The Break-Even Method

Start with the costs you pay every month whether or not anyone plays. List them from quotes and your lease, not from someone else's pro forma:

• Rent, plus the NNN charges (taxes, insurance, common-area costs) on top of base rent.
• Utilities: heating and cooling a tall building is a big line.
• Staff: front desk, coaches on salary, cleaning, management.
• Insurance for the business and its liability.
• Software and systems: booking, access, payments.
• Loan payments on the build-out, and any franchise technology fees.
• Repairs and replacement: resurfacing, nets, lights.

Rent is the one line with good public data. US industrial asking rent averaged $10.32 per sq ft per year (NNN) in Q2 2026, with markets from about $4.30 to $27.50 (Cushman & Wakefield). A 20,000 sq ft building at $10.32 is $17,200 a month in base rent. See lease vs buy vs build.

We didn't find reliable published figures for utilities, staffing or insurance at court facilities, so we don't give any. Get quotes.

Break-even here means the court-hours you have to sell each month for revenue to cover fixed costs.

Variable costs per court-hour (card fees, booking-platform commissions, consumables) are usually small next to fixed costs, but put yours in. Revenue from programs, the pro shop and food and drink can be subtracted from fixed costs first, once you have real figures for it.

Illustration only. The example below shows how the formula works. Rent and the court price come from published 2026 figures; the "other fixed costs" figure is an assumption we made up for the arithmetic. It isn't a benchmark, a forecast or a typical club.

Read the result against the time-of-day pattern on the revenue page: 60.5% across every open hour, including weekday middays. Run it with your own numbers in the break-even calculator.

There's no published, audited dataset on court utilization. What exists comes from vendors, and none states a sample or method:

• CourtReserve (booking software): evenings 70–90%, weekends 75–95%, midday 20–35%, early morning 15–30%; "60–70% blended utilization is healthy". No data source stated.
• beancount.io blog (22 May 2026): "sustainable annualized utilization in healthy markets runs 50% to 70%", no dataset.
• bizbite.io models a 10-court club at about 40% paid utilization, and 25–35% "without strong programming".
• An operator forecast of "as many as 80 members per court" (Jax Daily Record, February 2025). A forecast, not a result.

Those figures range from about 25% to 70% blended. Our illustration needs 60.5%, near the top of that range. That doesn't make it achievable or unachievable; it tells you which questions to ask. How many players in your area, how many competing courts, and what share of weekday middays can you really fill?

The three factors multiply, so small misses compound. PDI Consulting's example (The Dink, October 2026): if occupancy, players per court and revenue per player-hour each come in 15% below plan, revenue is 38.6% below plan, not 15%.

0.85 × 0.85 × 0.85 = 0.614 → revenue at 61.4% of plan

Each miss is easy to imagine: a slower opening season, more doubles courts with three players, more members on a discounted tier than planned. That's why a plan that only just covers its costs at the expected numbers is fragile, and why PDI lists layouts and columns that "limit usable court space" among the reasons busy clubs still lose money: fewer courts means every other number has to work harder.

Change one input at a time in the illustration and watch the break-even utilization move.

And the other way round, holding the base illustration and changing occupancy: at 50% utilization, revenue is 1,350 court-hours × $35 = $47,250, which is $9,950 a month short of fixed costs. At 70%, revenue is $66,150, $8,950 above fixed costs, before tax, loan principal beyond what's in fixed costs, reserves and the owner's own pay. Ten points of occupancy either side moves the result by about $9,000 a month in this illustration.

The same is true of courts. Losing one court of six to a column grid takes 450 court-hours a month out of the available total, and pushes the illustration's break-even utilization from 60.5% to 72.6% (1,634 ÷ 2,250).

A new club doesn't start full. Members arrive over months, programs take time to build, and early months usually run below break-even. Franchise disclosure documents budget for this: "additional funds" for the first three months of $25,000–$100,000 (The Picklr, 2025) and three-month working capital of $160,000–$348,000 (Pickleball Kingdom, 2024, from a summary). Those are franchisors' estimates for opening months, not evidence of when a club covers its costs.

What break-even does and doesn't mean:

• It means monthly revenue covers monthly fixed costs at the numbers you put in.
• It doesn't mean the build-out has been paid back, or that the owner is paid, unless those are in your fixed costs.
• It doesn't mean the business is worth what it cost. Nine US facilities listed for sale cut asking prices by a typical 39% over ten weeks in 2026 (The Dink / IAPPF, September 2026).
• It isn't a forecast. It tells you what has to be true, so you can judge how likely that is.

We can't tell you how long it takes to break even. We found no reliable published data, and the answer depends on your market. What a floor plan can do is make sure the court count you put into the formula is real, with every column and the lobby drawn in.

Not financial advice. This page explains a planning method and quotes published, dated ranges. It isn't financial, legal or investment advice, and nothing here predicts that a facility will make money or how long it would take. Talk to an accountant, a lawyer and your lender before you commit.