You can now spend $100,000 a year trying not to die. We looked at what that buys.

Somewhere under the West Village, in a converted federal archive building, there is a machine its makers call the Orb. It reads your blood, your sleep, your VO2 max and your recovery, and builds what the club describes as a digital twin of you. Membership at Continuum, the club that houses it, started at 10,000 dollars a month when it opened in 2024. That is the price of a new kind of promise: that with enough data, enough recovery technology and enough money, you can optimize your way to a longer life.

Continuum is not alone, and it is not even the most expensive. In London, a members club called Surrenne sits beneath a Knightsbridge hotel, charges 10,000 pounds a year plus a 5,000 pound joining fee, and lists the neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and the longevity researcher David Sinclair on its advisory board. At Aman New York, the wellness floors come attached to a private club whose initiation fee has been widely reported at 200,000 dollars, before annual dues. Aman does not publish its terms; that figure comes from Business Insider. These places have a name now. They are longevity clubs, and the wealthy are pouring in.

What a six-figure body costs

Strip away the marble and the menus are strikingly similar. You start with an onboarding assessment: blood panels, a DEXA scan for body composition, a VO2 max test, sleep tracking. Then an app and, increasingly, an AI system promise to turn all that data into a personalized plan. Then comes the playground: cryotherapy chambers, hyperbaric oxygen, IV drips, cold plunges, infrared saunas, red light beds. Wrapped around it is the thing the brochures sell hardest, which is belonging, a room full of people optimizing alongside you.

The prices span an order of magnitude. Continuum, having opened at 10,000 dollars a month, restructured its pricing in early 2026 to a range of 25,000 to 100,000 dollars a year. Surrenne's 100 memberships sold out. Not all of them cost a fortune: Remedy Place, a self-described social wellness club founded by Dr. Jonathan Leary with locations in Los Angeles and New York, runs monthly memberships from 255 to 750 dollars and reads more like a nightclub for cold plunges than a clinic. At the other end, Aman's spa alone charges 785 dollars for a single signature treatment.

Why now

Because wellness has become the world's most fashionable way to spend money. McKinsey puts the global consumer wellness market at around 1.8 trillion dollars, growing up to 10 percent a year. Longevity is its glossiest frontier, funded by Silicon Valley money and sold, increasingly, as a status symbol. As the Columbia Business School professor Silvia Bellezza told Fortune, the smaller and harder to enter the group, the higher its signaling power. A survey of longevity clinics by MIT Technology Review found that three quarters of their clients are Gen X, the generation now watching its parents age and deciding to do something expensive about it.

Now the reality check

Here is the part the tour does not dwell on. A great deal of what you are buying has not been shown to help you live longer, and some of it can do harm.

Take the diagnostics. The longevity clinics these clubs draw from, and sometimes refer members to, sell whole-body MRI scans to healthy people. The American College of Radiology and the US Preventive Services Task Force both advise against that for people with no symptoms. Dr. Brian Dontchos, a radiologist at Fred Hutch, put numbers on why: in the data he cited, 95 percent of asymptomatic people had at least one abnormal finding, and 91 percent of those findings did not matter, while actual cancer turned up in just 1 to 2 percent. What sounds like reassurance is mostly a machine for false alarms.

Then there is biological age. Surrenne, like many of these clubs, offers methylation testing that returns a number for how old your body supposedly is. Scientists who build these epigenetic clocks are blunt that they were designed for population research, not for you. They disagree with one another on the same person, and the result shifts with your diet, a recent illness, even the time of day.

"AI diagnosis" gets similar treatment from the people who study it. Reviewing longevity clinics worldwide, MIT Technology Review and the longevity physician Andrea Maier found that none of the treatments on offer have been proven to slow human aging. The marketing tends to blur a crucial line between a test that is statistically validated and one that is clinically proven to make patients healthier.

And the recovery menu? Whole-body cryotherapy has never been cleared by the FDA to treat any condition, and the agency found "very little evidence" it is safe or effective. Hyperbaric oxygen is genuinely useful for specific medical problems, but its use for anti-aging is off-label and unproven. IV vitamin drips, in the Cleveland Clinic's words, have "little scientific evidence" behind the wellness claims. Red light therapy has real, narrow medical uses, but the companies promising you will live forever, as one UCL neuroscientist put it, "are giving us a bad name."

What actually works, and it is almost free

The irony sitting inside every one of these clubs is that the two measurements most strongly linked to a longer life are cheap and unglamorous. One is cardiorespiratory fitness. A 2018 study of more than 120,000 adults in JAMA Network Open found it was the single strongest predictor of survival. The other is strength. The Lancet's global PURE study of nearly 140,000 people found that every 5 kilogram drop in grip strength came with 16 percent higher risk of death, a better predictor than blood pressure.

None of that requires a 100,000 dollar membership. It requires training your heart and your muscles, sleeping, not smoking, and getting ordinary blood work when your doctor suggests it. The clubs are not selling nothing: the coaching, the equipment, the accountability and the company are real, and for someone who will actually use them, they can genuinely help. It is the six-figure layer on top, the scans and drips and biological-age readouts, where the price runs miles ahead of the proof.

A good screening test, Dr. Dontchos noted, should be inexpensive, accessible and low-harm. Most of what these clubs sell is none of those things. The rich have always wanted to buy more time. What is new is that they can now do it in a members lounge, with a cold plunge and an app, and call the receipt an investment. Whether it works is, for now, mostly a matter of faith.

Read next

Where the science really lands: are full-body MRI scans actually worth it? and do biological age tests actually work? Plus the two cheap tests that predict how long you'll live.

For a closer look by country, see our guides to America's longevity clubs and Britain's longevity clubs.