The Dues Increase Your Board Keeps Deferring Costs More Than the One It Fears

Every fall, in board rooms from Jupiter to Boca, the same motion dies quietly. The finance committee recommends a 4 or 5 percent dues increase. Someone — usually a long-tenured member who remembers what dues were in 2009 — says the membership won't stand for it, not this year. The treasurer notes that the club ended last year roughly at breakeven. The motion gets tabled, or trimmed to 2 percent, and everyone leaves feeling like they protected the members.

They didn't. They just changed which invoice the members will receive, and made it bigger.

The math the motion never gets

Take a club that isn't exotic at all: 400 golf members paying $12,000 a year in dues, so a $4.8 million dues line. Per the CMAA and Club Benchmarking 2024 Club Finance and Operations Survey of more than 1,200 clubs, dues run about 50 percent of operating revenue at golf clubs — which means when this line stalls, nothing else on the revenue side can plausibly cover the gap.

Now let costs rise 5 percent a year — labor, insurance, agronomy, the whole stack. That is not a stress-test number. Club Benchmarking's own data shows club dues rose 9 percent in 2022–23 and 5 percent from June 2024 to June 2025, and their director of data analytics has called the 5 percent range "the new normal." Clubs raising dues 5 percent aren't gouging anyone; they're keeping pace with what it costs to be a club.

Hold dues flat against that for five years and the arithmetic is unforgiving. The dues level required to cover year-five costs is $12,000 × 1.05⁵ — about $15,315. Getting there in one move is a 27.6 percent increase, which no board will pass. So it arrives instead as a special assessment.

And here is the number nobody puts on the slide: the cumulative revenue the club didn't collect during those five flat years is about $9,600 per member. The costs were incurred anyway. That $9,600 per member — roughly $3.8 million across the club — didn't vanish. It came out of somewhere: the capital reserve, the course conditions, the equipment replacement cycle, the staff you couldn't keep. The "emergency" assessment of $8,000 or $10,000 a member that eventually lands isn't bad luck. It's the deferred dues, returning with interest, plus whatever the deferred maintenance compounded into while you waited.

The members paid either way. The only question the board actually decided was whether they'd pay in five forgettable installments or one memorable lump — with a worse golf course in the second scenario.

Why the assessment does more damage than its dollar amount

If the two paths cost members roughly the same, why do we care so much which one a club takes? Because members don't experience them the same way, and the difference shows up in the membership ledger, not just the income statement.

A 4 or 5 percent dues increase renews on autopilot. Almost nobody re-underwrites their membership over $50 a month. A special assessment does something different: it forces every household to make a fresh decision about the club. The invoice arrives, spouses talk, and the question on the table is not "is this increase reasonable" but "do we still want to belong here at all." We've watched clubs lose 5 to 8 percent of their membership in the year following a large assessment — and the members who leave are disproportionately the newer ones, the ones the club spent real money recruiting, the ones without twenty years of sunk sentiment. The assessment also freezes the referral pipeline: no member proposes a friend the same season they're writing a $10,000 check and grumbling about it at dinner.

There's a second-order effect we see constantly and almost never hear discussed: a board that defers increases is letting its most price-sensitive voices set price for the entire membership. The three members who write letters about dues are audible; the eighty members quietly disappointed that the fitness center renovation slipped again are not. Flat dues is a decision to serve the letter-writers at the expense of everyone who joined for the product.

And prospective members read flat dues correctly, even when boards think it's a selling point. Sophisticated buyers — and in South Florida right now, incoming members are very sophisticated — treat a five-year flat dues history plus an aging clubhouse as a signal that an assessment is coming. Some will ask for the reserve study before they ask for the tour. Your pricing history is part of your disclosure whether you intend it or not.

Where this advice doesn't hold

Honesty requires a concession. A steady annual increase is not a license to skip the harder work. If your club's costs are rising 5 percent because of contract creep, unmanaged overtime, and a food and beverage operation losing more than the board ever agreed to subsidize, indexing dues to that trajectory just anesthetizes bad budgeting. The increase should fund the club you decided to be, not launder the club you drifted into. And there are genuinely price-constrained situations — a club in an overbuilt market with a waitlist of zero and attrition climbing — where a dues increase accelerates the death spiral, and the real conversation is about the operating model, or a capital partner, or consolidation. If your club is losing members at flat dues, the pricing question is downstream of a positioning question.

But those are the exceptions, and boards reach for them far too quickly. A full club with a waitlist that hasn't raised dues in three years is borrowing from its members without telling them — and calling it protection.

What we'd tell your board

Put a standing annual increase on the calendar — costs-plus, typically 4 to 6 percent in this environment — and make not raising dues the motion that requires a vote and a written justification. Reverse the default. Pair every increase with a one-page bridge showing where the money goes, because members tolerate increases they can trace and resent ones they can't. And run the five-year flat-dues math above with your own numbers at the next finance committee meeting, before someone tables the motion again. The board that fears a 5 percent increase is almost always choosing a 27 percent one. It just hasn't seen the invoice yet.

Visions Alliance provides fractional CFO leadership to private clubs, hospitality businesses, elective medical practices, and owner-led companies across South Florida.