PadelGrids Data Study

The State of US Padel 2026

Padel is the fastest-growing racket sport in America, and the numbers back it up. We tracked 587 padel clubs across 38 states. Roughly one in ten has not opened yet.

How many padel clubs are there in the US?

As of 2026-06-02, PadelGrids tracks 587 padel clubs in 38 states. That count spans dedicated padel venues, racket clubs that have added panoramic courts, and clubs with courts announced or under construction. 526 are open and operating today. The remaining 61 are on the way, which tells you more about where the sport is heading than the open count alone does.

A decade ago that number would have been close to zero. Padel barely existed in the United States before the 2020s. The footprint we measured did not grow steadily over thirty years the way tennis did. It appeared in a rush, which is why the geography is so lopsided and why the construction pipeline is so large relative to what is already open.

Padel growth: 61 clubs in the pipeline

The headline growth signal is the pipeline. 61 clubs are announced or under construction, equal to a 10.4% expansion of the current US footprint. For a mature sport you would expect new builds to be a low single-digit percentage of the installed base. Padel is running at double that, and the new builds cluster in metros that already have courts, which is the classic signature of a sport crossing from novelty into local habit.

Within our browsable directory, the states adding the most new clubs right now are led by the same warm-weather and high-density markets that already dominate the open count.

Where padel is concentrated

Padel in America is a coastal and Sun Belt story. Florida, California, Texas alone account for 44% of every club we track. Florida leads by a wide margin, California is second, and Texas is third. Warm climates that allow year-round outdoor play, dense affluent metros, and proximity to Latin American and European padel culture all line up in those three states.

At the other end, 7 states have exactly one padel club. For a player in those states, that single club is the entire local scene, which is exactly why a current directory matters: the map changes month to month.

Top 15 states shown. Full per-state counts are on each state page.

Padel by region

Grouping every tracked club with a known state by census region shows the same tilt at a higher altitude. The South region leads with 252 clubs, driven by Florida and Texas, followed by the West on the strength of California, Arizona, and Colorado. The Northeast punches above its weather, with dense clusters around New York City and Boston where indoor builds make winter play possible. The Midwest is the smallest region today, and it is also where a single new club can move a metro from zero courts to a real local scene.

None of this is permanent. Padel's US map is being drawn right now, and the regions that look small today are exactly the ones where the construction pipeline can change the ranking within a single season.

What a typical US padel club looks like

For the clubs we have fully verified against their own websites, we can describe the typical venue. Among the 31 verified clubs that publish a court count, the median club has 3 courts, with the range running from 1 to 10. Those clubs add up to 119 courts in the verified sample alone. Most American padel clubs are small, boutique operations rather than the twenty-court megacenters seen in Spain.

Of the 20 verified clubs where we could confirm the setting, 30% are indoor. Outdoor still leads, which fits the warm-weather geography, but indoor builds are rising fast in colder markets that want year-round play. 32% of verified clubs offer coaching or clinics, a sign the sport is investing in bringing new players in rather than only serving people who already know how to play.

The boutique scale is a deliberate choice, not a limitation. A four-court club fits on a footprint a developer can actually secure in a dense metro, opens faster, and fills its booking calendar without needing a stadium's worth of demand. It also explains why so many clubs are clustered: once one operator proves the model in a neighborhood, the next one does not need much land to follow. Expect the median to stay small even as the total keeps climbing, because the unit economics reward more clubs rather than bigger ones.

What this means if you want to play

If you live in Florida, California, or Texas, you have real choice. Multiple clubs, competing booking apps, and enough demand that courts get built near you. The 32% coaching figure matters here too: in those markets you can find a beginner clinic, not just open court time, which is the difference between trying padel once and actually picking it up.

Everywhere else the calculus is different. With 7 states down to a single club, the question is less "which club" and more "is there a court within driving distance, and has it opened yet." That is the practical reason the announced and under-construction count is worth tracking. A club that is six weeks from opening is the difference between playing this season and waiting until next year. We mark operating status on every listing so you are never driving to a venue that has not poured its courts.

Methodology

This study aggregates the PadelGrids directory as of 2026-06-02. Club locations are sourced from OpenStreetMap contributors, individual club websites, and public listings, then deduplicated. The 587 tracked total includes every padel court location we found, a subset of which are mapped on OpenStreetMap without a public club name; the browsable directory lists the named clubs. Per-state counts and operating status (open, under construction, announced) cover all 587 tracked locations. Court count, indoor versus outdoor, and coaching figures are reported only on the subset of 47 clubs we independently verified against each club's own website, and the sample size is stated wherever those figures appear. We do not estimate or fill missing values. Medians are computed only from clubs that publish the relevant figure.