How Many Courts Fit in My Building?

The lines of a pickleball court enclose 20 × 44 ft, or 880 sq ft. Nobody plays inside the lines only: players run wide and deep, so the 2026 USA Pickleball rulebook sets a minimum playing surface around each court (rule 3.A.3). That surface, not the court, is what you fit into a building.

Which surface should you plan for? The rulebook recommends 34 × 64 ft for new construction. Many conversions use something nearer the 30 × 60 ft minimum to squeeze in another court. Plan both and compare: the difference is often one or two courts, and that changes rent per court more than anything else in the plan.

Here the rulebook goes quiet. It defines the playing surface as "the court and the area surrounding the court designated for playing", per court. It doesn't say whether two neighbouring courts can share the strip between them, and we couldn't find a primary source that does.

If each court keeps its whole surface and surfaces sit edge to edge, the arithmetic is simple. Two 30 × 60 ft surfaces put the sidelines 10 ft apart (5 + 5). Two 34 × 64 ft surfaces put them 14 ft apart (7 + 7).

Secondary sources (court builders, vendors and blogs) recommend anything from 8 to 14 ft sideline to sideline, some with divider nets where space is tight and 10 ft aisles between groups of courts. None cite a primary standard. The USA Pickleball / ASBA construction manual may say more, but it's a paid publication and we couldn't read it. This series uses whole surfaces edge to edge, which is the rulebook's own figure and errs on the generous side.

Badminton is different: Sport England states that 1.5 m between side-by-side courts is the shared minimum (club level), not 1.5 m per court. That's covered in the badminton section below.

The method takes a few minutes with a calculator, or seconds in the court layout calculator.

1. Measure the usable floor inside the walls. Leave out anything you can't play under: mezzanines, low ducts, loading docks.
2. Pick the surface: 30 × 60 or 34 × 64 ft.
3. Divide the building's width by the surface width and its length by the surface length. Round each down. Multiply. That's your court count one way round.
4. Swap the orientation (surfaces turned 90°) and do it again. Keep the bigger answer.
5. Check what's left over. You need a lobby, front desk, restrooms and somewhere for people to wait. If the leftover strips are too thin to use, drop a court.
6. Put in the columns (next section) and check that none lands inside a surface.

A quick example: a 100 × 200 ft building with 34 × 64 ft surfaces. Long way: 200 ÷ 64 = 3.1, so 3 along; 100 ÷ 34 = 2.9, so 2 across: 6 courts. Turned 90°: 100 ÷ 64 = 1.6, so 1; 200 ÷ 34 = 5.9, so 5: 5 courts. Six it is, using 68 × 192 ft and leaving a 32 ft strip down one side for the lobby.

Square footage assumes an empty box. Real buildings have columns, and a column is a hard object in the middle of the floor. The rulebook counts walls, posts and fixtures as "permanent objects", and a ball that hits one ends the point. It doesn't mention columns in the run-off directly, so the safe rule for planning is: no column inside any playing surface.

Columns stand at the intersections of a grid. Warehouses suitable for conversion have column grids from 30 to 60 ft on centre (LaBella Associates, architects, March 2025); modern distribution buildings run about 50 × 50 ft to 56 × 50 ft (industry sources, including Cushman & Wakefield guidance from 2017). We found no source for a "typical" grid in older or smaller buildings, so measure yours.

Because columns are points, a surface can cross a grid line as long as no column sits inside it. In practice that means fitting one dimension of each surface between two column lines. Here's the 100 × 200 ft building again with columns every 40 ft:

Now move the same grid 10 ft: column lines 30 and 70 ft from the long wall (bays of 30, 40 and 30 ft). Running lengthwise, a 34 ft surface fits only in the middle 40 ft bay, so you get 3 courts. Turned 90°, each 34 ft surface fits between columns along the length (bays of 40 ft) and runs 64 ft across the width:

One court out of six is a sixth of your court revenue, with the same rent. This is why the column grid matters more than the square footage, and why it's worth drawing the building with its columns before you negotiate. In the planner, draw the outline, add pillars at the measured spacing, then drop in courts and slide them until the columns sit in the gaps.

Three common building sizes, worked both ways. We've assumed simple rectangles with no columns in play; your building's shape and grid will change the answers.

Read the "left over" column before the court column. Nine courts in 20,000 sq ft at the minimum surface leaves no real room for a lobby or restrooms, so in practice you'd drop to eight or fewer. At the recommended surface, the 12,000 sq ft building holds only 3 courts but has plenty of room for everything else; at 30,000 sq ft the 12-court layout leaves under 4,000 sq ft, which may be tight for a busy club.

A useful cross-check: whole buildings in published projects have run about 2,450 to 3,900 gross sq ft per court (see Real buildings, below). If your plan comes in well under 2,450, look again at where people will wait, change and pay.

Badminton uses the same rows-and-columns method with different run-offs. The best published set we found is Sport England's Badminton Design Guidance Note (December 2011, Revision 003, produced with Badminton England). It's 15 years old and we found no newer Sport England badminton note, so treat it as the most recent published guidance rather than a current code.

The 1.5 m between courts is shared. So a row of n courts side by side at club level needs 6.1n + 1.5(n + 1) metres of width, and each row is 13.4 + 2 + 2 = 17.4 m long (our arithmetic). Four courts: 31.9 m (104.7 ft). Eight in one row: 62.3 m (204.4 ft).

Worked example, the same 100 × 200 ft building (30.5 × 61.0 m): one row along the 200 ft side fits 7 courts (7 × 6.1 + 8 × 1.5 = 54.7 m). Turned the other way, rows of 3 across the 100 ft width, with rows end to end separated by curtains (16.4 m per row plus 1 m, because the outer back lines need 2 m and the curtain sides 1.5 m), fit 3 rows in 50.2 m: 9 courts. That needs two division curtains, which Sport England asks for whenever courts are end to end.

A single club-level court envelope is 9.1 × 17.4 m, about 29.9 × 57.1 ft or 1,705 sq ft. That's almost exactly pickleball's 30 × 60 ft minimum surface, which is why the two sports share buildings so easily. The 8-court badminton hall guide has the full layouts.

Here's what operators have actually fitted, from news reports and disclosure documents. These are gross figures: lobby, pro shop, restrooms and lounge included.

The pattern: roughly 2,450 to 3,900 gross sq ft per court. Australian operators were taking 1,500–3,000 m² (about 16,000–32,000 sq ft) buildings in 2026, according to JLL (13 May 2026), which also noted that rent "tends to be a function of how many courts a site can fit".

When you have a candidate building, draw its outline and columns in the planner, add courts from the sports catalog and see the count for yourself; or start from the pickleball courts template. The court layout calculator runs the same arithmetic in a few seconds.