Quiet courts, closing clubs and a few viral “padel bubble” posts have got people asking whether the UK’s fastest growing sport has already peaked. We dug into the numbers to find out.

If you spend any time in UK padel group chats, you will have seen the question. A club near you has empty courts on a Tuesday afternoon. A new venue opened down the road and the prices dropped. Someone on LinkedIn is calling it a bubble. So is UK padel dying?

The short answer, according to data from Playskan, is no. Not even close. But the longer answer is more interesting, because the numbers show a sport that is still growing fast while also starting to split into winners and strugglers.

Playskan tracks court availability, pricing and bookings across UK padel clubs every day. As of 1 October 2026, it counts 2,472 padel courts across 678 clubs in the United Kingdom. That figure excludes private courts, closed clubs and venues that are still coming soon.

To answer the question properly, we looked at four things: how many courts are being built, how much money is going through them, how busy they actually are, and where in the country the picture changes.

The courts keep coming

If padel were dying, the first place you would expect to see it is construction. Investors stop building when demand dries up. That is not what is happening.

In 2020 there were around 87 padel courts in Great Britain, based on LTA court counts. By the end of 2023 that had grown to 346. Then the sport took off. The UK finished 2024 with 837 courts and 2025 with 1,645. Today, Playskan counts 2,472. That is roughly 28 times the number of courts the country had at the start of the decade.

Those figures line up with the governing body’s own count. The LTA said Britain had just 69 courts in 2019, passed 1,000 courts across 325 venues in July 2025, and finished 2025 with more than 1,500.

The more telling number is how many courts are being added each year. Working from Playskan’s totals, the UK added 491 courts in 2024 and 808 in 2025. In the first nine months of 2026, it has already added 827.

That means 2026 has already beaten last year’s total with three months still to go. Whatever else is going on, the build-out has not slowed down.

The money behind it is serious too. Using the LTA’s 2025 construction costs, Playskan estimates that building the UK’s current 2,472 courts would cost somewhere between £149 million and £213 million, excluding VAT. That covers the courts, foundations and canopies only. Land, fees, clubhouses and fitting out converted buildings all come on top, so the real total is higher.

Nobody puts that kind of money into a sport they think is on its way out.

There is still plenty of room to grow, too. Even after all this building, the UK has roughly one padel court for every 28,000 people.

Follow the money

Courts only matter if people pay to play on them. Here, too, the numbers point the wrong way for anyone predicting a collapse.

Playskan estimates that UK padel court bookings are now worth around £25 million a month, or roughly £304 million a year when annualised from the last 90 days. That is gross booking value: what players spend on court hire at listed prices, including VAT. It is not club revenue. It leaves out coaching, events, food and drink, memberships and sponsorship, and it comes before booking platforms take their cut.

The growth rate is the headline. Playskan estimates that booking value is up 94.8% on a year ago, with a three-year compound annual growth rate of 114%. In plain terms, spending on padel courts has roughly doubled in twelve months.

The average court is now taking an estimated £11,000 a month in bookings, and the average hourly price across the UK sits at £34.

A sport in decline does not double its spending in a year. But spending alone does not tell you whether each individual club is doing well. With so many new courts opening, the real question is whether there are enough players to fill them.

Are the players keeping up?

This is where the “bubble” argument usually lives. Courts are easy to count, but players are what pay the bills. If courts were doubling while players stood still, clubs would be in trouble.

The player numbers say otherwise. According to the LTA’s 2025 annual report, padel participation in Britain doubled during 2025 to 860,000 players, and has since passed one million. In May 2025, the LTA put the figure at just over 400,000.

Booking platform data tells the same story. Playtomic, which estimates it has around 80% of the UK market, says the number of players booking courts each month rose from 76,695 in January 2025 to 172,564 by December. Monthly court bookings grew from around 140,000 to more than 360,000 over the same year. First-time players more than doubled too, from 17,196 to 37,411 a month.

So courts roughly doubled in 2025, and so did players. Supply and demand have, so far, grown together.

How busy are the courts?

The best test of whether there are enough players is how full the courts actually are. Playskan measures this across 644 UK clubs, around 95% of the total, over the last 28 days.

Playskan estimates that the average UK padel court is 55% occupied, with a median of 56%. For context, that means more than half of every bookable hour is being paid for, across the whole country, during a period when hundreds of brand new courts are still finding their feet.

Break it down club by club and you get a clearer picture. Playskan estimates that 395 clubs, or 61%, are running at 50% occupancy or above. At the top end, 54 clubs are 80% full or busier, and 16 of those are above 90%.

But it is not all good news. 249 clubs, or 39%, are below 50%. Most of those are in the 40 to 50% range, which is not a disaster. The concern is the tail: 58 clubs are under 30% occupancy, and 17 are under 20%.

Those are the clubs behind the empty Tuesday afternoon courts people post about. They are real. But they are a minority, not the norm.

The real problem is the timetable

If you want to know where padel’s slack really sits, look at the clock rather than the map.

Playskan defines peak time as weekdays from 7am to 9am and 5pm to 10pm, plus all weekend opening hours. Across 555 clubs, it estimates that courts are 68% full at peak but only 42% full off-peak. That is a 26 point gap.

In other words, the after-work and weekend slots are busy. Anyone who has tried to book a 7pm court in a big city knows that. The Global Padel Report 2026 made the same point, noting that UK peak-time occupancy in large clubs is still very high, with some players struggling to find slots at all.

The empty courts are mostly the weekday daytime hours, when most people are at work. That is not a sign of a dying sport. It is a sign of a sport that has not yet worked out how to sell its quiet hours, whether through cheaper daytime pricing, coaching, leagues, corporate bookings or social sessions. For clubs, that gap is the biggest commercial opportunity on the table.

Two-speed padel: London vs Manchester

The national average hides a big regional split, and the UK’s two biggest padel cities show it best.

Across 67 London clubs, Playskan estimates average occupancy at 66%, eleven points above the UK average. At peak, London courts are 79% full. Even off-peak they hit 52%, almost as busy as the UK’s overall average. Only 10 of London’s clubs are under 50% occupancy.

Manchester is a different story. Across 43 clubs, Playskan estimates average occupancy at 50%, five points below the UK average. Peak sits at 63% and off-peak at 38%. The city is split almost down the middle, with 24 clubs at 50% or above and 19 below.

Price tells part of the story. Playskan’s city rankings put the average London court at £47 an hour and around £17,000 a month in estimated bookings. In Manchester it is £37 an hour and £11,000 a month. London players are paying more and still filling more of the court.

Manchester’s issue is not demand. It is the second biggest padel market in the UK, with 182 courts and an estimated £2.1 million a month in bookings, and Playtomic named it the UK’s second busiest city for players in 2025. But it has built fast, with 182 courts against London’s 257 for a much smaller population. Those new courts are still being absorbed.

Other cities sit between the two. Playskan’s rankings put Leeds at 65% occupancy and Birmingham at 64%, both comfortably above the national average, while Preston and Chester sit just above 50%.

So, is UK padel dying?

It helps to know what a dying padel market actually looks like. The Global Padel Report 2026 points to Chile, where monthly bookings dropped by 27% and more than 80 clubs closed after courts were built faster than players arrived. Sweden and Finland went through similar corrections after their own booms.

The UK looks nothing like that. Compare 2026 with the years before it:

• Courts: 837 at the end of 2024, 1,645 at the end of 2025, 2,472 today
• New courts: 491 added in 2024, 808 in 2025, and 827 already in 2026 with three months left
• Players: around 400,000 in May 2025, 860,000 by the end of 2025, and over a million now, according to the LTA
• Booking value: up an estimated 94.8% on a year ago, according to Playskan
• Occupancy: an estimated 55% on average, with six in ten clubs at least half full

The same report puts the UK in its “hotspot” group of markets, not its “post-boom” one.

That does not mean every club will make it. Playskan’s data shows 58 clubs below 30% occupancy, a Manchester market still absorbing a wave of new courts, and weekday daytime hours that sit mostly empty across the country. Some venues opened in the wrong place, at the wrong price, or both. A few will close, and when they do, the “padel is dying” posts will come back.

But the bigger picture is clear. UK padel is not dying. It is growing up. The easy phase, where any new court filled itself, is ending. The next phase belongs to clubs that can fill a Tuesday at 2pm, not just a Thursday at 7pm.

Occupancy and booking value figures are Playskan estimates based on publicly available data, not clubs’ own accounts. Data as of 1 October 2026.