Cold Plunge Searches in US Have Fallen 55% From 2024 Peak

Every trend report from early 2026 still frames the cold plunge as a rising wellness category. An analysis of 56 cold-plunge-related keywords across 48 months of US Google Ads data tells a different story: the category peaked in January 2024 and has since collapsed by more than half. The only thermal-therapy cluster still growing is "contrast therapy" - sauna-plus-cold-plunge searches, now at an all-time high.

Study Highlights

• US searches for "cold plunge" peaked at 135,000 in January 2024 and have fallen to 60,500 in January 2026 - a 55% decline from its peak.
• "Cold plunge tub" is down 70% from peak, "ice bath" down 75%, "cold plunge benefits" down 76% - every core category keyword is in retreat.
• "Wim Hof" searches have fallen from 110,000 in January 2023 to 40,500 in January 2026, a 63% decline for the cultural figure most responsible for mainstreaming cold therapy in the US.
• "Contrast therapy" searches have grown by 313% since January 2023 (from 2,400 to 9,900) and are currently at an all-time high, with no sign of slowing.
• "Sauna cold plunge" combo searches have grown from 2,400 to 8,100 over the same window, a 238% increase.
• The peak was January 2024. Every January since has been lower than the last. The American cold plunge moment has already happened - market research reports forecasting 2026 growth are measuring a curve that has already inverted.

The Peak: January 2024

For most US wellness categories, January is the dominant month of the year. New Year's resolutions, cold weather, post-holiday fitness motivation, and wellness content saturation combine to push every health-related search term to an annual high. Cold plunge is no exception - every January in the dataset is a visible peak.

What makes the cold plunge pattern distinctive is that the Januaries are getting smaller, not larger. In a growing category, each January peak would be higher than the last. In cold plunge, the January 2024 peak was the highest on record, and every January since has been lower.

US monthly search volume for "cold plunge," January-over-January:

The January 2026 number is the lowest January reading for "cold plunge" in the entire 48-month window. It is also roughly 18% below the January 2023 level – meaning the US is now Googling "cold plunge" less often in its peak month than it was three years ago.

Decline from peak - every major cold plunge term:

The declines are not uniform in timing - some keywords peaked in January 2023, most peaked in January 2024, and a handful held out until mid-2024 - but the direction is. Every category keyword in the dataset has lost at least a third of its peak volume, and all but one have lost at least half of it.

The partial exception is "cold plunge near me," which has declined 33% from peak rather than 50%+. This is consistent with what happens in maturing product categories: the people still searching are those seeking a local experience rather than buying a unit for home use. The ownership audience has moved on faster than the experiential audience.

The Wim Hof Effect, in Reverse

No single figure did more to mainstream cold therapy in the US than Wim Hof, the Dutch extreme athlete whose breathing method, cold exposure protocols, and Netflix documentary appearances turned "cold plunge" from a fringe biohacking term into a supermarket-aisle wellness category. The Google Ads data tracks Hof's cultural moment with unusual precision – and tracks its end.

US monthly search volume for "wim hof":

Hof's US search volume peaked in early 2023. By 2025, average monthly interest had fallen 56% from its 2023 level. The 2026 YTD average is higher than 2025's full-year number, but that's an artifact of the January spike being included in a partial-year average - the underlying trend remains downward.

The decline matters beyond Hof himself. When a wellness movement's most visible advocate loses more than half his search volume in two years, the category he represents is usually in the same motion.

The Replacement: Contrast Therapy

The most important finding in this dataset isn't the decline - it's the category that has quietly replaced it.

While every cold plunge keyword has been declining, searches for "contrast therapy" - the practice of alternating hot and cold exposure, typically a sauna followed by a cold plunge - have been rising almost every month in the window. In January 2023, Americans searched "contrast therapy" 2,400 times. In January 2026, they searched it 9,900 times: a 313% increase. The term is now at an all-time high, and every monthly reading from August 2025 onwards has matched or exceeded the previous peak.

The combined-product searches tell the same story. "Sauna cold plunge" - the query most commonly associated with people researching how to build a two-unit setup - has grown from 2,400 US searches in January 2023 to 8,100 in January 2026.

US monthly search volume - contrast therapy cluster:

Two things stand out about this cluster. First, it grew through the cold plunge decline - meaning Americans didn't abandon thermal therapy, they reframed it. Second, it is not a hypothetical shift: the January 2026 readings for both "contrast therapy" and "sauna cold plunge" are the highest ever recorded for those terms. The behavior is happening now, at scale.

The cold plunge wasn't a failed trend - it was an incomplete one. The audience has figured out the actual protocol: hot first, then cold. For most of the last four years, Americans were buying half the stack. Now they're buying the whole thing, and the search language has shifted from "cold plunge" alone to "sauna cold plunge" and "contrast therapy" as a combined category.

What This Means for the Cold Plunge Industry

The cold plunge industry has grown into a category that market research forecasts will reach roughly $387 million globally, with North America accounting for nearly 40% of total demand. Those forecasts - almost without exception - are based on top-down estimates that project 2022-2024 growth rates forward. They do not incorporate primary search data, and they do not show the inflection point that occurred in early 2024.

For brands that raised capital on the 2022-2024 demand curve - Plunge, Ice Barrel, Morozko, Renu, and the long tail of DTC cold plunge startups - the search data is a warning signal. The category is not growing. The buyers who were going to buy in the first wave have largely bought. And the remaining demand is shifting toward combined sauna-plus-cold-plunge setups, which changes the economics of the product category: the competitor is no longer the next DTC cold plunge brand; it is the outdoor sauna sitting next to the cold plunge in the customer's garden.

Ownership-intent search volume (US monthly averages):

Every ownership-intent keyword in the dataset has already peaked. "Cold plunge chiller" - the component search that tracks ongoing product refinement - peaked later than most (2024, not 2023), suggesting a brief tail of serious buyers after the mainstream audience had already moved on. But by 2025, even searches for "chiller" were in decline.

Why the Decline Has Gone Unnoticed

Two things have obscured the cold plunge inflection from mainstream coverage. The first is timing - the decline began in early 2024 and accelerated through 2025, exactly the window in which most trend pieces and market forecasts were using 2022-2023 growth data as their base year. The second is methodology - the publicly available data on cold plunge interest is dominated by either B2B market research reports (which use top-down financial modeling rather than search demand) or normalized Google Trends figures (which show relative interest but not absolute volume).

Google Ads Keyword Planner is the only publicly available data source that shows the actual monthly volume of US searches in absolute terms. It is the tool every large advertiser uses to size markets before bidding on keywords, and it has been showing the cold plunge decline in plain sight since early 2024.

Methodology

Data was collected via the DataForSEO API, drawing directly from Google Ads Keyword Planner for the United States (location code 2840, language code "en"). The dataset covers 56 cold plunges and related keywords across a 48-month window from April 2022 to April 2026 - the maximum historical window Google Ads Keyword Planner exposes.

Keywords were selected to cover seven intent categories: core awareness ("cold plunge," "ice bath"), discovery and location ("cold plunge near me," plus ten US city-level queries), ownership and purchase intent ("home cold plunge," "buy cold plunge," "cold plunge for sale"), types and formats ("chest freezer cold plunge," "stock tank cold plunge"), benefits and education ("cold plunge benefits," "cold plunge temperature," "cold plunge dangers"), cultural figures ("wim hof," "huberman cold plunge"), and contrast therapy ("contrast therapy," "sauna cold plunge," "cold plunge vs sauna").

Search volume figures are reported as Google Ads monthly averages and absolute monthly readings. January-over-January comparisons are used for headline claims because January is the seasonal peak month for every wellness search category analyzed, which controls for annual seasonality and allows for clean year-over-year comparisons. Year-over-year comparisons use full-year averages for 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025, and partial-year figures (January-April) for 2026. "Peak" figures refer to the single highest monthly reading in the 48-month window.

No data normalization, weighting, or composite indexing was applied. Unlike Google Trends, which reports relative interest on a 0-100 scale, the figures in this analysis are absolute monthly US search volumes as reported by Google Ads Keyword Planner. All figures are independently reproducible by running the same keyword list through the Google Ads Keyword Planner UI, or via the DataForSEO API, using the parameters listed above.

Data source: DataForSEO / Google Ads Keyword Planner Location: United States (location code 2840) Window: April 2022 - April 2026 (48 months) Keywords analyzed: 56 Data points: 2,688 keyword-month observations