The members'-club opening calendar has not slowed since 2022, but the ratio that defines the category — what the initiation buys against what the club actually delivers — has moved decisively. A handful of clubs are now charging six figures to join and producing the experience to justify it. Others are charging the same and producing nothing more than a quieter dining room. The 2026 class divides cleanly along that line, and the divide is now visible enough to plan around.
The Aman Club at Aman New York remains the most expensive in the city — initiation around two hundred thousand dollars, plus annual dues, plus a tightly controlled member list. What the membership buys, however, is genuinely differentiated: full access to the Aman New York spa floor that has no public availability, the dining rooms with their own kitchen separate from the hotel restaurant, and the residential adjacency to the Aman tenants upstairs. The price-to-experience ratio, for the client who would otherwise stay at the hotel four times a year, makes structural sense. The club is one of the few in the city that justifies the entry on use alone.
In Miami, the two rooms doing this correctly are operating on different ends of the social spectrum but with the same underlying logic. The MILA Members Lounge on Lincoln Road functions as the inner layer of a hospitality group that has understood early that the restaurant is the lobby of a much larger building. The membership is not a product separate from the dining room; it is the building behind it. The client who books the table regularly enough to know the host by name becomes, eventually, the client the host calls when the table becomes available. Casa Neos Members Lounge does the same from its Brickell-adjacent position — a room built for the family-office and finance community that has settled south of the Miami River and wants a private floor to match. Both operate on the fundamental logic of the category: the meal is the front door, the lounge is the real room.
At the London end of the calendar, 5 Hertford Street continues its quiet dominance of the Mayfair private-club conversation. The Chiltern Firehouse has found a second life as a membership proposition for the creative-media set that has always preferred Marylebone to St James's. Soho House, at the scale end, runs a softer version of the same idea — more distributed, more open, and more useful to the client who moves between cities than to the client who has already arrived.
The summary the year produces is simple enough: the clubs worth joining in 2026 are the ones that can answer the question of what the initiation actually buys. The Aman is justified by the residential integration. Miami's best two rooms are justified by the relationship they build over time. The clubs that cannot answer the question are the ones I have stopped recommending. The category has matured. The buyer should too.
— Camille
