Is a padel club a good investment?

Padel has grown rapidly in Britain, and that's the problem with most of what gets written about the business of it. Growth makes every model look good. The question for anyone putting money in now is what a court earns once the next club opens down the road.

What one court can turn over

Start with three numbers: opening hours, occupancy and price.

Take a court open 14 hours a day, every day. That's 5,110 court-hours a year. Playskan's UK report dated 23 October 2026 puts average occupancy at 57% across the trailing 90 days, measured against each club's opening hours, and the average listed price at £34 per court hour.

5,110 × 57% × £34 is roughly £99,000 a year of court bookings per court.

Three things that figure is not:

• It's not revenue. Playskan's booking value is court hire only, at listed prices, including VAT and before the booking platform's commission. Assuming 20% VAT applies, take it out and you're nearer £83,000, before commission and operating costs. This is not profit.
• It's not your club. It's a national average applied to one illustrative court. Use your own hours, your own published rates and your own grid.
• It's not everything. Court bookings are about 68% of gross merchandise value globally, according to Playtomic's 2026 report. The rest is coaching, food and drink, events and membership.

This is an illustrative gross booking value calculation, not a forecast. Public availability can include time blocked for coaching or maintenance, so it can overstate sold hours. Annualising a recent window also misses seasonality. Every assumption above is visible, and you should swap in your own.

Where the UK is in the cycle

Not saturated, but the gap is closing.

Playtomic's Global Padel Report 2026 classes the UK as a Hotspot, meaning demand is still ahead of supply. Sweden, Chile and Finland are in what it calls Post-Boom Adjustment. Chile saw bookings fall 27% and more than 80 clubs close.

MATCHi's platform data (January 2022 to April 2026) gives the clearest ruler: players per court. UK 172. Norway 112. Denmark 96. Sweden 37. Sweden's correction cost it 48% of its courts and 56% of its players.

On the supply side, Playskan's planning tracker, read on 24 October 2026, lists 4,456 proposed courts across applications since February 2005. That cumulative total is not an unbuilt pipeline: some proposals may already be open, refused, withdrawn or superseded. Playskan separately counts 2,866 open UK courts on 23 October 2026. My own PlanIt search found 1,150 UK planning applications mentioning padel in the twelve months to August 2026. That's applications, not courts or clubs, and plenty will never be built. Check individual approvals before treating them as future competition.

What separates the clubs that hold up

Price alone won't do it. Oxygen Consulting's 2026 UK Padel Report puts the median peak price at the nine largest UK operators at £42 a court hour, while players report £18 to £28 as an acceptable price range for an indoor weekday evening. Oxygen frames those as player value benchmarks, not recommended prices: you can charge more, but the proposition has to earn it.

Playtomic and Strategy& found nine in ten top-performing clubs sell something beyond the court, and named the failure mode: "no reason to stay, no extra spend." Vincent Hivert, co-founder of Game4Padel, asked which single metric he'd track across the business, said: "Off-peak occupancy and engagement." And: "Off-peak doesn't fill because of pricing alone. It fills when players feel connected."

A good test from MATCHi: if a comparable club opened five miles away tomorrow, what share of your players would move? A peak that's full because players choose you is healthy. A peak that's full because yours is the only slot in town is fragile, and you can't tell the two apart on the dashboard.

Before you commit

• Model revenue per court from your catchment's published prices, not a national figure.
• Count the courts within twenty minutes today, and the ones with planning approval.
• Price the building for off-peak, not just peak. Test local demand before assuming peak will fill.
• Budget for what isn't the court: coaching, food and drink, a room people would visit without a racket.

The businesses that build courts, finance clubs and run their software are all on the leaderboard: court builders, finance and insurance, consultants and club software.