Florida has no mold law for gym saunas. Sign the petition for a mandate.

Sign the Petition
MOLD’S GYM Mold information & reporting. Not a gym.

The World Regulates This. America Regulates the Water Next to It.

Germany tests gym shower water every year and reports the results to a health office. Switzerland caps bacteria in gym showers by law and names fitness studios in the rule. England puts landlords on a 10-day clock for mould. In the 10 largest US states, checked against the codes themselves, no sauna or gym sanitation inspection mandate exists at all.

Here is a fact you can check against the statutes themselves: in much of the developed world, the water systems inside a gym are regulated — tested on a schedule, against a numeric limit, by an operator the law can name, with a health office that can close the showers. In most of the United States, the only regulated thing in the building is the water in the pool. The sauna next to it — the sealed wooden box where strangers sweat onto benches nobody can lift — is regulated by nobody.

This page is the comparison, law by law, with sources. One honesty note up front, because this site does not strawman: no country on earth was found with a mold-testing mandate for gyms. What other countries regulate is water hygiene (Legionella and bacteria) in gyms and enforceable mold and damp duties in housing, schools and workplaces. America largely lacks even that. The contrast below is damning enough with the facts straight.

The Daytona proof — this atlas is not abstract. In August 2024, our founder got sick in a gym sauna full of mold and filed with every office a citizen is told to file with. By his account — documented in his filings and his five-part video record, and told in full on The Story — the officials who looked at that room were stopped by the same wall every filer hits: once the problem was identified as mold, there was no citation anyone could write. Not for the mold. Not even for the condition of the room. No test anyone could order, no closure anyone could impose, no standard anyone could point to. That is not an enforcement failure. You cannot fail to enforce a mandate that does not exist — and in Florida, as in nearly every state, there is no mold mandate.

Germany: the gym owner’s home market has a testing law

Gold’s Gym is owned by RSG Group, a German company. In Germany, the Drinking Water Ordinance (Trinkwasserverordnung) requires operators of large hot-water systems — storage over 400 litres or more than 3 litres in a pipe run — that supply showers to the public or commercially to have the water tested for Legionella at least once a year by an approved laboratory. Gyms are covered; the German Olympic Sports Confederation’s own facility guidance says so.

The law has a number: the technical action value is 100 CFU per 100 ml. Reach it, and the operator must immediately notify the local health office (Gesundheitsamt), investigate the cause, commission a written risk assessment, and carry out the protective measures the technical rules require — up to restrictions on shower use. This is not guidance. It is an ordinance, with an inspectorate attached.

Switzerland: fitness studios, named in the rule

Switzerland’s TBDV (SR 817.022.11) sets maximum values for water in publicly accessible baths and showers: Legionella spp. no more than 1,000 CFU per litre in shower water, 100 CFU/L in whirlpool and steam-bath water. Every operator must run a documented self-control system — hazard analysis, risk assessment, a named responsible person. Cantonal guidance listing who is covered names hotels, pools, sports centres — and fitness studios, in so many words. If contamination reaches a level dangerous to health, the operator must notify the canton and tell users the showers are closed.

The Netherlands goes a step further on one point: its Drinking Water Decree requires Legionella risk analyses and certified management plans at “priority institutions” — and the statutory list includes saunas by name. France requires annual Legionella analyses in collective hot-water systems serving premises open to the public, with L. pneumophila under 1,000 CFU/L at showers and whirlpool baths. Spain’s Royal Decree 487/2022 makes every owner of an aerosol-generating water installation run a written prevention-and-control plan with scheduled sampling — and gives health authorities the power to order partial or total closure. Britain’s regime (ACOP L8, enforced under the Health and Safety at Work Act) requires a risk assessment, a written scheme of control and a named responsible person for every premises — and for spa pools, testing is compulsory, with a published ladder: over 1,000 CFU/L means close immediately, shock-dose, drain, clean, disinfect, retest.

Even Japan permits its bathhouses — saunas included, as “special public bathhouses” — and regulates bath-water quality and Legionella testing under national hygiene guidelines. When a Fukuoka inn skipped its required weekly water changes and inspectors found Legionella at 3,700 times the permitted level, the result was a criminal complaint.

England: a landlord gets a clock, not a shrug

The strongest mold law in this atlas is not about gyms at all. Awaab’s Law — in force for English social landlords since 27 October 2025 — is named for Awaab Ishak, a two-year-old who died in 2020 after prolonged mould exposure in a social-rented home his family had complained about repeatedly. The law answers that failure with deadlines:

Elsewhere in housing, Germany’s Civil Code reduces a tenant’s rent by operation of law while a defect — and the case law counts significant mould as a defect — impairs the home. The Dutch Rent Tribunal can inspect a mouldy home with its own building expert and cut the rent to 40% of the maximum until the landlord fixes it. New Zealand’s Healthy Homes Standards make extractor fans, drainage and ground moisture barriers mandatory in every rental. France treats mould from structural damp as a breach of the landlord’s duty to provide a decent dwelling — and, at the dangerous end, grounds for a prefectoral insalubrity order.

The American patchwork — credit where it exists

The United States is not a complete blank, and this site won’t pretend otherwise. What it has is a patchwork:

SettingWhat existsWhat doesn’t
Pools & spas (water)Permit and water-testing regimes in effectively every state—
Pool locker/shower roomsReachable only through a permitted pool (CA, MI, OH rules); Georgia’s pool rule even mandates floor drains with positive slope in pool dressing roomsAny reach when there’s no pool
Dry saunasNew York City Health Code Article 165 — local sauna permits. The only sauna regime found in the USEverything, everywhere else
GymsRegistration and contract law (Florida: FDACS registration, bonds, cancellation rights — money, not hygiene)A sanitation inspection mandate in any of the 10 largest states
Rental housingReal mold law in pockets: California (visible mold = substandard housing; complaint inspections), Virginia (move-in mold disclosure, remediation within 5 business days), Massachusetts (sanitary code bans “chronic dampness” incl. mold; health board must inspect on request), New York City’s Local Law 55 (annual mold investigation; licensed assessor + remediator over 10 sq ft)A mold-specific landlord duty in most states; anything federal
SchoolsConnecticut: mandatory IAQ inspections that name mold, results published. New Jersey: public employers must deal with damp materials within 48 hoursA school-mold mandate in most states
WorkplacesOSHA’s General Duty ClauseAny OSHA mold standard — OSHA itself says none exists, and there are no federal limits for airborne mold

Read the gym row again. In the ten largest states — California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan — we read the codes. The inspection regimes attach to pool and spa water. Gyms are regulated as contracts. A dry sauna is in nobody’s code at all.

The closing exhibit: one sauna in Daytona Beach

In August 2024, our founder got sick in the sauna at the Gold’s Gym in Daytona Beach, Florida. His own consumer test kit found Chaetomium, Aspergillus and Nigrospora growing in it. The sauna’s bathroom had no floor drain. The bench was nailed to the wall with no access panel — built that way roughly a decade earlier, which means that for ten years, nobody could clean under it, and nobody was ever going to check. He filed everywhere: the gym, the brand’s owner, the Attorney General, the Governor, the consumer agency, the health department, the business regulator, code enforcement, the BBB. The health department’s answer, in substance, was the truest sentence in the whole file: there is no mandate for saunas. Fourteen filings sit on our Silence Index today. Substantive responses: zero.

Now run the same room through the German rule — the rule that governs the brand owner’s own home market. The shower system feeding that locker room would be tested every year. A bad result would go to a health office whether the gym liked it or not, with a written risk assessment behind it. Run it through Georgia’s pool rule and even the missing floor drain becomes a code violation. Run it through Florida law as it actually stands and you get what happened: a sick member, a test kit he bought himself, and a video camera — because the camera was the only inspector that sauna was ever going to get.

Say it plainly, because everything above points at it: there is no mold mandate — not in Florida, not in any of the ten largest states, not at the federal level, and not anywhere on earth for the rooms where this actually happens. The other countries in this atlas regulate the water, the housing, the schools and the workplaces around the problem. America regulates the pool and stops at the water’s edge. The zero is not an oversight waiting to be noticed. Until a legislature writes the rule, the zero is the rule.

Editorial note (the site’s position, stated as ours): a mandate is not a exotic idea. It is what Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain and Japan already do for the water, what England now does for mould in homes, and what Connecticut does for the air in its schools. The American sauna is not unregulated because regulation is impossible. It is unregulated because nobody has written the rule. The petitions exist to change that.

Sources