Britain had 45 public saunas at the start of 2023. Two years later the British Sauna Society counted 147 — roughly a tripling — and its listings have since climbed past 600. Search interest has risen in step: UK searches for “sauna” go up year on year, steeper every January, and the national press now calls the sauna the “new pub.” The demand side is loud, and anyone can see it.
A headline count, though, doesn’t tell you which saunas, or when each one opened — and that’s the harder question, because it means dating real venues one by one. We’ve dated ours. The Society’s figure counts the whole scene; the Ember atlas keeps a smaller, hand-checked slice of it — 134 UK saunas, 131 of them with a verified opening date — so we can place each in the year it opened. Counted that way, the build-out looks like this.
+65%
UK openings, 2024 → 2025
51
new UK saunas dated to 2025
27
already dated to 2026 (part-year)
Demand went up. So did supply.
Three readings now point the same way, and that’s the whole story: public search interest (Google Trends), an independent venue count (the British Sauna Society’s tally, up roughly threefold in two years), and our own atlas, dated venue by venue. Any one alone could be noise — idle curiosity, a counting quirk, an artefact of what we chose to catalogue. Three independent methods landing on the same shape are not.
The clearest single step is 2024 to 2025: UK openings in our atlas rose 65% (31 to 51). 2026 is only half-counted and already at 27. The pre-2022 bars are low not because Britain had no saunas then, but because the current wave — mobile barrel saunas, community trailers, waterside cabins — mostly didn’t exist yet.
Where it’s happening
The map isn’t evenly lit. Of the 109 UK saunas we’ve dated to 2024 or later, London leads on raw count — but the cities directly behind it are Scottish, and per head of population Scotland is the clear epicentre. Glasgow alone has added more since 2024 than any English city outside London.
UK openings since 2024, by city
That a small coastal town like North Berwick places in a national ranking at all is the tell. This isn’t a big-city amenity spreading outward; it’s a coastal, small-town movement that happens to include the cities. The pattern rewards water: the places punching hardest above their size — North Berwick, and the Highland and island newcomers — all sit within reach of a sea or a loch to plunge into. The boom is following the cold water.
A wild-sauna boom, not a spa boom
Break the same 109 openings down by what they are, and the wave has a shape. 79% are outdoors. 55% are wood-fired. 70% build a cold plunge into the ritual. Only 16% are urban, indoor, spa-style rooms. The boom the search charts detect is, up close, a wild-sauna boom.
Nearly a quarter sit right on the sea (24%), more again on lochs and rivers. And that 70% cold-plunge figure is worth pausing on: the cold plunge that trends as its own rising line on the same search charts isn’t a separate movement here — it’s built into most of the new saunas themselves, the second half of a single hot-then-cold ritual.
Share of UK openings since 2024 with each trait
Venues carry several traits, so shares are read independently, not summed.
That typology is the part the demand curve can’t tell you. The search line says “sauna”; the venues say something more specific — Britain is building barrel saunas on beaches and wood-fired cabins by lochs faster than anything with an infrared cabin and a reception desk. From Sál on Skye to Steam and Salt on the Tyne, the default new British sauna of 2026 is outdoors, beside cold water, and lit by a wood stove.
Why now
We map venues, not motives, so on the why we defer to the people covering the scene — and their explanation is social, not clinical. The sauna is being pitched as somewhere to meet without drinking. “I class saunas as the new pub,” one operator told the BBC, “a sober way of getting together, and you don’t wake up with a hangover.”
The economics help. A £10–15 drop-in reads as an affordable night out when the pub round doesn’t; hybrid work has loosened the weekday; and the broader recovery-and-wellness wave — the one the cold-plunge line on the same search chart belongs to — gave it a tailwind.
But the typology above hints at a supply-side reason the wave looks the way it does. A wood-fired barrel sauna on a trailer costs a fraction of a bricks-and-mortar spa fit-out, needs no permanent building, and can be parked on a beach car park or a farmer’s field. Opening a sauna in 2024 is closer to opening a coffee cart than a leisure centre — which is exactly why the new supply is wild, wood-fired and mobile rather than urban and infrared. The low barrier isn’t a footnote to the boom; it’s a large part of the cause.
What happens next
Both the count and the curve suggest it isn’t done. 27 UK venues are already dated to 2026 with half the year still to run, tracking close to last year’s full-year 51. The British Sauna Society’s director put it plainly: the growth “suggests that the peak has still yet to come.” One market forecast has the UK becoming Europe’s largest sauna market by 2033.
One honest hedge on the curve: some of what opened as a pop-up won’t survive its first winter. Mobile and seasonal saunas churn in a way a fixed bathhouse doesn’t, and our count records openings, not closures — so the yearly bars are a gross figure, not a net one. The trend is solid; the individual dots are more fragile than a spa’s. We’ll reissue this report each year, count the survivors as well as the newcomers, and find out.
Go deeper
Want the venues, not just the count? Every sauna behind the 2026 bar is listed — with dates and links — in New Saunas of 2026. For how the cities compare, see The 2026 Sauna Index.
Method, and what these numbers are not
Every count above is computed live from the Ember atlas. A venue is counted in the year it opened as a sauna (not when its building or business was founded), from a cited source — local press, the operator’s own launch announcement, or a corroborated search result. Venues we couldn’t date are left out, not guessed.
This is a lower bound on our atlas, not a census of the United Kingdom. We curate for a current audience, so we list far more recent venues than historic ones — which means the rising line partly reflects what we choose to catalogue, and the early years understate how many saunas existed. We publish the atlas we’ve curated, and we’d rather show the caveat than sell a cleaner chart. Where a number could be read two ways, read it as “at least this many, among venues we track.”
For scale: the British Sauna Society counts more than 600 public saunas across the UK; we curate 134 of them. The gap is deliberate — a hand-checked slice, not a directory of everything — and a slice that moves with the authoritative count is corroboration, not competition.
This report is the 2026 edition and won’t be rewritten; next year’s ships at its own URL. Data source: the live Ember atlas, as of publication.
Sources & further reading
- British Sauna Society — UK public-sauna counts (45 in early 2023, 147 by early 2025, 600+ by 2026).
- BBC News — “Sauna has all the benefits of the pub” (2026).
- Much Better Adventures — the rise of UK sauna culture.
- Google Trends — UK search interest for “sauna.”
Cite this report as: The UK Sauna Boom, Mapped, Ember, July 2026. https://saunadiscovery.com/reports/uk-sauna-boom-2026