Britain Builds a New Padel Court Every 9 Hours
Somewhere in Britain, roughly every nine hours, a new padel court opens.
That is not a figure of speech. We track every publicly bookable padel court in the country, and in 2026 so far Britain has added 674 courts across 176 clubs — one new court every nine hours, day and night, since January.
Seven years ago there were 68 courts in the whole of Great Britain. Today there are 2,227.
The build-out, year by year
The headline number is striking, but the shape of the curve is the real story. Here is how many courts opened each year, and what that works out to as a rate:
| Year | New courts | That's one new court every |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 19 | 19 days |
| 2021 | 63 | 5.8 days |
| 2022 | 70 | 5.2 days |
| 2023 | 108 | 3.4 days |
| 2024 | 466 | 19 hours |
| 2025 | 772 | 11 hours |
| 2026 (to 4 Sep) | 674 | 9 hours |
2023 is the hinge. Up to then, British padel was adding a court every few days — real growth, but the kind a single enthusiastic operator can drive. From 2024 the sport started adding a court faster than most people finish a working day, and it has not slowed since.
Note the last row carefully. 2026 shows fewer courts than 2025, but that is only because the year is not finished. Measured as a rate — which is the only fair way to compare a part year against a full one — 2026 is running faster than any year before it.
The stock
Annual additions tell you about momentum. The running total tells you about scale:
| Year end | Total courts |
|---|---|
| 2019 | 68 |
| 2020 | 87 |
| 2021 | 150 |
| 2022 | 220 |
| 2023 | 328 |
| 2024 | 794 |
| 2025 | 1,566 |
| 2026 | 2,227 |
That is roughly 33× growth in seven years, across 619 clubs. For context, those courts now carry an estimated £296 million a year in court bookings alone — before coaching, memberships, food and drink, or events.
So is it slowing down?
Not in the pipeline. In the four weeks to early September, 37 new padel planning applications were lodged with UK councils, and 79% of the decisions made in that period were approved. Applications submitted today become courts in roughly nine months, so the 2027 build-out is already visible in council records.
The more interesting question is not whether supply keeps arriving, but where it lands. Our club data shows occupancy holding up well in areas with few courts per head of population and falling away sharply in the ones that already have plenty — which suggests the constraint on British padel was never national demand. It is local.
How we calculated this
A note on method, because growth figures in this sport get quoted loosely.
Court counts for 2020–22 come from the LTA's published Great Britain figures rather than our own roster. Our data only sees venues that appear on a booking platform, and in those early years that undercounts the market badly — plenty of single-court additions at tennis and leisure clubs never became bookable online. From 2023 onwards our own roster tracks the LTA's numbers closely, so those years are ours.
Clubs whose exact opening date we cannot confirm are spread across years using the measured distribution of clubs we have since dated, rather than being lumped into a single year. 2026 figures run to 4 September and are compared as rates, not totals.
Every number here is recomputed daily from our live club roster. You can explore the whole dataset — club by club, city by city, and application by application — at Playskan Insights.