changes;

Monthly pricing remains broadly unchanged. Annual pricing has been impacted the most by pricing updates, however it remains nominal for membership.

Membership costs remain broadly unchanged, costing less now than in 2016 on some packages. We've continued to innovate tremendously over the past few years, with features like our SENCO award, ClubManager by BMABA, Custom Printing, 1to1 Web Design and so much more now included as standard. In most cases, clubs can more than offset 100% of membership fees by migrating a website to us (and saving on the subscription elsewhere). For 2025-26 membership pricing will remain broadly the same.

We've had to ever so slightly reduce the multi-instructor discount, but this is in most cases marginal.

We know for many clubs who provide their members with student public liability insurance, it's a big cost. For this reason we've kept both named and open allocation student pricing the same as before, meaning this remains at 2020 pricing for the 2025-26 period.

Unfortunately the biggest increase in costs has to be passed on when it comes to instructor insurances. We've always typically tried to offset this by reducing the membership margins, however our operational profits (which we always aim to break-even on - never retain profit) are being squeezed dangerously low. On this basis, we do now need to pass on the direct group cover instructor insurance cost to clubs.

All of our other provisions, be it insurance or membership, should remain broadly unchanged. There has been some marginal changes to pricing across the board, but this is only to ensure we can continue to support clubs fully, continue to innovate in technology, and continue to maintain BMABA's excellent standards.

It's too soon to say what 2026-27 might look like, however we hope now we've been able to address the ever-spiralling costs of insurances and supply chains etc (which have been unchanged largely since 2020) we won't have to make any other noticeable increases in costs going forwards.

If you have any questions about the price changes, how it might impact your club or possible affordability, please reach out to us on chat or via email and we'll be happy to discuss this further with you.